Please enjoy the first in a new five-part series from guest author Henrik M. – Ed
It feels almost quaint to look back at the past 20 years and see just how drastically and quickly the entertainment landscape changed. In 2000, everything had its own little niche. Sure, video games and the Internet were already there, and showing signs of their future dominance of our lives, but there was no Netflix, no YouTube, and television was still the great, unquestionable overlord of media. Unfortunately, it was during these early days of the 21st century that the inherent flaws of network TV cost us five classic animated shows. In this five-part series, I’ll be taking a look at several short-lived gems of animation lost to us for a variety of factors, the biggest of which being that ratings-based television was a dying dinosaur 20 years ago, and hasn’t gotten any livelier in the interim.
Once upon a time there was a city called Cosmopolis. And in that city, there was a funky little neighborhood called Mission Hill. And in that neighborhood was an apartment building full of hilarious weirdos. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
It all began during the salad days of The Simpsons. In 1992, comedy writing duo Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein joined the production staff of the show, and would go on to help create some of the most iconic episodes in the show’s now near-mythical Golden Age of the ’90s. With episodes like “Mother Simpson”, “$pringfield” and even the classic two-part “Who Shot Mr Burns?” (
The show was initially known as The Downtowners, though this had to be changed in a hurry when they found out that MTV was making their own urban youth animated series called Downtown (hey, it was the late ’90s, it was skateboards and Playstation the whole way down), itself a woefully unappreciated series. Instead, they named the show Mission Hill, after the neighborhood the characters lived in. But just creating a new animated series wasn’t enough for Oakley and Weinstein, they wanted Mission Hill to look and feel like a real city. For that purpose, they created things like public transportation schedules and background subcultures, things you can barely spot even if you KNOW it’s there and actively look for it, much less if you’re watching it at 2 AM while drunk and hungover at the same time, which is probably how most viewers caught it when it first aired. On top of that, the show also used a unique form of neon paint for the animation, which really makes the palette stand out. The visuals were allegedly even more gorgeous in real life, but lost most of it during the filming process, with the most notable remaining indicator being that all the characters have weird, jaundicey yellow eyes.
It’s either spectacular animation, or there’s something wrong with the Mission Hills tap water.
An unusual aspect of the show was its use of licensed music, something most big networks would rather set themselves on fire than agree to. While shows on MTV had been doing it since Beavis and Butthead, they were, you know, MTV! They had a bit more of a connection to the music industry. Keep in mind, this was before MTV rebranded itself as the White Trash Morons and Pregnant Teens network and actually played music. Even Mission Hill‘s intro music is licensed, it’s actually an instrumental version of the song “Italian Leather Sofa” by the band Cake. It’s also the only song that remains on the DVD release, as nearly all the tracks were replaced with generic public domain songs to avoid the nightmare of copyright fees that would otherwise be required, a fate which would later similarly befall Daria. While it doesn’t ruin the show or anything (some scenes arguably benefit from the change), it did have one notable drawback. In the episode “Andy vs. the Real World” there is a scene where Real World contestant “The Skiz” (a thinly veiled parody on former Real World cast member and current WWE pro wrestler Michael “Miz” Mizanin) is run down by a car and wheeled away in an ambulance. Originally, this scene had the song “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. playing over it, which is later reprised by the entire cast singing it during the closing scene as a callback. However, on the DVD, this song has been removed from the ambulance scene, but obviously they couldn’t edit out the singing part without cutting the ending entirely. As such, the musical number makes no sense and comes completely out of nowhere, as if the writers wrote themselves into a corner and just threw in something random to meet a deadline. Alas, copyright is a harsh mistress.
What makes Mission Hill extra interesting is that it was basically about hipster culture some 10 years early. The characters live in a hip, quirky little neighborhood full of quirky little stores, surrounded by quirky, hip people. I’ll stop saying quirky now, but you get the idea. Their apartment building is clearly a repurposed factory or warehouse, they hang out at seedy, underground clubs, and they listen to local SKA bands. Yeah, the show dates itself a bit with that, but Ska really was the cool thing for a while. Just think of it as the dubstep of its day. Hell, the show actually USES the word “hipster” in one episode (“Andy vs. The Real World”), though obviously this was long before the term became popular, and used to describe everyone who wore a hat without a sports team logo or a beer brand on it.
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Though in this case it might have been justified.
But unnecessarily detailed animation and hipster prediction aside, what was it that made the show stand out, and if it was so great, why did it fail so spectacularly? Well, we’ll talk about what the show did right first. The show focused on Andy French, a wannabe-cartoonist currently cursed with the ultimate burden of the creative person: a day job. In his case, working in a waterbed store owned by the tyrannical Ron, a vaguely offensive Eastern European stereotype of the kind that seem to be the only people owning outlet retail stores in cartoons. Andy lives with his best friend Jim, a computer programmer working at an advertising agency during the height of the dot-com boom (a position that essentially made him a god at the time), and Posey, a neo-hippie of the kind you really have to be from the ’90s to appreciate fully. And unlike most apartment tenants who mostly view their neighbors as emergency food in case of nuclear war, the main characters are actually friends with their neighbors, who make up the rest of the cast. There’s Natalie and Carlos Hernandez and their infant child Baby Nameless, who was left unnamed until they could decide on a name that reflected their respective cultures. Yeah, Carlos and Natalie were basically like if Tumblr was an actual, exceptionally annoying person. Finally, there’s Gus and Wally, a gay couple in their sixties who have been together since they first met in Hollywood in the ’50s. Rounding out the cast is Gwen, Andy’s on-and-off girlfriend.
The show begins with “The Douchebag Aspect”, when Andy’s parents move to Wyoming and leave him the family dog to look after. Unfortunately, that’s not all they leave him. Andy’s 16-year old little brother Kevin wants to stay behind to graduate high school before going off to college, and much to Andy’s frustration, his parents ask him to let Kevin room with him for the next two years. While that might not sound like a big deal, Kevin and Andy’s relationship makes Cain and Abel look well-adjusted. Not only is Kevin a geek of the classic kind, obsessed with grades, sci-fi, video games, you name it. He’s also by far their mother’s favorite child. Seriously, the level of favoritism she gives him borders on disturbing, the two really give off a Bates Motel vibe. One of the show’s main themes is exploring Kevin’s character development as he matures into his own person, away from his overbearing, enabling mother. While Kevin never stops being the basic character we’re first introduced to, he comes a long way from being the bratty mama’s boy he starts out as, eventually culminating in episode 12, “Happy Birthday, Douchebag”, where the two brothers bond over their adulthood.
Andy’s development focuses more on getting to know his brother as a person, instead of as the annoying, spoiled brat he had to share a house with. The first episode shows the early stages of this, as Kevin experiments with alcohol at a party held in the apartment, but like most of us discovered when sneaking our first beer, it’s easy to get too much of a good thing. Andy sits with him through his first hangover, even turning down a booty call in the process, which is a pretty major sacrifice for Andy, and the two agree that Kevin would probably be happier being himself rather than trying to imitate Andy’s lifestyle. Of course, this was just the first episode of the series, there were plenty of sibling issues still to work out.
Something else that set the show apart from most other animated shows was its intended heavy use of continuity. Unlike the static world of The Simpsons, where almost nothing ever changes unless a voice actor dies, Mission Hill was intended to change over time, and one way to do this was to have Andy change jobs every now and then. Obviously due to the show getting canned almost as soon as it started, this only had time to happen once, in its first-and-only two-parter, “Unemployment”, in which Ron’s sleazy business practices finally bite him in the ass when he’s arrested for tax evasion and his store is confiscated by the government. This is bad news for Andy, not just because he’s suddenly out on the street, but also because the day before he had spent the last of his money on a play-along organ in a stupid, yet completely in character moment of impulsiveness. The first half is spent mostly on Kevin and Andy trying to either get a new job or get on unemployment, and hilariously ends with them ending up with the exact same amount Andy had blown in the beginning of the episode. (How? They accidentally trash Ron’s car, which Kevin was looking after, and the cheap-ass insurance Ron had signed up for only paid out $400.)
The second half gets a bit more serious when Andy, having spent a few weeks on unemployment, has a nasty shock when he realizes that pretty much the rest of his generation has abandoned the slacker lifestyle and rushed off to get rich in the dot-com boom. This eventually leads to him becoming an advertisement illustrator at Jim’s law firm, a job he’d keep for the rest of the series. These two episodes did a pretty good job portraying the ascent of Generation Y, as it gradually abandoned the slacker lifestyle, just as their parents had ditched the hippie culture in favor of corporatism. Teenage idealism didn’t pay the bills in the ’70s and that hasn’t changed. Unfortunately, during the show’s original run on WB, it actually got cancelled after the first part of Unemployment aired, with the remaining episodes not airing at all until Adult Swim picked it up two years later. As such, the last image the viewers were left with were Andy still out of a job, though still pretty happy due to at least getting to screw over his former boss on his way out.
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They say living well is the best revenge, but it’s actually abandoning your enemies in prison.
So what about the actual series finale? Well, it ends the series on a much more positive note, and is about the only good thing that came out of the comprehensive cluserfuck WB made of the show. “Plan 9 From Mission Hill” serves not only as a love letter to cinema, but is also arguably one of the first primetime shows to focus on a realistic gay couple–and an elderly one at that, because unlike what primetime TV might tell you, gay people don’t stop aging at 28. While walking the dog, Kevin comes across a movie theater proclaiming “X-Rated Movie Festival,” and in a moment of hormonal impulsiveness, buys a ticket. However, he’s confused to discover that the movie being screened is actually Dustin Hoffman’s Midnight Cowboy, which is only erotic for a very specific group of people. He bumps into his neighbor Wally at the snack shop, who works as a projectionist in the theater and explains to him that this is actually a revival theater showing old, classic movies, and that the X-Rating is from the early days of the MPAA, when the X was given to serious films meant for adults, not porn. This leads to Wally and Kevin bonding over classic films, most of which Kevin had never heard of before, having grown up with modern Hollywood movies. However, one day the theater advertises that it’s going to show The Man From Pluto, an obscure sci-fi movie long thought to be lost, which bizarrely seems to feature Wally’s partner, Gus. It turns out that Wally is in fact the director of the film.
Kevin’s enthusiasm over seeing the film leads to record crowds at the theater, only for the movie to turn out to have been a laughable trainwreck in the style of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is the reason why Wally didn’t want anyone to know about it. (Wally had met Gus on the set of the film, and had ended up wrecking his career after his lovestruck infatuation lead him to cast Gus as the main star.) However, despite feeling humiliated that his secret shame was exposed, Wally realizes he regrets nothing about his past, as he’s happy being with Gus. The episode ends on a touching note, as Kevin shows Wally how much joy even bad movies can give to people needing a laugh. On a side note, this episode won the show a GLAAD award for its positive portrayal of a gay relationship, which even in the late ’90s was about as common as finding a unicorn in a public bathroom.
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Progress!
While that’s the finale we got, the story doesn’t quite end there. While 13 episodes were finished, there is in fact five unproduced episodes that exist either as scripts or unfinished animatics and storyboards, including one that had a finished voice recording. These five: “Supertool”, “Freaky Weekend In the Crappy Crudwagon”, “Pretty In Pink” (no relation), “Death of A Yale Man”, and the third and final series finale, “Bye, Bye Nerdy”, can be found online and are definitely worth checking out for fans of the show. While not quite as good as if we had gotten to see the finished episodes, they do provide a measure of closure. For example, after spending most of the series in an on-off-again romance, Gwen and Andy become an official couple in the storyboarded “Pretty In Pink”, while “Bye, Bye Nerdy” revolved around Kevin briefly moving back in with his parents, only to discover that his time in Mission Hill had changed him so much that his mother’s coddling was unbearable. The final scene in the script ends with Andy and Kevin walking back into Mission Hill together (after their dad paid Andy $5,000 to take Kevin back), a fairly satisfying close to the series.
So, for all these advantages, why did the series flop as badly as it did? Well, basically because it got hit with so many misfortunes you’d almost think someone on the show pissed off a voodoo priest. Things went bad right out of the gate, as the two-minute pilot used to draw in advertisers to the show was so crudely slapped together at the last minute that it soured a lot of critics before they had even seen the show, and led to several crap reviews for what was basically a notebook doodle. Thanks to this misguided response, the WB completely mishandled the show, originally cutting it off after two episodes, and only begrudgingly airing off four more a year later before simply flushing it all together. It didn’t help that the WB put the show in the infamous Friday night death slot, a timeslot known to destroy TV ratings because no one the advertisers want to reach watches TV at 8 PM on a Friday. We likely wouldn’t even have the DVD release if the show had not gained a cult following on Adult Swim.
Another problem was that the WB simply wasn’t the right network for the series, which, as I’ve mentioned before, was intended for an MTV audience. While the network did try to attract teenage viewers, what they actually did was effectively make itself the Teenage Girl network, with shows like Dawson’s Creek, Charmed and, for some reason, the Christianity-themed 7th Heaven. Not exactly the kind of lineup that would attract Mission Hill‘s intended audience of jaded 20-somethings. Mission Hill was basically the only show in the whole schedule that wasn’t about 30-year olds pretending to be depressed high schoolers. Combine this with WB’s approach to advertising being “pretend it fell through a crack in the Earth and stop answering phone calls,” and there’s little wonder why the show didn’t manage to succeed.
Despite its short life, Mission Hill was an early foray into animation as a meaningful storytelling medium, something we’ve only seen blossom into maturity in recent years, with shows like Bojack Horseman or Archer, instead of shows like Family Guy which reduce animation to a stream of cartoon pop-culture references. On Mission Hill, the characters grew, they lived, they learned, there was a feeling of life that so many syndicated shows lack because the format doesn’t support it. Had something like Netflix existed in 1999, perhaps the show could have given us even more, but as it is, we’ll have to be happy for what we got.
So that’s it, folks. That’s the tale of Mission Hill, a show so tragically ahead of its time it was doomed from the start, because like all beautiful things, it just wasn’t meant to last. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly urge you to seek it out, as it remains funny and relevant to this day.
In our second entry, we’ll be publicly shaming MTV for their failure with the show that cost Mission Hill its original title, the frank portrayal of life in the Big Rotten Apple of New York in the last gasping months of the ’90s: Downtown.
-Henrik M.