On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: At Least Adult Swim Gave Me My Backstroke
I spend a lot of time hunched over my laptop. In fact, in the indie film world, my posture problem is so common it’s sometimes affectionately called a “programmer’s hunch.”
That’s the catchall term for the shape your spine gradually assumes when your every waking moment revolves around random screening links and unanswered emails. Of course, way before I was old enough to give myself such a genuinely stupid workplace injury, I developed a different back issue — equally rooted in my love for discovering strange media.
As an underage Adult Swim fan, I spent much of my 2000s childhood sneaking downstairs to watch the late-night Cartoon Network programming block hours after I’d been sent to bed. To avoid waking my parents and older sister, I kept the volume low and got as close to the TV set as possible.
Belly-down on the carpet with my back arched like “The Little Mermaid,” I was totally engrossed in what I was watching and physically incapable of relaxing for fear of being caught. Instead, adopting a kind of stress position that produced the s-curve that still impacts my structural integrity today, I felt every second of my most formative Adult Swim memories.
Naturally, being a sick freak, I totally loved it: finding joy and even identity in witnessing stuff I wasn’t “supposed” to see. The discomfort was part of the fun and, in its own way, made the risk worth it.
Earlier this month, my colleague Christian Zilko brought that feeling flooding back for me with his oral history of the cult platform. For Adult Swim’s 25th anniversary, IndieWire traced the scrappy and subversive sensibility that turned a ballsy experiment into one of TV’s most influential brands and, for folks like me, a meaningful ritual. It’s a rollicking good read and one of the rare times Hollywood execs sound sincerely cool. But the lineup’s iconic “Infomercials” do warrant a special After Dark side quest.
Kicked off in 2009, when I was then a teenager and actually allowed to enjoy myself after midnight, the “Infomercials” premise was extraordinarily simple. At 4 a.m., network viewers who were already accustomed to seeing lengthy advertisements for so-called miracle products and questionable self-help programs on TV were greeted with “paid” Adult Swim presentations that felt real but weren’t.
Innovative filmmakers, like Alan Resnick and Casper Kelly, used the bait-and-switch exhibition premise as an excuse to explore their arthouse ambitions and get very, very weird on broadcast.
You probably know “Too Many Cooks,” which begins as an innocuous sitcom opening but keeps adding credits, characters, and eventually a murderer. But here’s also “Unedited Footage of a Bear,” which sees a pharmaceutical ad curdle into a nightmare. And my personal favorite is still, “This House Has People in It,” which turns security footage into a sprawling suburban horror mystery.
Despite my newfound adolescent freedom in the early 2010s, I still remember watching these bizarre segments the same way I did as a child — laying down on the carpet, close enough to the TV to hear every nonsensical word. Thank God most of the “Informercials” shorts only run about 10 to 12 minutes.
There’s actually a wonderfully mundane reason for that breezy length. Adult Swim’s “Infomercials” were designed to fit just a quarter-hour television slot with room left over for commercials. Contextually, that’s just enough time to establish what you think you’re watching and then make you regret settling in.
Some “Infomercials” are funnier than others, and plenty show little interest in being funny at all. What they share, however, is the uncanny ability to make the machinery of TV feel existentially unstable. So, in honor of Adult Swim turning 25, I’m recommending you end Cartoon Network’s month-long celebration with an “Infomercials” marathon, sure to be both nostalgic and upsetting!
Watch a few you’ve never heard of (on YouTube or the official Adult Swim site), and resist the urge to read the descriptions first. If your back can take it, get close to the screen, too. I’ll do the same. Probably. —Alison Foreman
The Bite: May the Kids Never Get Back in the Pool
I’ve spent a lot of September thinking about Adult Swim. It’s the 25th anniversary of an entertainment brand that means more to me than almost any other and, as Ali was gracious enough to plug, I wrote a few articles trying to capture what it’s all meant to the people who made it.
There’s so much to discuss — the unique shows, the talent it platformed, the fanbase that it cultivated — but to me it all comes down to a simple question: what is Adult Swim? And there’s no better way to answer it than by watching some Infomercials.
Adult Swim isn’t just a programming block, even if it’s been a great one that eventually surpassed that children’s programming it was designed to supplement. It isn’t just a tight-knit group of people, even if many of them continue to closely collaborate after 25 years of making cartoons in Atlanta together.
It’s not just a style of comedy, even if terms like “Adult Swim humor” are universally recognized pieces of our pop culture vocabulary, even when they’re used to describe shows made by other companies. And it feels like a cop out to say that Adult Swim is a vibe, even if that feels like the fairest answer I could give.
More than anything, Adult Swim is a celebration of the element of surprise. It shocked viewers who kept the Cartoon Network on too late and were ushered into maturity by the “Family Guy” reruns they saw at too young of an age. It shocked older animation enthusiasts who never thought they’d see Shaggy and Scooby on trial for marijuana possession or Space Ghost hosting his own talk show. And it shocked many of us who spent countless hour watching cable in the middle of the night, never being quite sure what weirdness would air next.
That’s the beauty of the Infomercials, and it’s why Adult Swim was the perfect platform for geniuses like Alan Resnick and Casper Kelly. Watching a cheesy sitcom opening turn into a bloody field day for a time-traveling serial killer or unedited footage of a bear turn into a pharmaceutical nightmare is the ultimate expression of that unapologetic commitment to keeping us on our toes.
For such a small programming block, Adult Swim had a massive, outsized influence on creating the shared language that we’ve come to recognize as “internet humor.” The surrealism, pastiches of existing media, and willingness to put dark spins on familiar pieces of nostalgia are immediately recognizable to anyone chronically online, even if you never watched “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” late at night. It’s also why I wonder if Adult Swim inadvertently helped create a future that it won’t have much of a part in.
So much of its brilliance was the advantage that it had over the viewer, being able to show you anything it wanted while you sat there captive. I’m not sure that it’s possible to recreate that feeling in this age of endless content. Maybe that’s not even a bad thing — maybe we need a few less surprises while we catch our breath — but it’s absolutely cause to take an evening to celebrate the incredible artistic accomplishment that the first quarter century of Adult Swim represents. And no matter what the next iteration looks like, I’ll be watching. —Christian Zilko
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
