Talking Simpsons - TalKing of the Hill - The Wes Archer Interview

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

We're about to do a new TalKing of the Hill podcast miniseries on Patreon, making this the perfect time to interview KotH's Supervising Director Wes Archer! Not only was Wes the first animator ever hired to work on Simpsons during the Ullman days, but Archer is also the creator of the Twister Mouth, director of some of the best episodes in the first seven Simpsons seasons, defined the look of King of the Hill, and still works on shows like Rick & Morty and Disenchantment to this day. Wes Archer tells us all about it, and if you enjoy this, please consider subscribing to Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons for our discussion of King of the Hill Season 2 Part 1 (plus all our previous interviews)!

Oh, listen to this. It's from an old student of mine. He's on death row. And as I raise my hand for possibly my final question, I hope that Miss Peggy Hill will call on me one more time. Because she is the person who has had the most positive impact on my life. Sincerely, Wesley Martin Archer. That's a good name for a killer. Ahoy, ahoy everybody and welcome to another Talking Simpsons interview. I am one of your hosts for this one, Bob Mackie, who is here with me today as always. Howdy y'all, Henry Gilbert. And today we are talking to Wes Archer. He was the very first artist to be hired to be part of the Klasky Chupo shorts for the

Tracy Ellman show. So he is the grandfather of the Simpsons in a way. And of course, he was on that show from seasons one to seven. He went over to King of the Hill to be the supervising director. He's done so much since then. Rick and Morty, Disenchantment, you name it, Wes has done it. A legendary career in animation and we are talking to him for an hour today. Yes, we have so many questions. We pretty much split it between half Simpsons, half King of the Hill. So many interesting stories he has to share about what we have questions about Twister Mouths. It is ass.

We have questions about King of the Hill and all the Texas specialties. You might learn something about Moe's missing tooth that appears sometimes or disappears sometimes rather. It was super awesome. Now we have talked to all three of the original Simpsons animators. We got them. So definitely go back on the old interviews if you want to hear our ones with David Silverman and Bill Kopp. And also I definitely suggest listening to our ones with Mark Kirkland and Lauren McMullen too.

We learned a lot about the animation side of those shows. And we are doing this in tandem with the upcoming launch of talking to the hill season two, part one, that's 11 new episodes of talking to the hill are retrospective on king of the hill. That is only behind the Patreon paywall for five bucks a month at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons.

That begins on friday march 26 and will roll out for 11 weeks after that so if you enjoy king of the hill if you enjoyed some of wes's answers about it on our interview coming up here you're going to really enjoy the talking of the hill series we'd have the same treatment that we do with talking simpsons only for a different show and you can sign up right now to hear that every friday and you can listen to the back catalog of us talk about the entire first 13 episodes of king of the hill in the previous mini-series along with our mini-series about the critic futurama and mission hill so many amazing patreon exclusives at patreon.com slash talking simpsons and of course you can find wes on twitter and instagram

at archermation and if you enjoyed this interview, please let him know. We always like when our guests know that our listeners enjoyed our little chats with them. Yeah. And also, if you hear a cat meowing a couple times, it's Wes has a very friendly cat. But it makes the interview no less interesting. Yes. He's beloved by all, even cats. But all right.

Now, let's give a listen to our chat with Wes Archer. So we are here with the great Wes Archer. Welcome to the show, Wes. And our first question we want to ask you is all about the early days of the Simpsons. What was the atmosphere like within the Klaski Chupo studio? And what were some of your biggest biggest earliest contributions to defining these characters? Yeah the atmosphere of the studio was a lot of fun. I loved it. It was a smaller studio. I had some experience working for other smaller studios but I never was employed at one of the giant places like disney

or i think you know filmation at the time uh there's one called deke so we could kind of come and go as as we pleased as long as we got the work done we could carry on and have fun inside and make paper airplanes yeah it seemed very small and scrappy because this was before Rugrats and everything else they made. This was their first major project for TV. Yeah, it was pretty much run by Gabor Chupo and Arlene Klasky, and they employed a few production associates. There was Larry LaFrancis, Paul Germain. Paul went on to create the the rug wraps actually paul germain started out as part of the crew from fox with with greening yeah our producer was margo pipkin you know there were there were a few other employees and um it's a very small

place very fun when we started the shorts yeah we had uh when we talked to david silverman about the shorts he he mentioned there was an in joke in a like a blink and you miss it frame from one of the last shorts of of matt strangling paul germain i drew that oh awesome that's great that's fun uh well also in those early days, like I was just rewatching some of the first shorts yesterday and I was surprised how early, you know, the the the Wes Archer trademark of the Twister Mouth is like I I believe I spotted the earliest one was in the fourth short Babysitting Maggie. What brought that about? OK, so we had one week to do this animation that that includes everything from Matt Groening's little scribbly drawings or big scribbly drawings. So we didn't really have, we didn't start with a formal storyboard or layout process. We just kind of took his drawings and went with them.

And so it was limited animation. We had one week to do the animated, do the cleanups and everything. The Twister map came about because I was just trying out something that was fairly easy to do that would have kind of an impact on the acting. So I just tried that out. And I would throw it in every once in a while. It's not something you would want to throw in there all the time. We prize every Twister match we see

when we're watching it. We're like, ah, there's another one. It feels like they were phased out by maybe season five. And it's also weird to see. It's become kind of an Easter egg. You know, Silverman had the best really experience and talent

for animating these characters. And he had more of a vision I think in his mind's eye of what it could be whereas I think my approach is more like making up stuff as I went along and kind of see what's what would stick you know but I was I was like still kind of learning character animation as I was doing those shorts and it was all very rushed. We spent long hours there at the studio completing these, but you still felt rushed no matter how many hours you spent at the studio. No, any kind of animation is a lot of work.

I don't know, except for maybe Roger Ramjet, if you've seen those old cartoons. Oh, yeah. You've seen them? Yes, yes, yes. They're crazy. Initially, I was told by Gabor it's going to be black and white like the life in hell comic by matt greening um and like one minute it turned into color and over a minute um the the length the lengths varied it got up to two minutes one year how

long is the longest short like over two i think like uh bart bart on tv or the i think the last one is like two minutes or so yeah yeah so we start i started off with god were calling me in and and i and he said find another animator so i called in bill cop and it was too much work so uh we called in david silverman wow so you were the first you were the first simpsons animator right yeah because i was uh doing animation for gobbler and arlene for other commercials stuff at that studio previously and and they they saw my short film jack neck and radboy go and they thought i would be a good candidate to take on this kind of weird alternative sort of animation that really had very little to do with stuff that you'd seen other than

Matt was initially inspired by the Flintstones sensibility when he quickly roughed out the family for Jim Brooks to sell his idea. So as far as influences went, it was slightly influenced by classic Flintstones, but not really. I mean, we just kind of wanted to make up our own style which had some snap to it and squash and stretch and a smart kind of limited anime as opposed to something fully

animated and what are your thoughts on the shorts not being uh made available officially i mean you can find them on youtube you can find them online but to date there's been no official release and these are a very important step in the evolution of the simpsons right i wish they would release those i used to have a vhs tape of all of them but that was lost oh yeah the master's got to be somewhere you think in the klasky chupo offices yeah yeah i think i think so i think klasky chupo must have a uh reel-to-reel master kind of three-quarter inch tape or something well we know where that is they must in their vault so after the the shorts in the the show it gets turned into a full like 30 minute show and that i i know was a a big leap for for

for you and david uh who were transitioning from that and not to mention all the new folks like i i've seen in some histories of the simpsons in the early years that Kent Butterworth doesn't get the warmest reception. But I believe I've heard you've praised him for a lot of his, you know, knowledge he brought in the early days. Oh, did I? Well, yeah. I mean, I was appreciative of his experience when he first came in. We'd never worked with exposure sheets or timing, timing out animation or official having a layout department. So technically, you know, speaking, he was able to provide some guidance as to how to proceed. David had worked at Ruby Spears on a series, but not as director. We were kind of figuring it out and Kent was able to help us. But along the way, we kind realized he wasn't uh kind of sticking to the um

parameters of the style we'd kind of established so i guess you know about the some enchanted evening yeah and the there's a there's a screening of that when it came back in color that was a debacle that kind of didn't surprise me that much. I was a little worried about that. Then David's episode came back looking great, and mine came back looking okay as well. So the series proceeded at that point without the director Butterworth. And comparing some of the earlier shows, so we have been going over the earlier seasons once again, just reviewing them with new guests. And last year we covered Homer's Odyssey and we just covered the episode where Burns runs for governor. And there was such a huge leap in just the growth of the show visually from that first show to the first show of the second production season. How did that growth

happen on your side? How did you and your team figure out so much in so little time? Yeah, I was really proud of that. Because during season one, I had a lot of frustrations with some of the layout artists that were hired and turning in work. And I was at the same time learning exposure sheets and how to do a storyboard for a half hour. So I felt like season one was a really big learning curve. A lot of the scenes were patched up in retakes, you know, with pickup scenes and some fixes. So I felt like when I got back, you know, to do season two, I knew what needed to be done now in advance. I just put my nose to the grindstone and

worked extra hours to make sure things were looking good. And we hired some better people. And I posed out a lot of that stuff. I kind of figured out where we needed to do key poses, how to tell the story in a way that would really make it sing. And the script were amazing. So I wanted to make sure that the animation did justice to the writing. So yeah, two cars in every garage and three eyes in every fish. It's a complicated title. Yeah, we always just call it the three-eyed fish.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, Blinky. Yeah, I almost got a tattoo of Blinky on my arm oh wow well anyway because you introduced blinky in homer's odyssey and then uh then did his episode yeah yeah that was a lot of fun it came as it came back looking really great it was definitely a step up from season one in terms of consistently good animation and staging. Yeah. There's three-eyed fish starts with this pan down, like a really amazing like background pan for, for TV, for TV animation back then.

I don't think you'd have seen something that good. Well, I mean the, the script, which was written by Schwartz Welder and Sam Simon might've mentioned that shot from the movie citizen Kane directed by Orson Wellder and Sam Simon, might have mentioned that shot from the movie Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles. If it wasn't written in the script,

it was definitely referenced. So I was able to watch that and kind of recreate some of those shots in our universe. So it wasn't so much like stealing the shot but it was you know borrowing it and adapting it to what what we were doing and hummer's odyssey in particular had some of the first big crowd shots and that was before there were enough characters to populate the crowds with so we noticed that over time by the time you hit um the telltale head there were actually a town full of characters to populate the famous Simpsons mob scenes that we see in almost every other episode.

Right. Yeah, the crowd scenes were a challenge for sure. Initially, we let slip a lot of weird characters into those scenes. Matt was very adamant that those background characters should not outshine the Simpsons or be weirder than our main characters. He wanted our main characters to be kind of the most eye-catching characters. So it was a problem when the background characters were too outlandish. However, like some of them ended up being used as like Bart's schoolmates or maybe the mole man was back there Hans mole man might have had his origin background characters okay I also was curious in those early

days like it uh the number of episodes you directed is you know is so impressive but also like I feel a little distressed like oh my god like how much work and and also like a lot of the directors in those early days it looks like you guys were credited as the borders on your episodes too sometimes like that could not have been easy you know so it wasn't there's a lot of work so but but it always showed on the screen which was nice you know i knew that if i if i put in the extra hours, they weren't going to be wasted. It was going to show. So it was very gratifying. Well, one thing we like to do on these interviews is ask a follow-up questions to things that we heard about on commentaries and, uh, the

episode, uh, Bart sells his soul has the famous uncle Mo's family feedback extended bit. And in that episode, uh, Mo has a missing tooth. And there's a bit of an argument on the commentary as to who is correct. Is there a missing tooth on Mo's model sheet? It doesn't come back a lot, but I like whenever I see Mo on screen with a missing tooth. It feels like someone is getting away with something. Yeah, I don't remember what exactly the discussion was on the commentary. But I think initially Mo had a missing tooth in his design and we didn't have a mouth chart for him

and they animated Mo's mouth with, I don't know, it had like too many missing teeth or it was cracking. So we took the missing tooth out or something. Okay. How did that resolve itself? I haven't seen that.

It's only in that episode i think consistently that mo has one missing tooth on the left side of his face and you like it it's great it's a nice little touch it adds to his sleaziness yeah it's not a problem i mean there's there's some real interesting stuff i know enough when watching like your episodes differ from others that i really like like i i miss like in season two it eventually got phased out but i like homer's wavy your hair when like it's it's the smoother m over his ear in your episode oh yeah yeah i don't know i think i think i would see when the series began i was tasked with putting together the main

model pack and silverman was doing the main title and we're doing this like as we are directing episodes geez man so it was it was it was really pretty hectic so i was i was kind of like funneling david's drawings and my drawings and this designer uh we had hired character designer dan haskett uh who had like experience with a lot of traditional full animation. I was kind of funneling in some drawings from maybe from the character design department. I don't think so. So like Dan Haskett's drawings, I had to kind of redraw them more into our universe to be less flowy and less, almost I want to say like less good. He was making amazing drawings, but they didn't look like Matt Groening's style, you know? So I had to kind of pull them back into our style.

And then like David did some drawings for like turnarounds, and I did the turnarounds and kind of pulled it all together. But there was some problem with Homer's hair. It started out like spiky, but it was like floating off the head too far or something. And then I think I went in and did a revision, but it was too wavy. But then it already got animated.

Then we went back in and made it less wavy. But like, you know, like during the first two or three seasons the model packs were were revisited and revised and tweaked several times and then i you know like later they probably went back in again but i'd also done the mouth chart with with the stretcher mouth where the mouth stretches way over to the neck oh yeah yeah and it's like it would stretch like to bart's neck and then it would stretch way pat waist through homer's beard line and matt didn't like that so it was uh toned down because like things like like the twister mouth and those stretchy mouths they only look good if they're animated well or just not too much.

And if they're not, then it's just kind of distracting. So that's why Matt just eventually outlawed those things. He can't do that anymore. The Tracy Ullman short where they went to the aquarium, Homer had this take to Bart where he had shark teeth that I drew. And Matt didn't like that. He didn't like the shark teeth. I was just kind of trying things out to see what would work and what people liked. So eventually we arrived at the style.

Yeah, he seems to be pretty vocal about the things he doesn't like to see on the show especially if you listen to the commentaries he will be quick to point out oh like i don't like how this looks or that care i want one tier on this character one tier that's all we want yeah yeah but those early episodes they had a certain charm because they're organic kind of off-model uh wobbliness but season two was definitely a huge improvement that i really liked over season one i think i did five episodes in two and the and the halloween episode too like well yeah but that that was like leftover from season one i think at the end we did that i remember the halloween the first halloween episode wait did that air season one

or two that's season two it aired in season two but i remember doing that during season one i can see it being held over or taken a little longer for the for two i i also was i was curious to you know speaking of uh the production side of it did you notice any big changes in the way production works when it uh the it moved in season four from klaski chupo to film roman like did you have to tell people not to draw garfield style uh well no um when it moved over there um it was it became more organized um i think it was a little more structured. So it was an improvement. I think after season two, I wanted to take some time off because I was kind of burned out. And I took half a year off.

Well, for season three, I think I directed two episodes. Then I took half a season off. And then for season four, I continued to take half season off, came back and did two episodes. So between seasons three and four, I took almost a year off, probably a year off. And I did two episodes at the beginning of two and then two episodes at the end of three. I mean, three and four. So then in season five, it came back full. Okay.

And you were also the director of the second part of Who Shot Mr. Burns. What was it like to work on something so shrouded in secrecy uh yeah that was really fun it was a big deal um it was uh you know it was it was an enjoyable episode i guess the writer and the producers knew and then silverman and myself knew but i didn't know actually I didn't know I was I was I animated several endings yeah I think I figured it out or I knew after I animated all those various endings that I had like were those ever released the the scenes of like Moe and Barney and yeah Smithers and everyone yeah they aired that in a in a the next clip show they did in season seven one of my favorite characters to to animate to draw pose out for sure and maggie the real treat

show featuring burns and maggie you did a lot several of the big itchy and scratchy episodes that have to do a lot in different animation styles like uh you know what was it a treat to you know break the normal simpsons rules to do you know what was it a treat to you know break the normal simpsons rules to do you know like a fritz the cat parody or schoolhouse rock or fantasia yeah definitely yeah i did i did um quite a bit of itchy and scratchy yeah i i would always wanted to edit together all of the itchy and scratchy shorts that i worked on. And I would want to know like if that would comprise a half hour or more or what. Yeah.

I think probably by now there's like an hour of itchy and scratchy that you could cut together across the span of all the episodes. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would always kind of want to take those myself for doing storyboard and layout. I would always have my want to take those myself for during storyboard and layout i would always

have my hand in those so i remember uh itchy and scratchy land i designed the island that they fly to on the helicopter that remember that yeah yeah that's a great looking episode too i was based off of this uh disney short where pluto goes up up against this jury of cats. Oh, that one scared the hell out of me as a kid. Was it called Pluto's Nightmare? That sounds right. So we want to transition to talk about King of the Hill. We're big fans of the show.

We're actually covering the second season right now with one of our podcasts. And first up, I wanted to know, what was your transition like to King of the Hill? And when did you leave The Simpsons to become supervising director of that show? So, yeah, after I finished up season seven, I was interviewed to supervise King of the Hill and accepted that position. Started that in 96, 97. That was upstairs from The Simpsons at the old Film Roman building. That was equally difficult during season one because there was an animation boom where artists were employed everywhere. There was a shortage of artists and animation artists didn't want to go work on a cartoon that was realistic like King of the Hill.

They, by and large, would prefer more cartoonier projects or projects that were more beautifully art directed and the like. So we had a difficult time staffing up. And initially, I think, yeah, we didn't have a layout department. It was all storyboards. But it was kind of this weird hybrid between layout and storyboards, where our storyboards were drawn on animation paper at a larger size. So we could get a lot of the detail, more of the details in there. And then the animation came back looking really wobbly and

hank hill had these arms that that would become short like too short kind of like didn't match his his proportions and his hands were too small he had too many lines under his eyes his hair was too curly and like the the korean animators would kind of veer off model in a way that that was distracting. Mike Judge wasn't super happy with the look. So we had to, I went back in and redesigned the model sheets to give Hank larger eyes, bigger hands, that sort of stuff. Take out some of the lines under his eyes. It looked much better season two.

Kept getting better. I mean, that show really went out looking great you know went out on top it just kept getting better and better i thought yeah we very well run production we we were thinking the first the first season of it there's there's flaws to see if you're look really close but i mean we we compare it to the first season of simpsons and i i think king of the hill is much more together of a production uh for the first season yeah i mean if you look you'll see like light switches on the on the backgrounds are huge for you know weird stuff like that but um people liked it um you know it was a hit and um got good ratings and

um we all got you know really excited about making it better and it was it was it was a hit and got good ratings. We all got really excited about making it better. It was a really good show, really. It's kind of its own thing. Yeah, and it seemed that you had a lot more boundaries to work within compared to The Simpsons. Can you talk about what the restrictions were in terms of what you could and couldn't do on that show? Well, it's just observational acting, and you want to stage things more at an eye level whereby you don't have a lot of up shots or down shots.

You have to just kind of pace it. I don't know if it's rules per se, but one of the rules would be don't have Hank close his eyes while he drinks a sip of beer. Because in real life, people don't. They don't do that. In cartoons, they do that. But in real life, they keep their eyes open.

Avoid bending the wrist in gestures like Scooby-Doo, which would be like, you know, a rule. Keep Bobby's feet on the ground if you can, when he is sitting down. So he doesn't look like a small boy. So he looks like a 14 year old teenager. Wait, how old was Bobby? 15? I think he's, I think he's 12. He starts as 12. And then he becomes 13. Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting him confused with Morty Smith. You've been working on Morty too long. I'm drawing Morty Smith right now, and he's 14. Well, we have seen that really great guide, the do's and don'ts of King of the Hill,

and very funny things like no high fives, don't make Peggy too sexy, things like that. A very, very fun and interesting look at the design of the show. Yeah, yeah. I had to do whole sheets about how people drink or hold silverware or that sort of thing eating at a table in animation if you're gonna make it convincing it's that's an observational and more realistic it's it's quite demanding the the things you have to think about, you know, where people's elbows are and their hands, what they're doing,

the drinks on the table, all these sort of, you know, dressing the set, it becomes more like live action and we would get colored, you know, back. We would have these day long color screenings where we would just pick it apart. We would watch it comment about where the orange juice was and where his hand is and, you you know this and that and from scene to scene to to make it work do a lot of fixes that way yeah we uh we interviewed lauren mcmullen and she had nothing but nice things to say about uh you as supervising director uh there like you know just working with so many directors what was that rewarding for you? Yeah, it was great.

There was Lauren. Actually, yeah, I promoted some people from within. I think Lauren came over from Mission Hill. Remember that series? Oh, yeah. We talked with her a ton about that. I had Cindy Tang direct. We had Kyunghee Lim.

She directed. Who else? Monty Hall, Dominic Faucino, Clay Hall. We had good orders for episodes. We had large orders for episodes. I think, what, 24 episodes a year? Yeah, I think for a while it was 24. Yeah.

It was a very enjoyable production. It was very well run. After season one and two, it really got up and running well. And we know that the staff took a trip to Texas to figure out the characters and the look of the world, but you are a native Texan. How much authority did you have in terms of defining the universe for King of the hill yeah the the writers took a trip to texas um before they they started writing and then they had a couple of writers from texas jim dotrive um and uh johnny hardwick yeah who else but i was i was able to i guess one reason they they really wanted me on to supervise is that i i'd grown up in that area around Houston and knew just kind of

had you know firsthand knowledge of what seemed to be a good fit design wise and whatnot so I was able to pull you know from my own experience some to to to help out with design when you were starting like how much did you look to you know what what had already been defined on the Beavis and Butthead shorts that preceded King of the Hill? We referenced Beavis and Butthead a bit. You see, Mike provided, he had drawn a shot of the four guys in the alley and the family, of course. We had this black and white pencil test that he and Greg Daniels

had produced at a small studio in Texas. Now, we didn't have a whole lot of artwork to start with, so we did reference Beavis and Butthead, but we wanted it to look a little more polished than that. You know, it just kind of evolved into what it is. And you were saying earlier that you loved working with Maggie and Mr. Burns on The Simpsons. Did you have any favorite characters to work with on King of the hill yeah i also like moe animating moe we heard that he can never truly be off model because of how hideous he is i think mark kirkland might have said that yeah i liked bart scenes lisa was very challenging so uh as far as

king of the hill yeah i liked i liked drawing them all really did you uh did you have like a favorite uh i'm curious like a favorite like action sequence that like we just did the um the how to fire a rifle one the the father and son rifle tournament from the start of season two and that has so many just like great action scenes of yeah oh the twister yeah the tornado episode is basically like the king of the Hill action movie. Yeah. Yeah, that was a lot of fun to storyboard. John Rice did a lot of nice storyboard panels for that.

I think he might have directed that one. Or was that Jeff Myers? Yeah. He was always like the best storyboard guy on King of the Hill. Those characters, they just seemed so real. I mean, there was just a strange feeling you got drawing them because every one of them was so well written and made so much sense. The dialogue was so good. It really like, it didn't matter who it was. They were well-written.

I enjoyed, you know, drawing them because, you know, it was this great cast of characters, like a soap opera. So it was a real pleasurable show to work on. A lot of interesting stories. In 2018, on your Instagram, you shared something that I'd never, like many people had never even heard of that the king of the hill theatrical short yeah uh so that the king of the hill theatrical short for the will rogers institute was one of the uh last things they did i think on king of the hill it was the first like white what was it uh it was it was widescreen sorry what year was was that produced oh i just knew when

you would uh you shared it online in 2018 i'm not sure i definitely the late aughts i think it was but yeah it was it was it was late it was like 2009 i don't know i'd have to look at my post i can't remember right now i storyboarded the Will Rogers thing. I timed out the animation on ones, meaning like one frame per drawing more so that it would look more theatrical. It was this weird public service spot that they had paid for. I think the entire spot is available on YouTube. I think the actual Will Rogers Institute finally posted it. When people found that, they thought, oh, was this going to be a King of the Hill movie? Did we miss something?

Yeah, they thought it was like a clip from a theatrical movie or something because I posted it. I posted the beginning, the first 60 seconds without the ending saying it was the Will Rogers Foundation, a charitable organization. And I did that because 60 seconds, I think, was the only thing I could post on Instagram. So that's why I cut off the ending of it. People thought there was a real movie where a genie cursed the group. That was out of context. I think it was better with no context. Dale is invisible. Yeah. You didn't want to know.

It's the World War I Foundation. Let's just watch it in all of its twisted glory about how the UFO had crashed into the White House and Bobby is 50 stories tall and Dale is invisible. It's great. And that made me think, I mean, King of the Hill did so many great two-parters in its history,

but I think there's maybe four or five of them and they were so great in terms of long-form storytelling. Was there ever an idea for a movie or was that ever on the board? No, as far as I know, there was never a movie pitch.

Do you ever hear rumblings of doing more King of the Hill? You sworn to secrecy? Yeah. Who knows? I sworn to secrecy? Yeah. Who knows? I think it would be a success. Oh, yeah. We went to a table read of the episode Husky Bobby.

It was a live reading for San Francisco Sketch Fest. And everyone seemed to be getting along. And there was a lot of buzz about, oh, will King of the Hill come back? But it's been four years since then. And, I mean, everything is coming back. So you never know. I mean, Beavis and mean, everything is coming back. So you never know. I mean, Beavis and Butthead is coming back. They're getting a movie and a new TV series.

That's right. So you never know. I hope they contact you. Yeah. First person who would know. Well, Wes, I also have a very random question from your history. But as a youngster,

I watched any time Cartoon Network had a a new pilot on and then i see this one that i'm like wow this kind of looks like futurama called fungus among us and then at the credits i was like whoa s archer is the creator of this like how did that come together so uh what happened was i left king of the hill to go to this uh internet company called Icebox.com. I was there for about nine months and they went bust. And so I went over to Futurama to direct a couple of episodes. And then Futurama was temporarily canceled. Like it was put on hold or something. I remember Futurama was canceled and then they renewed it then they renewed it later yeah brought back so so after after it was put on hold I was at Rough Draft Studio and I sold this pilot to Cartoon

Network Fungus Among Us that they produced as part of their pilot shorts program that was that was just just a wacky idea I had that I thought would make a good series because I have always been fascinated with trademark designs and logos. Also kind of its opposite, the microscopic organic microorganisms and the photography of small things you can't see. So I thought it would be a good show to have these chemical mascot characters materialize and fight these small fungus characters. And so I pitched that and they wanted to do the pilot and I designed all the characters. And Rough Draft Studio provided a couple of background designers and we animated that short there with all Futurama people, basically.

No, it looked great. As a kid, I really loved it. Cartoon Network messed up there, not ordering that to series. I think they did. What was the one they chose to produce as a series i forgot what i think it was probably grim adventures of billy and mandy and code name kids next door that was that era of the early 2000s it was code name kids okay yeah billy and mandy i think was the previous season of shorts maybe but yeah i remember they chose code name kids and i think fungus among us may i i made the mistake

of presenting the chemical mascot cleaning characters as the main characters and the fungus guy mush mush rotten as the kind of villain secondary character i guess i suppose whereas like i would have i i figured it out after we did the pilot, but, like, during the pilot, I could have rewritten it to be with Mush Rotten, and then he's fighting the chemical mascot guys. You know what I'm saying? So, yeah, like, they could have devoured him. It ends with him being eaten. He pops back in his can, you know, to strike again later. But the fungus people are happy and well fed or whatever.

Anyway, that would have been figured out if it had been approved for series. And when it comes to Rick and Morty, were you hired because Justin Roiland is a big Simpsons fan? And also, what was it like to work under an artist with a very particular style, just like Matt Groening? Are you referring to Justin's style? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they wanted me to come on Rick and Morty for season one, but I was on Bob's Burgers. I had to do Bob's because of financial reasons.

And so I turned down Rick and Morty, but I was able to come on board season two. When I was interviewed for Rick and Morty, Mike Mandel, the producer, had worked with me on The Simpsons. Okay. And, yeah, Justin's a big fan of The Simpsons. So they really wanted me on board because I also had experience with primetime animation. Rick and Morty seems like a very design-intensive show, too. Is it more or less design-intensive than regular Simpsons you did? Oh, much more because they're actually art directors on Rick and Morty.

They bust out some amazing design work, and the color work on Rickick and morty is amazing it's very it's got a lot of very complex designs so as as a as a director or supervising director on rick and morty you you don't have to spend design time because the art directors have that covered okay the amount of design work for a director is a lot less and one of your most recent credits uh you worked on disenchantment was was it like getting back into the matt graining art style uh as director that was that was great i really enjoyed that i really you know because since the simpsons is still going on into season 30 something now. I always, you know, part of my brain always knew

that I could have made like an entire career out of that one series. Working on that. And I miss drawing that stuff. So it was great to go on to Disenchantment for a year because there, you know, there it was again. I was drawing Simpsons style Matt Groening stuff. So it was awesome. And I had Simpsons style, Matt Groening stuff. So it was awesome.

And I had one final question before we wrap up here. Henry, you have something else to throw out there too. But I wanted to know, and I just thought of it now, was it your choice to be drawn into King of the Hill as a murderer? So Wesley Martin Archer, that's a good name for a killer. It is. Okay, sure. But then it is you in the show. It's a good name for a killer. It is. Okay, sure. But then it is you in the show.

It's a caricature of you. Yeah, it is. So they asked and I consented. And I, you know, I did have some trouble with the law before I turned 18, or up until 18. I was arrested a few times wow nothing violent

you know you mentioned rick and morty i guess my last question was like uh were i i should have looked this up beforehand but were you involved in the uh rick and morty couch gag the simpsons did no no i was not i think that was done while I had gone over to disenchantment. It was a long gap between Rick and Morty seasons at the time. Right. Now you've got 60 more Rick and Mortys coming your way. I did some couch gags. I did the one with the green monster with all the tentacles.

Oh, that one's great. Yeah, I love that one. I did the one with the two robbers carrying out the couch yeah well i guess you know talking about the couch gags it the first season is just you know very simple one person just falls out of it like when when was the turn for them to be you know more creative and and wild I forgot. Was it season three or four? Two gets a little weirder in a good way. I think mine were all season two or three. I forgot.

Well, we could keep you here forever, Wes, with the building question. Thank you so much for your time, Wes. Do you have anything you want to promote, like your Twitter, your Instagram, anything you want to tease that you're doing in the future? No, not right now. So tune in

to archermation i i did really like your archermation for halloween of a of a bart twister mouth a brand new one that was pretty nice yeah that was just because i wanted to animate part you know i love the cintiqs and the and the ability to crank out animation now digitally. It's something that I've really grown to love. Although I miss drawing on paper, it's nice to be able to have a whole setup where you can just sit down for a day and animate something and spit out a movie and add sound to it.

It's a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed some of your commissions on your instagram especially the king of the hill ones they've been great yeah i get i do i do commissions occasionally for for people who want a king of the hill like ink ink paint uh image so i don't do a whole lot of that but well the next time they're open i'll be available to give you money. Yeah. Well, I can't do a whole lot of those. I mean, I am getting more into painting in the spare time. I guess I'll be doing more of that when one day I retire from animation.

Well, thank you so much, Wes, for your time. Yes, thank you, Wes. My pleasure. So, uh, I guess it's this convict's word against my wife's. Now, let's see, who can we trust? Peggy, have you ever decapitated anyone? No, I don't believe I have. How about you, Wes? Have you ever done anything

that caused a man's head to come off? Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!