We will have a full rundown of everything Archer from New York Comic-Con, so look at this bit as sort of a taste of what’s to come. This news comes from The Daily Beast and it involves the name of Archer’s clumsy, but lovable spy organization, ISIS. If you enjoy the International Secret Intelligence Service, say your goodbyes and prepare for a change. It’s going bye-bye.
According to Marlow Stern, the acronym and name will be dropped from the show due to a certain real life group named ISIS that seems to be causing some sort of panic in the middle east. Who knew? From The Daily Beast:
In light of recent events, however, the creative team behind the Emmy nominated series—creator Adam Reed along with executive producers Matt Thompson and Casey Willis—made a decision to quietly eliminate the acronym from their show.
“We quietly did,” Reed told The Daily Beast. “We were waiting for it to go away—at least I was. Back in Season 5, FX said, ‘This might be a thing,’ and I thought, ‘Maybe it won’t be? Maybe it’ll be the mole that I’m gonna ignore and nothing will happen.’ We got sort of lucky and could organically make a merger with the CIA, so we went back and retroactively painted out the ISIS logos in parts of the show, and we just don’t talk about it in dialogue…
“We won’t say ISIS anymore, and the only visual representation of it will be that sign rolling off the show,” said exec producer Thompson. “It’s just the most awful thing, and we didn’t want to have anything to do with it. There were people online saying that we should address it and say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe these guys have co-opted our name.’ That’s the way South Park would do it, coming after them and saying, ‘These assholes stole our name,’ but that’s not the way the Archer universe works, where it’s all our own creations. In our universe, they don’t exist.”
There’s also some interesting discussion about what to do with all of that ISIS/Archer merchandise, like the t-shirts and the coffee cups with the name on it. They’ve been pulled from the official store, I say keep using them if you already own them. What’s the harm? Until you see some extremist sporting an ISIS t-shirt in the back of a Toyota truck, the name is still an Archer thing to me.
Hopefully this will put to rest any doubts on why President Obama was so quick to call ISIS by their newer name, ISIL. He saw this coming a mile away, probably posted on the message boards about it, but couldn’t get it to stick. That makes sense, right?
(Via The Daily Beast / Mediaite)