My Patron-Funded Exploration of Freakazoid! Comes to an End with a Reverent Appreciation of the Best Thing Steven Spielberg Has Ever Been Involved With

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.

We have come to another bittersweet end here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. By the time this piece is done I will have watched and written about all twenty-four episodes of the cult superhero satire Freakazoid! for one very special, very appreciated reader/patron and, to a lesser extent, everyone else.

The patron in question had a hunch that I would dig Freakazoid! He thought it would appeal to my sensibility and sense of humor. He was correct! He was very, very right.

I have loved everything about Freakazoid! But what I love most about it is that it is VERY silly. It began silly. It continued on an equally silly note and it ends in an appropriately silly fashion with the final two episodes, "Freak-a-Panel/Tomb of Invisibo” and “Normadeus.”

Though Freakazoid! Lasted a mere twenty-four episodes it concludes with a proper sense of ceremony as well as transcendent silliness. Pretty much everyone returns in the final two episodes, including plenty of heroes we haven’t seen in a very long time, since the show shifted formats in its second season, and all of the bad guys in the grand finale.

Freakazoid! closes things out with a characteristic flurry of in-jokes, running gags, meta-textual tomfoolery and cameos aplenty. I would say that “Freak-A-Panel” begins by shattering the fourth wall except that that would imply that a fourth wall exists in Freakazoid!

That may have been true early in the show’s run but by this point the fourth wall had been broken so extensively and so often that it ceased to matter. Freakazoid! exists perpetually in two overlapping realms: the “reality” of the show and a “real” world that is forever intruding on the action in weird and wonderful ways.

For example, one of the show’s several thousand running gags involves narrator Joe Leahy’s eagerness to have a more central role in the show, to be a part of the action rather than an unseen commentator.

So instead of merely describing Freak’s opening fisticuffs with Cave Guy he peevishly points out that the only reason we’re subjected to the fight at all is because the episode needed to fill time so they did so with pointless filler.

Freak joins Leahy in his fourth wall-disrespecting antics by threatening to replace Leahy with cute singing interns who could do his job just as well, if not better, and be much more pleasant and appreciative to work with to boot.

It’s a not so subtle way of foreshadowing that Freakazoid! will be doing just that when a girl group sings a nifty Phil Spector-style song about a crime spree later in the episode.

Then things get even more meta and inside baseball when the action moves to a comic book convention where Cave Guy, a muscle-bound big blue caveman who speaks in the effete cadences of William F. Buckley, is freaked out by its inhabitants and the very idea of people speaking Klingon, a fictional language from a television program.

Freakazoid then joins a panel that includes Freakazoid! co-creator Paul Dini. Freak’s appearance proves a bust, as all that anyone wants to talk about is Superman.

Dini was working on Superman: The Animated Series around the same time he worked on Freakazoid! He consequently worked on a show based on one of the most popular and iconic superheroes AND on Freakazoid!, a superhero show so unpopular that it was a mere episode away from ending its run after a mere twenty-four episodes.

The callbacks and in-jokes continue with the unexpected return of oddball heroes who appeared early in the show’s run and then not so mysteriously disappeared when the show became less ambitious and random and more Freakazoid-centric.

Huntsman, Fan Boy, Bo-Ron and Lord Bravery want to know why they’ve been fired and what their role, if any, will be in the new season. Of course Freakazoid!’s future is profoundly limited but they do get to wash the Freak-A-Car, a gig that is, if anything, worse than nothing.

The next segment focusses on a new supervillain that is every bit as stupid as the rest. I mean that as high praise. One of the things that I love about Freakazoid! is how utterly ridiculous all of the bad guys are. Individually and collectively they’re an inspired, absurdist spoof of the concept of super-villainy.

In “Tomb of Invisibo” Dexter Douglas and his family visit a museum where their horseplay results in an invisible ancient Egyptian spirit being unleashed to wreak havoc.

The Invisible maniac talks like Vincent Price and carries around a bo so it looks like an Egyptian bo has somehow achieved sentience and is moving about of its own accord. That’s silly, of course.

Invisibo ISN’T a weapon that has attained sentience. Instead he’s an an invisible dude carrying a bo that is his trademark, obviously, but also defeats the purpose of the whole “invisibility” thing.

Invisibo has Vincent Price’s voice as well as his signature sinister prissiness. Freakazoid! is in love with language and words, the sillier the better. For example, I will never be able to hear or read the word “weenie” again without at the very least smiling as a Pavlovian response to the incredible pleasure I get from hearing Ricardo Montalban shout that glorious word with varying degrees of body and soul-consuming rage.

It similarly made me also obscenely happy when Invisibo sneers at Freakazoid, “Farewell, you clownish being!”, “I grow WEARY of your buffoonery!”, “Oh puffery!” and finally “You’ve given me a lot of trouble—for a goof!”

I love words and ideas like clownish, puffery, buffoonery and goof, particularly when uttered with barely suppressed rage by a heavy who doesn’t need to be seen to make a big impact or be hilarious.

Of course the downside to being introduced to a wonderfully idiotic, purposefully pointless bad guy like Invisibo when a show’s run is nearly over is that we have to say goodbye to him not long after saying hello.

Thankfully Invisibo has one more moment of glory when he shows alongside more established supervillains in the grand finale and The Lobe greets him with a wry, “Invisibo! Good NOT to see you!”

Oh, how I love this ridiculous show!

The Lobe unsurprisingly figures very prominently in “Normadeus.” More surprisingly, PBS superstar carpenter Norm Abrams ALSO figures very prominently. The superhero and supervillain alike are obsessed with a cult figure not terribly popular with Freakazoid!’s ostensible core demographic of small children.

Like Batman Beyond, Freakazoid!is a children’s show that has little to no interest in appealing specifically to children, which helps explain why it’s a cult classic and not a mainstream hit.

As the title suggests, “Normadeus” is also a parody of Amadeus, which is unmistakably adult but extremely well-known by the show’s standards.

In “Normadeus”, the perpetually frustrated and defeated Lobe plays the role of Salieri and Norm Abrams functions as a wood-working Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The Lobe has created a wooden contraption known as Finestra 3000 to defeat Freakazoid but he needs a carpenter with Abrams’ gifts to bring it to life. So he kidnaps the public television staple and then invites all of the villains to watch Freakazoid’s demise, including our new friend Invisibo.

Candle Jack, Cave Guy, Cobra Queen, Waylon Jeepers, Longhorn and the Lobe’s henchmen Medulla and Oblongata all show up for the big event. We’re even treated to a rare appearance by Ricardo Montalban’s Armondo Guitierrez.

Guitierrez gets one last glorious chance to express full-throated disapproval of Freakazoid’s word choices when he refers to the bad guys as weenies and Gutierrez rages, “Don’t say the weenie word!!!” with wildly, hilariously misplaced outrage.

Few things in the world give me us as much joy as Ricardo Montalban angrily yelling “weenie”.

I also derive great joy from Jonathan Harris’ delirious self-parody as Freakazoid’s  manservant. Just about everything that comes out of his mouth is gold but I am particularly partial to a wonderfully insane monologue he delivers here about a race of pixies living below the earth that decide to make Norm Abrams their pixie king.

When they cancelled Freakazoid!, they also eliminated the possibility of moments that gloriously insane and random. That is a tremendous loss for us all.

Freakazoid! ends big. All the major characters are trotted out, including Joe Leahy and Executive Producer Steven Spielberg, before an episode AND show-ending sing-along to “We’ll Meet Again.”

That’s a World War II standard perhaps best known to contemporary audiences for being the song that ends Dr. Strangelove.

Normally I would say that it’s a bit much for a cartoon to end its run with a Dr. Strangelove homage but Freakazoid! earns it.

Is Freakazoid! the best thing Steven Spielberg has ever been involved with? I’m going to say yes. The shark movie was nice, and the films about the extra-terrestrial and the dinosaurs certainly have their fans but nothing can measure up to the warped genius of Freakazoid!

So goodbye forever, Freakazoid!, and thanks for the laughs.

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