Tropes/Dork Age

Film — Studios and Production Companies

 * Argosy Media and its sister studio, MTM Enterprises, have had a few:
 * The first one, known as the “Argosy Dark Age”, was from 1981-1993 when Phil Stacker ran Argosy, having performed a hostile takeover of the Argosy Media Affiliates holding company through his own company, Stacker and Associates, which had previously operated a failed restaurant chain. He quickly led the studio into massive debt, leading to Argosy going bankrupt after only a year under his ownership, and only managing to survive by forcing through a merger with rival company MTM to form Argosy Entertainment. It didn’t end there, as Stacker bribed Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker to keep himself in an executive role. Under Stacker, the Argosy unit was only barely kept afloat by the decent performance of its Argentinian satellite animation studio (home of Manuel García Ferré), and half-decent television programs from the creative minds of Paul Lopez and a young Ellen Peck (who were hired by executives on the MTM side); even then, Peck and Lopez were still under creative control of Stacker. Lopez himself had a vast criminal record (mostly DUIs) and a nasty drug habit, both of which Stacker bribed Seattle police to sweep under the rug. Stacker’s own productions were gaudy and poorly-written, and he notoriously hated animation, only begrudgingly keeping the Argosy animation unit alive because it made most of the company’s money; meanwhile translating the beloved Wondertoons characters into a poor live-action version. Another thing Stacker didn’t touch was the comic unit (Argosy Comics and Argosy Features Syndicate), which was kept under control of the Shires family. Argosy did start making shows for PBS around this point, especially The Carmen Show, which was well-received at the time for living up to its companions such as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers, but whose creator and host, Carmen Jensen, was later revealed to have paranoid schizophrenia, which led to the show unceremoniously ending in 2002. It got bad enough that the company was relying on videogames, an industry that was just getting back on its feet after the crash of 1983, as its main source of income. The combined Argosy/MTM company went into administration in 1988, and had to be scooped up by TVS, a British TV station, to stay afloat. However, TVS kept Stacker in charge because they had cold feet and were afraid to put anyone from their homeland in charge of their new American subsidiary. It wasn’t until 1993, when TVS itself went into administration (having lost its broadcasting license to upstart Meridian after overstretching itself by acquiring the Merv Griffin company and other former Columbia Pictures assets that Sony didn’t want) and was taken over by televangelists, when Stacker was fired and thereafter arrested. At that point, Lopez had died in a car accident, so Ellen Peck (and Lopez’ apprentice Nathan Blake) gained full creative control over the company. Peck had heard good things about a guy from Chicago who created an early form of computer animation, and hired him on the spot because she wanted a “real animation wizard”; that’s how we got The Aaron Show, kickstarting the “Argosy Golden Age” of the 1990s and early 2000s. Meanwhile, on the video game side, Argosy took control of a bankrupted Japanese video game publisher, Amusement Software, and brought its cult classic Touhou Project series to arcades worldwide; and Killer Combination defined the Platform Fighter Massive Multiplayer Crossover, and paved the way for the successful Super Smash Bros. series. By 1996, Argosy had firmly established itself as a rival to Disney’s dominance over children’s media.
 * The second one, known as the “Argosy Interregnum”, was from 2006-2013. This was when Ellen Peck, figurehead of the company, kicked herself upstairs, having bought off Argosy and its sister companies on the cheap from their Canadian parent company, Corus, which had written its American assets off for tax purposes and found them utterly worthless compared to its home-grown Nelvana studio. Peck resigned to a CEO position, leaving her apprentice Tiger Lee Clarke in charge of creative affairs, and ended The Aaron Show unceremoniously, as she had new things to attend to. Most of the producers of the other classic 1990s series that had ran until that point, such as The Adventures of Mercy, AuldTopia Kids, and Snuffy, also ended their shows and resigned to boardroom positions. The only series from the 90s that kept going was The Jumping Ground, which was a production of the New Zealand satellite studio. With the old blood being gone, Argosy entered a sort of creative slump, indicated by Aaron the Cat being removed from the Vanity Plate during the first few years of this era. Clarke barely made anything new herself other than Sketch Satires (a Robot Chicken clone), Wondertoons Movie Night (an MST3K clone), and a few adaptations of old Shires-era franchises, instead relying on freshly-hired talent that just wasn’t as good as Ellen and her “Golden Age” contemporaries. Like how the Argentine studio kept the company’s animation unit going during the “Dark Age”, the British satellite studio (the former TVS studio), which had essentially became a rubber-stamp for work by Morgan “Reloaxa” Jordan, was the main thing keeping Argosy Animation afloat during the “Interregnum”, and even that was hampered by ITV executives (and Tiger) forcing them to make generic shows with little charm; meanwhile, the preschool puppetry unit headed by Kenny Yates carried the flag for live-action and prevented the studio from being absorbed into MTM. The video game and comic strip units were largely untouched, but Tiger placed Rhode Montijo in charge of the comic book unit, rebooting the Gumazing Gum Girl and Melvin Beederman Superhero franchises into graphic novel series and cancelling the long-running comic book series started by Michael Shires himself. The “Interregnum” ended in the early 2010s, when Ellen Peck returned to creative duties, and The New Aaron Show, and the “Argosy Renaissance”, started. Tiger Lee Clarke went over to the NZ studio, where she went on to create Raccoo! and Mystic Island; Timmy Gladdison and Anthony Earnsburg revitalized the live-action family entertainment unit with decent Kid Coms; Kenny Yates kept on entertaining preschoolers with his puppetry; and Morgan Jordan, finally being allowed to do the things he always wanted to do by Ellen’s gentle touch, created the smash-hit Weird World franchise. Since then, ArgosyMTM has been performing quite well, and has expanded into the worlds of anime (ABS Aligned Universe) and religious programming (Whirl); created an entire movie using only artificial intelligence (Bao-Bao); brought back the concept of showing cartoon shorts before movies in theatres (the brand-new Reilly Toons, a revival of the classic Wondertoons, and the first theatrical anime shorts shown in Western theatres, Azumanga Tunes); and took advantage of its ownership of NASCAR, WWE, and arena football to show live sports in movie theatres.