Freakazoid Squares Off Against Classic Villains Voiced by Ricardo Montalban and David Warner as My Patron-Funded Look at Freakazoid! Continues
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As it closed out its first season Freakazoid grew more conventional, more commercial and less insane. Don’t get me wrong. It was still unconventional, brazenly non-commercial and pretty freaking bonkers but it was not quite as aggressively kooky as it was at the very beginning.
Freakazoid no longer had to worry about sharing episodes with even weirder, even more obscure, even less child-friendly side characters. He had the show all to himself although it’s worth noting that Freakazoid was not as broadly appealing a character at the time of the show’s release as he is now.
Back in the 1990s, comic books were universally derided as nothing more than funny animal stories for small children. A revolutionary journalist wrote an article proposing that due to revered, paradigm-shifting masterpieces like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, comic books were NOT, in fact, just for kids anymore, but he was literally beaten to death by an enraged public for even suggesting something so absurd.
Comic books for adults? That’s as utterly preposterous as an adult going to Disney Land without children! Or a grown up promenading about in public dressed up like a superhero! Can you even imagine? Just thinking about it makes me so angry I want to dig up the corpse of the man who wrote that article so that I can abuse it further.
Nowadays superheroes dominate pop culture and geeks control everything. That’s why Deadpool can make a billion dollars; everyone knows the cliches and conventions he’s sending up but back in 1995 being seen with a comic book was enough to inspire a vicious beating. And that’s just the cops and teachers! Children were even less understanding.
“The Wrath of Guitierrez” is about as straightforward as Freakazoid! got in its more experimental and freewheeling first season. It’s twenty minutes of Freakazoid fighting the bad guy. Thankfully the bad guy in question in Armondo Guitierrez.
Guitierrez is voiced by Ricardo Montalban in a virtuoso exercise in sublime self-parody. The writers of Freakazoid! are clearly the kinds of geeks who love reading comic books about obscure heroes like Superman and watching nerdy shows about space travel such as Star Trek.
So they clearly got off on putting the most ridiculous possible words in Montalban’s magical mouth, then watching them emerge coated in lush musicality.
When Guitierrez shows the warden at the prison where he enjoys a standard of living higher than many monarchs computer games he enjoys such as Attack of the Grillery, Chubby Fudge’s Cooking Lab and Amazing Castle the hilarity comes mostly from the fussy way Montalban pronounces those gloriously idiotic phrases.
Montalban’s voice and delivery are as smooth as the finest Corinthian leather. His Guitierrez is an utter delight. When Freakazoid off-handedly calls him a weenie later in the episode, he becomes apoplectic, positively volcanic in his rage.
“I am not a Weenie! YOU are a weenie!” Montalban’s easily insulted bad guy rages, investing the word “weenie” with more righteous indignation than it has ever possessed before. Freakazoid! knows they have a goddamn star with the best, cheesiest voice in the world in Montalban and they make the most of him.
Guitierrez busts out of prison and enters the internet so that he can harness its evil power to become superhuman and get revenge of Freakazoid for putting him in prison in the first place.
A now super-powered Guitierrez squares off against his old nemesis inside the internet, which looks unmistakably like one of the computer games the bad guy is so fond of.
What “The Wrath of Guitierrez” lacks in conceptual craziness it makes up for in star-power. I am still chuckling at Montalban’s delivery of weenie. It feels like it’s destined to be one of those things I think about randomly and with great affection and consequently makes me laugh all over again.
Freakazoid! is full of moments like those. It works on a macro level but on a micro level it’s often not just funny and inspired but unforgettably hilarious.
Unforgettably hilarious is a good description of the late legendary character actor David Warner’s portrayal of big-brained super-villain The Lobe. The Lobe is a fan favorite in the sense that I am a fan of the show and The Lobe is a favorite of mine.
The Lobe sets out to destroy the entertainment industry by stealing all of its content, a horrible crime at the time known as “video piracy” but is quickly caught by Freakazoid.
The adorably lonely, vulnerable and WAY too relatable super-villain doesn’t even get to be chased around because Freakazoid is short on time due to Dexter Douglas going on his first date.
A discouraged Lobe seeks solace in returning to his favorite restaurant for the first time in decades in what I discovered from Wikipedia is an elaborate parody/homage to the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!
Even by Freakazoid! standards, this is gloriously obscure for a superhero themed kid’s cartoon from the mid 1990s. We’re even treated to an elaborate spoof of the theme song to Hello, Dolly! with Freakazoid in blueface (of course) doing the Louis Armstrong part.
Dexter Douglas happens to be dining with his date at the same restaurant but instead of reliably turning into Freakazoid when he says “Freak out” he instead turns into a very 1990s assortment of television personalities including Oprah and David Letterman.
It might seem implausible that a nerd like Dexter would score a date with a beautiful girl but in a realistic touch it’s a total bore and the only fun she has comes from watching Freakazoid chase The Lobe around the restaurant, something that makes him VERY happy.
Watching The Lobe makes me happy. The super-villains are deliberately less-than-super but they’re pretty terrific all the same, thanks to geniuses like Montalban and Warner, who just died and is being rightly and widely mourned as one of the all-time great character actors and a brilliant and hilarious VoiceOver artist as well.
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