Freakazoid Spoofs the Island of Dr. Moreau and Cops as My Patron-Funded Look at Freakazoid! Nears a Close
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.
For no discernible reason, Leonard Maltin introduces the second season Freakazoid episode “Island of Dr. Mystico” but his inexplicable but delightful involvement does not end there. For even less explicable reasons, Maltin later appears on a plane otherwise exclusively packed with criminals and then as a captive guest of the titular Dr. Mystico alongside an unintelligible Henry Kissinger, who is referenced but does not physically appear in the next episode as well.
As the title suggests, “Island of Dr. Mystico” is a parody of The Island of Dr. Moreau that begins as a goofball riff on a movie near and dear to my heart: the 1997 Nicolas Cage cult classic Con Air.
I’m professionally obligated to watch and write about every movie Nicolas Cage has made for The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast, just as I must watch and write about every episode of Freakazoid so there’s nice synchronicity to my overlapping missions intersecting here.
In a related development, boy oh boy do I love my job! It doesn’t pay terribly well and there’s no security, stability or benefits but it’s a whole lot of fun and I get to do things like watch Freakazoid and Nicolas Cage movies for work.
Only instead of a whole bunch of bad hombres and Nicolas Cage, “Island of Dr. Mystico” centers on Freakazoid flying a rogue’s gallery of his silliest villains to an obscure country in Europe known as France.
It’s a murderer’s row of bad guys who have tried to murder Freakazoid without success that highlights how wonderfully, intentionally stupid the show’s heavies are. There’s Cave Guy, a big blue caveman who communicates in the dulcet tones of William F. Buckley, Longhorn, an angry anthropomorphic bull with an Elvis thing going on, not to mention Wisconsin’s own Cobra Queen, the otherworldly Candle Jack and my own personal favorite, The Lobe.
I never tire of jokes involving The Brain’s eternal discomfort so you better believe I guffawed heartily at his inability to fit a life vest over his comically oversized cranium when the plane goes down and the bad guys and the good guys end on the titular isle of the damned.
As a parody of Dr. Moreau and other mad scientists, Dr. Mystico takes an archetype that’s already extreme and ridiculous and ratchets it up to parodic levels. Dr. Mystico is voiced by Tim Curry, who is of course famous for playing one of film’s preeminent mad scientists, Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
On the Island of Dr. Mystico, Freakazoid and his allies must put aside their differences with the bad guys for the sake of battling a common foe.
Dr. Mystico is intent on transforming our heroes into Orangu-Men, half man, half ape and pure freak. Cobra Queen and Longhorn are already ungodly combinations of animal and man so they do not want their DNA or genes messed with any further.
Cave Guy and Cobra Queen team up in the next episode, “Two Against Freak”, romantically as well as professionally. They’re intent on stealing a diamond-festooned hat known as the Crown of the Czars but they also take some time for themselves to go on a nice date where they terrorize the waiter the same way they terrorize Washington D.C.
But first we’re treated to a parody of Cops centered on Cosgrove, who is a very large man but also somehow able to keep up with criminals literally on the run and Freakazoid during their many friend dates.
Cosgrove is so improbably quick on his feet that the poor cameraman from the Cops spoof gets winded chronicling his crime-fighting antics. I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure it out, but Cosgrove’s affectless, deadpan, no nonsense monotone is a nod to Dragnet, particularly Jack Webb’s “Just the Facts” narration and seeming dearth of any identifiably human characteristics.
Cosgrove is distracted by his unlikely television fame, although considering just how often Freakazoid! peels back the curtain in this episode alone, it could be argued that he’s making two television shows in this episode, since Freakazoid and many of the supporting players seem cognizant that they are fictional characters in a cult animated superhero show Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg.
Narrator Joe Leahy, for example, isn’t content to merely comment on the action from the sidelines. Instead he is continually trying to wiggle his way into the show’s action. As the announcer, he is a central presence but he is also, amusingly enough, a figure on the perimeter looking in.
Freak, meanwhile, is briefly out of action because he has been trying to learn telekinesis from his ornery, extremely Scottish mentor MacStew (Craig Ferguson) but keeps on accidentally hitting himself in the head with a brick.
This leads Freakazoid to be a little fuzzy. He enjoys a nice glass of hospital water and Hero Boy on the hospital TV, one of a seemingly infinite number of callbacks and inside jokes but eventually he springs into action to save the day.
The second season of Freakazoid! isn’t as crazy, audacious or original as the first but it’s still a marvelous meta delight full of weird jokes, obscure pop culture references and all manner of meta-textual, post-modern tomfoolery.
So when Freak brags that speed and smarts won him a second season, there’s something unmistakably melancholy and bittersweet about knowing that we’ve almost reached the end of our journey, yet there’s so much more life left in this character and this world.
There’s definitely something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead but if Freakazoid! were rebooted, I wouldn’t mind a bit. Heck, I’d probably even watch it even if I were not getting paid to do so.
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