My Patron-Funded Exploration of Freakazoid! Continues With More Marvelously Meta Tomfoolery
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.
While flying outside of Air Force One in the middle of a thunderstorm in “Freakazoid is History” , Freakazoid turns to us, his friends in the audience, and in what feels like an ad-lib, quips that prime time could have had the show but apparently thought better of it.
The wisecrack made me wonder why Freakazoid! wasn’t on prime time. It certainly would feel at home before or after something like The Simpsons or The Critic. Its humor is brazenly, unapologetically adult.
One of the many things I love about the strangely simpatico sibling series Freakazoid! and Batman Beyond is that they’re ostensibly cartoons for children yet they make zero effort to appeal to kids unless the tykes in question dig Paul Harvey and Marty Ingles references and wall-to-wall meta-textual motherfuckery.
Freakazoid! was apparently and unsurprisingly very expensive, which is a big part of the reason it only lasted twenty-four episodes. All that money is up onscreen. You pay handsomely for this level of animation, writing and voice acting. Furthermore, Steven Spielberg does not do things cheaply.
Cost would be less of an issue for a prime-time cartoon but Freakazoid! ended up running during the day all the same, to its eternal commercial detriment.
As its title suggests, “The Chip II” is the second entry in a two-part origin story that explains how Freakazoid! came into existence. The wacky superhero is explicitly posited as the internet given physical form so it is VERY realistic that he is smart, informed and quick but also out of his goddamned mind, a true lunatic.
That was true in 1995. It’s even more true today. Freakazoid! was prescient in its depiction of the internet as something that was posited as serious and important and society-transforming but is actually utterly bonkers and not sane or serious in the least, beyond the serious amount of damage it causes at every step.
An exceedingly game Ricardo Montalban returns as Armondo Guitierrez, the malevolent but sonorous chairman of the board of Apex microchips and a heavy who wants to harness Freakazoid’s powers so that he can play supervillain to his superhero.
To attain super-powers he of course has to enter a series of letters and numbers into a computer and then press delete. Almost insultingly easy, eh? In a gloriously meta gag, Armondo sits down to do the data entry necessary to become superhuman and grouses boyishly, “I am such a bad typist!”
It’s a gloriously clumsy way to give Freakazoid all the time in the world to stop his arch-nemesis and his evil plan. Sure enough, Armondo is still pecking away at the keyboard like a secretary school reject when our hero shows up to save the day.
After a weirdly straightforward musical interlude of Freakazoid playing the piano poorly we journey once again into the world of parody with a segment that begins with Freakazoid saving “Slick” Willie Clinton and falling through the fabric of time and space all the way into December 7th, 1941, a day that will live in infamy on account of the Japanese bombing the shit out of us, in the process inspiring a sub-par Michael Bay motion picture.
The super rapscallion ends up messing irresponsibly with time, resulting in an alternate future where The Brain of Pinky and the Brain fame is now President.
Freakazoid! shares a universe and, in Steven Spielberg (THE Steven Spielberg) an Executive Producer with Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain as well as a fair amount of creative talent.
More than that, they share an anarchic comic spirit and sensibility. They got away with an awful lot because the most powerful and successful man in show-business was their Executive Producer.
In “Hot Rods From Heck” Freakazoid squares off against a very silly super-villain named Longhorn who was once a garden variety criminal but had himself transformed into a humanoid steer to avoid law enforcement and the consequences of his actions.
He’s a bumbling bad guy but what he really wants to do is make it in Nashville as a country crooner. Maurice LeMarche gives Longhorn the cornpone cadences of a cut-rate Elvis wannabe by way of Tromeo & Juliet.
We learn Longhorn’s backstory in another fourth wall breaking appearance from the show’s version of Paul Harvey, the young people’s favorite.
Freakazoid has some tricks up his sleeve, however. He heads over to the Freakalair, his absurdist version of the Bat-Cave and informs us that it showed up in an earlier episode and tested well so it would become a permanent feature of the show. That’s true of his freaky take on the Bat-mobile, the Freak-Mobile, as well.
Then again, the Freakalair and the Freakmobile are both referenced in the theme song, so it seems like a no-brainer that they’d make it onto the show as well.
Freakazoid, who seemingly spends as much time talking to the audience as the other characters in the show, tells us that the Freakmobile was specifically designed to be “toyetic”, which is defined as an industry term for something designed to be turned into a toy the gullible public can waste their money on.
I will forever associate the phrase “toyetic” with the movie Batman & Robin. Joel Schumacher famously said he was told to make a movie that would be toyetic above all else.
I assumed “toyetic” was a brand spanking new phrase and conceit when Schumacher made it infamous but “Hot Rods From Heck” precedes Batman & Robin.
Freakazoid’s relentlessly smartass, adult sensibility might have made it a poor fit for children’s television of the mid 1990s but it’d feel more at home on a hip streaming service today. Freakazoid! had the misfortune to be way ahead of its time.
That explains why it was a failure at the time of its release but a cult success today.
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