Freakazoid Tangles with Cosgrove's Evil Girlfriend and a Lovecraftian Ghoul as My Patron-Funded Exploration of Freakazoid! Continues
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 are deep into my patron-funded exploration of the cult 1990s superhero cartoon Freakazoid! and I have not talked much about the major supporting character of Cosgrove. That’s because Cosgrove is amusing, if not quite guffaw-inducing, while also being extremely limited.
That’s the whole point of Cosgrove. When he was cast as Commissioner Gordon to Freakazoid’s zany Batman, Ed Asner was surprised when he was told not to act, but rather to deliver his lines as coldly and flatly as possible, as if cold-reading them for the first time.
That went against the instincts Asner had developed over the course of his long decades in the business but it suited Freakazoid!’s conception of Cosgrove as the gruffest of hard cases but also somehow a softie who is always up for a fun hang with Freakazoid no matter how busy he may be.
Cosgrove is a consummate supporting player but in “A Matter of Love” he takes center stage. The thin joke of this sub-par episode is that Cosgrove, a deadpan block of granite who never expresses any emotions, is suddenly so overcome with emotion that he’s blinded to the inconvenient reality that his new girlfriend is an ageless ghoul who wants to suck dry Freakazoid’s life essence, but not in a sexual way, you perverts.
Freakazoid is annoyed because Cosgrove no longer has all the time in the world to spend with him to do stuff like attend a performance by Gulliver, a mallet-wielding threat to the world’s watermelon supply.
It’s utterly out off character for Cosgrove to reject an invitation to do any leisure activity, no matter how transparently stupid and pointless it might be, and as someone who has seen Gallagher perform live, nothing is stupider or more pointless than Gallagher’s shows.
Freakazoid eventually learns that the reason Cosgrove isn’t interested in hanging out is because he has a new girlfriend, a cosmetics mogul who seems too good to be true because she is too good to be true.
She may be attractive and affectionate but she’s also an ageless monster masquerading as the perfect woman. There’s no way a plot involving Freakazoid’s main bro being unable to bro it out with him because the woman he’s in love with is an evil succubus won’t be at least a little bit sexist. “A Matter of Love” is, indeed, a little misogynistic in its depiction of Cosgrove’s new lady as evil personified. Even more devastatingly it’s not particularly funny.
Late in the episode Cosgrove breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the audience to help Freakazoid out of a jam by rooting for him. It’s a winking nod to Peter Pan that traffics in the reference-as-punchline formula that Freakazoid! generally eschews.
A running gag involving the word “Huggbees” being fun to say is similarly random in a way that feels annoying and empty instead of fun. The internet being what it is, there is apparently a popular YouTuber who named himself Huggbees after this episode so that randomness REALLY resonated with someone. It just wasn’t me and I am a HUGE fan of this television show, if not this particular episode.
I enjoyed the following episode, “Statuesque” a lot more and not just because I appreciated that it featured cameos from Count Dracula (clad in a cardigan, no less!), the Wolfman and finally the Loch Ness monster.
Since this article will post on Halloween and I pride myself on being a good citizen of the Spooky Season I always appreciate it when I am able to integrate monsters and bogeymen and things that go bump into my October activities.
This being Freakazoid!, the appearances of Dracula, the Wolfman and the Loch Ness monster have no bearing on the action whatsoever. Freak, Cosgrove and Professor Jones jet off to Transylvania and Scotland to learn more about their enemies and do not learn a goddamn thing. The episode’s famous monsters are ultimately monstrous red herrings that serve no point other than as gloriously pointless distractions.
The same cannot be said of Zorn the Unspeakable (voiced by Richard Moll), a Lovecraftian monster who looks like a buff, shredded Cthulhu and is summoned by Waylon Jeepers (voiced by Jeff Bennett), a creepy resident of Venice Beach obsessed with monsters and turning people into stone.
The dweeb succeeds in creating a Medusa Watch that turns people into stone, most notably Freak’s girlfriend Stuff, in addition to summoning a demon to do his evil bidding.
I quite like the dynamic between Waylon and Zorn the Unspeakable, an ageless ghoul who must act as the enforcer of whoever summons him, no matter how lame they might be.
Freak is devastated when his girlfriend is turned to stone so he tries to reverse the process by finding out more about this mysterious pair.
Speaking of dynamics here I enjoy, I quite like the yin-yang relationship between Jonathan Harris’ Professor Jones and Ed Asner’s Cosgrove. They’re a study in contrasts. Cosgrove is gruff, deadpan and emotionless, a man of stone. Jones, however, is a total drama queen who is forever flying into a rage and launching into a verbose monologue about his regrettable lot in life.
After a wild goose chase the action re-locates from Europe to Venice Beach, where Zorn the Unspeakable is quite the fish monster out of water and the fellas are able to turn Steff back into a flesh and blood human being.
The second season of Freakazoid! isn’t quite as crazy, original or audacious as the first but it’s still a bummer that we only have four more episodes left until the series is finished, although Freakazoid did return decades later in 2020 for a Teen Titans Go! episode called, you guessed it, “Huggbees.”
Nothing but nothing could keep Freakazoid! from its beloved callbacks and running gags, even being off the air for twenty-three years.
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