Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #260 Freakazoid! "Five Day Forecast/The Dance of Doom/Handman" and "Candle Jack/Toby Danger in Doomsday Bet/The Lobe"
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
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A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I just finished a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
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When a much appreciated reader/patron commissioned a new series on the 1990s animated show Freakazoid! I was a little worried. What if I didn’t like the show? What if it did nothing for me? What if it gave me nothing to write about? What if a reader paid me to sing its praises but instead I loathed it?
That thankfully does not appear to be the case. Freakazoid! so perfectly suits my tastes that I legitimately wondered why I’d never seen even a a single episode of it before. The answer, I suspect, is that it began life in 1995 when I was a college student whose life was one big blur of sex, drugs and pranking the stuck-up dean.
You should have seen some of the gags we pulled on that square! I was too busy with collegiate mischief and seeing how many students I could fit inside a phone booth to check out Freakazoid!
I became an instant Freakazoid! fan during its obscenely catchy ear-worm of a theme song, a sadistically infectious little ditty full of delightful non-sequiturs, zany pop culture references, inside jokes, fourth-wall-breaking shenanigans and sheer insanity.
There are turns of phrase in the Freakazoid! theme worthy of Sir Alfred Matthew Yankovic of Lynwood, California. That is the highest possible praise. That’s particularly true of a final meta-verse bragging/imploring, of the titular hero, "He's here to save the nation/So stay tuned to this station/If not, we'll be unemployed/Freakazoid! Freakazoid!Freakazoid!!!”
Freakazoid! never stops smashing the fourth wall. In that respect the title character of Freakazoid, wild man teen superhero and unrepentant horndog, is a cross between Bugs Bunny, Deadpool and The Mask.
If it was possible to copyright an essence, Jim Carrey would have a strong case against Freakazoid! for essentially stealing his whole deal.
Freakazoid! was originally conceived as a more straightforward superhero cartoon by Bruce Time and Paul Dini, two of the bigwigs behind such beloved cartoons as Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond before Executive Producer Steven Spielberg suggested they pivot ever so slightly into being a zany, post-modern superhero comedy with a tone exactly like that of The Animaniacs.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him or his work, but it turns out that Steven Spielberg is VERY successful (he directed Ready Player One) and has a pretty good track record. So a conventional superhero show morphed into something unconventional to the point of being dadaistic.
Freakazoid! begins with what is essentially a blackout sketch, an elaborate fake-out that finds Freakazoid seemingly delivering a fire and brimstone speech about an impending apocalypse that will lay waste to humanity, leaving no one spared, that is eventually revealed to be nothing more than a mundane weather report.
We’re then introduced to an unusually erudite, loincloth-clad brute who looks for all the world like a latter-day caveman yet speaks in the upper-crust tones of Jim Backus’ Thurston Howell III known as Cave Guy.
“Only one hero can track down Cave Guy. Only one hero has the heart to fight this fiend!” booms the narrator before an image of Batman in silhouette manhandling a criminal on a rooftop is accompanied by the words, “That HERO is…on another network!”
Even Batman seems surprised and annoyed by this development, as he stops what he’s doing and faces the camera with a quizzical expression before the narrator continues, “Thus, we have no choice but to turn to this fellow” as the mean streets of non-Gotham are replaced by the suburban home where hero Dexter Douglas/Freakazoid lives.
It’s an audacious gag that speaks to the show’s subversive central conceit: the world needs Batman. Instead it gets a lunatic who is 9 parts Bugs Bunny to 1 part Shazam, a sort of teenaged Deadpool.
By day, Dexter Douglas is a lonely computer nerd. But when he yells “Freak out!” he transforms instantly into Freakazoid, a motormouth lunatic who is fast in every way. He thinks fast. He talks fast. He moves fast. He communicates in a free-associative blur forever threatening to devolve into complete nonsense.
He’s a creature of pure id in a world as crazy as he is, where a simple school dance in honor of Daylight Savings Time becomes a 1960s-style horror movie entitled Dance of Doom, complete with fictional stars Leonard Rhombu, Kipton Tang and “Weena Mercator as the hopping woman.”
Glorious non-sequiturs are introduced and abandoned, like a mysterious figure with a special watch that turns beavers into gold. Why? There is no why in Freakazoid. Just go with the flow and don’t expect logic or sanity.
Women love Freakazoid despite his propensity for Jerry Lewis impersonations and manic ranting but they’re wholly uninterested in his dorky alter-ego and he isn’t above using his incredible powers to make out with cute girls.
“Dance of Doom” is then followed by a Freakazoid-themed parody of the Animaniacs theme song sung by the Warners themselves explaining the show’s premise and introducing us to its characters with a zippy wit worthy of the Animaniacs theme song itself.
Just when it seems like things can’t get any wackier the episode ends with “Handman”, an absurdist short that takes a very weird gag for what is ostensibly a kid’s cartoon—Freakazoid turning his hand into “sidekick” Handman by making it “talk” Señor Wences-style—to its breaking point and beyond
It’s Paul Harvey, the young people’s favorite.
Things escalate deliciously when Handman proves himself in battle against super villain The Lobe and then finds true love with a “woman” who is just Freakazoid’s other hand with a crude wig on it.
The episode ends with Freakazoid marrying Handman and his true love in a wedding chapel while speaking in an inexplicable Irish brogue. Then Handman and his new bride consummate their marriage on their honeymoon, with literal fireworks exploding outside to celebrate their fucking.
Freakazoid says he hopes Handman and his wife have a happy marriage, in contrast to his feet, who appear to be locked in a bitterly unhappy union.
If is, as you might imagine, super fucking weird yet that is nevertheless how this wonderfully bizarre cartoon chooses to end the episode that introduced it to the world.
They really threw down the gauntlet, establishing in no uncertain terms that Freakazoid would be as weird and, well, freaky, as it wanted to be. It would be more than freaky: it would be super freaky.
“Candle Jack”, the first segment in the second episode is presented in “Scream-O-Vision”, a William Castle-style pointless innovation where the audience is invited to scream when prompted.
It takes place at a camp where campers are frightened with terrifying accounts of things turning into wood and Sinbad being given another television show.
This seems to terrify children more than anything else, even if one camper assures another of the possibility of the Houseguest star returning to the small screen, “The broadcasting industry has all sorts of safeguards to prevent that sort of thing.”
It’s a rando gag done right, a Freakazoid! specialty. It’s not the only rando gag in the segment: later Freakazoid! references a specific bit in the half-forgotten sitcom F Troop.
Eventually a horror even more terrifying than a new Sinbad sitcom presents itself in the form of Candle Jack, a real-life bogeyman who appears whenever foolish man-animals make the mistake of saying his name out loud.
The nifty-looking, suitably creepy Candle Jack has barely gotten up to shenanigans when the relentlessly post-modern show decides to skip ahead to the end of his story by having someone playing radio personality Paul Harvey explain everything that else that happened in voiceover.
As if that’s not audaciously adult enough, at one point Freakazoid breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly to gush about what a goddamn joy it is to show up at work every morning on the show and how much he loves spending time with Ed Asner (who provides the gruff, deadpan voice of Sgt. Mike Cosgrove, the cop Freakazoid works with, in addition to enjoying various leisure activities) and narrator Joe Leahy.
In the kind of insanely specific detail that sets the show apart, Freakazoid once again channels Jerry Lewis only this time it’s the “serious” voice he used on his telethon to illustrate that he was acting in his capacity as a philanthropist and humanitarian and not an emotionally stunted, nonsense-spouting buffoon.
The segment is followed by a stand-alone Johnny Quest parody centering on the adventures of Toby Danger and his family. In that respect the show anticipated Venture Brothers by nearly a decade.
Freakazoid! consequently feels more like a cartoon adaptation of 1970s-era National Lampoon than the garbage that reigned on children’s television at the time of its release. It is nakedly, unapologetically satirical and delighted in going way over children’s heads with a flurry of unmistakably adult references, the more obscure the better.
If I had continued with The Simpson Decade, my long-abandoned, wildly unpopular Rotten Tomatoes column on the post-modern, self-referential, TV-crazed nature of 1990s comedy Freakazoid! would definitely make for a good entry.
That’s because it’s as post-modern and meta-textual as they come but also because it illustrates that the best, most inventive comedies of the 1990s looked inward for inspiration, particularly the mind-melting, soul-warping, society-corrupting glow of television.
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