America: The Motion Picture is the latest project from Matt Thompson, who has worked on animated classics such as Archer and Sealab 2021. However, one of his most beloved titles is Adult Swim’s Frisky Dingo, which has become a cult classic despite its short run and has been seen as ahead of its time due to its election storyline that drew comparisons to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. To Thompson, the show still holds up and there’s even an Easter egg in America for fans of the show.
“I’ve made a lot of TV, comedy, adult TV over the last 20 years. Some of it holds up and some doesn’t,” Thompson told ComingSoon. “I still can watch Frisky Dingo and go, ‘That’s decent.’ The main character in Frisky Dingo is basically Archer and Killer Mike’s in there and a bunch of other stuff, but I still can go back to that show and think that it’s pretty decent. I will even say that we brought for fans of Frisky Dingo, we even brought our version of the Xtacles in this story. To me, Samuel Adams, the inventor of beer, the frat bro, and when we meet him, he’s surrounded by all his frat bros. To me, we treated those frat bros as the Xtacles. In fact, I had the guys, who were still on my staff, that voiced the Xtacles, be those frat bros yelling at Sam Adams in the background.”
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Thompson is also very thankful for the success that Floyd County Productions has had and that he still works with nearly everyone that made Frisky Dingo.
“[I’m] very fortunate as a cartoon maker to be working with almost all the same people in the hierarchy of the organization that I have for the last 20 years. You mentioned Frisky Dingo, almost every single one of those people that made that show with me works for me still. They’re still here. They’re still on it. Eric Sims was the producer. Eric was on Frisky Dingo. Casey Willis is still here. He’s running Archer. Neal Holman, he’s one of those frat bros in that scene, is still here. He’s running a show coming up for Hulu called Hit-Monkey. What is fortunate is to have the stability and to be able to do this job in America when a lot of animation is no longer in the United States, and so I’m just surrounded by my old friends and we sit there and we pick each other apart, we pick our jokes apart and there’s a comfort to be able to say awful things to each other.
“It’s just … I know people say this and I don’t want to do this Dom [Toretto] meme right now, but it is a family that we’ve been together for this long. I cherish each and every one of them and they make me better. They make us all better. We’re better together, stronger. I think that’s the essential message of the movie too, which is we’re better if we listen to everybody, we’re better. If we’ve listened to immigrants, people of color, men and women alike, and the company I felt that we built we all try to keep that in line too.”