Freakazoid Just Keeps Getting Freakier and Freakier!

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One of the reasons I’m fond of Freakazoid is because it reminds me of “Weird Al” Yankovic, a musician I’m quite fond of. I have all his albums and everything! I supposed you could say that I’m something of a “fan.”

Freakazoid shares with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s music, television shows and movies an interest in parody and pastiche, crazed riffing and dense layers of allusions and pop culture references. 

Not a terribly clever fellow!

So you can imagine how amused I was to discover Al’s idol Stan Freberg appears in several episodes as Mo-Ron, a green-skinned alien with the soft, squishy body and intellect of a toddler. 

In subsequent appearances, Mo-Ron was re-named Bo-Ron out of either culturally sensitivity, a desire to pay homage to a favorite pizza place or some combination of the two, depending on who you ask and where you look. 

Moron, like idiot and imbecile, was once a psychiatric term to denote an intellectual disability. Over time it lost that meaning and devolved into a schoolyard taunt. It became offensive on multiple levels so it’s not terribly surprising that Freakazoid changed it, though it is a little surprising they used it in the first place. 

The pace of Freakazoid is generally lightning-fast. It takes its cues from its nutty titular superhero, who is as fast mentally as he is physically. Literally and figuratively, he’s perpetually the fastest man in the room, with a machine-gun stream of patter, wisecracks and pop culture references. 

Mo-Ron/Bo-Ron, in sharp contrast, could not be slower. His internal monologue seems stuck at “Duh” and it appears that his vocabulary is largely limited to “I am Mo-Ron”, which he delivers so slow and haltingly that he doesn’t seem entirely sure that that he is, in fact, Mo-Ron. 

Freakazoid slows down mightily out of deference to Mo-Ron. The show’s lightning fast rhythms become molasses slow as Mo-Ron tries to remember what it is he’s supposed to tell Earthlings.

He finally remembers that he’s supposed to warn them about a comet approaching the earth at the end of the episode but by that point it’s too late. 

The next segment involves the hapless and perpetually annoyed Lord Bravery, a TERRIBLY English superhero with a doubting wife and a woefully unsupportive mother-in-law voiced my Mark Slaughter of the band Slaughter. 

Lord Bravery’s costume is a cross between a Roman soldier and a C-list superhero. Lord Bravery may be a superhero but he can’t get any respect in his home or outside it.

Lord Bravery lives in the shadow of Superman, who is forever being name-dropped as a genuine, competent superhero, in sharp contrast to the forever inferior and insecure Lord Bravery. 

The Lord Bravery segments essentially re-imagine Basil Fawlty as an off-brand superhero with a chip on his shoulder and a family that is a burden rather than a blessing. John Cleese has of course ruined John Cleese for everyone with his cranky old man antics and tragic inability to accept the modern world and all of its scary changes. 

That is not true, however, of John Cleese types. In this weird world, John Cleese types might actually be preferable to the real thing because they don’t have the same unfortunate baggage as the Monty Python veteran. 

The same is true of Woody Allen types. They may not have the talent of the Annie Hall auteur but you can watch their movies without thinking about whether or not they are child molesters.

In “Sewer Rescue” Lord Bravery attempts to come to the rescue of a man stuck in a sewer but is unwilling to soil himself in the process. 

The poor man asks Lord Bravery to ask Superman to intervene and save him and when he huffily says no he asks if he could instead be saved by the “turtles with the bandannas” who wouldn’t have a problem with rescuing a man in a sewer because they themselves live in the sewer. 

As I wrote in the last Freakazoid write-up, the show feels more like the television equivalent of golden age National Lampoon rather than a cartoon for children. In the third and fourth episode of Freakazoid, our wacky hero’s alter-ego Dexter Douglas is mostly a non-entity while brazenly bizarre detours involving a harried English superhero and crappy gnomes take up serious screen-time. 

Freakazoid was unmistakably a product of its time, which is one of the reasons why I would have included it in my Simpsons Decade project about the post-modern, self-referential, TV-obsessed comedy of the 1990s if I hadn’t abandoned it.

But Freakazoid was prescient as well. Its fourth-wall breaking, wildly referential comedy anticipated the Deadpool movies and the fourth episode segment “And Fanboy Was His Name” predicts the rise of entitled geeks as a major cultural force. 

In “And Fanboy Was His Name”, geeks are an annoying but fundamentally harmless part of superhero life. In the ensuing decades, they have taken over pop culture, and by extension American life, in ways more troubling than triumphant. 

As the brains behind Animaniacs and Batman: The Animated Series, the folks who gave the world Freakazoid have a love-hate relationship with fanboys and comic book obsessives. So the episode’s depiction of Fan Boy (Animal House’sStephen Furst) is affectionate as well as scathing. 

“And Fanboy Was His Name” features cameos from geek Gods who were big when the episode was released back in 1995 but are even bigger and more important now. 

In his misplaced zeal to be closer to his heroes, Fan Boy ends up terrorizing first a suspiciously young-looking George Takei, playing himself, and then Mark Hamill, also playing himself in a manner that references his biggest non-Joker role as Luke Skywalker. 

Freakazoid is bummed that his latest sidekick, the wonderfully and appropriately named Expendable Lad, lives up to his name and suffers an injury that puts him out of action permanently. Fanboy eagerly volunteers to take Expendable Lad’s place as Freakazoids’ new sidekick/comic foil.

Our hero tries to placate his biggest, most annoying fan with a signed photograph of Stan Lee and then cult writer Harlan Ellison. 

Yes, Harlan Ellison. Heaven knows nothing connects with 90s kids like winking nods to the ultimate science-fiction cult writer. Freakazoid is wonderfully dense with allusions, parodies, pastiches and in-jokes. 

The Animaniacs and Batman, for example, are constantly being referenced, spoofed or given the business. Batman lurks forever on the periphery of the action, a dark shadow over a kooky world. 

“And Then There Was Fanboy” is followed by a parody of the cult animated series Gargoyles called “Lawn Gnomes: Chapter IV – Fun in the Sun.” But where the Gargoyles are heroic and misunderstood the gnomes are mostly just fucking assholes. 

The gnomes lie and cheat and steal and are hideously ugly and also very stupid. The Great Mystic Gnome (Roscoe Lee Browne) tries to get the gnomes to stop behaving like total douchebags but even he is powerless before their innate crappiness. 

Freakazoid began bizarre and just keeps on getting kookier. Each episode is almost impossibly dense and contains singular moments like an unforgettable scene where Freakazoid first encounters Fanboy and literally vomits anywhere between thirteen and eighteen times. 

The gag succeeds through excess. It just keeps going and going and going, getting funnier and more ridiculous with each repetition. 

I’m enjoying Freakazoid to the point that I have been skipping ahead and watching episodes that I won’t have to write about for months to come.

It took me over a quarter century to finally get around to watching this cult delight but I am making up for lost time. 

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