My Patron-Funded Exploration of Freakazoid! Continues with Freak Facing Off Against Silly Super-Villains and Relax-O-Vision

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.

I am a firm believer in the idea that you should at least try to find something you like about entertainment you otherwise hate and also that you should acknowledge at least a single flaw in something that you conversely love with your whole soul.

But the older and softer I get the less important it seems to find flaws in stuff that blows me away. I’m much more content to accept and embrace things despite their imperfections, to the point where those imperfections barely seem worth pointing out.

At this point it should be pretty damn apparent that I love Freakazoid! I am a Freakazoid! freak, as it were. So it seems both unfortunate and inevitable that nine and ten episodes in I can very clearly point to something in it and note sadly that it kind of sucks.

That’s the segment “Fat Man and Boy Blubber.” The one joke is right there in the title. It’s a superhero spoof about a pair of superheroes who are “comically” obese and consequently ill-prepared to fight crime.

“Fat Man and Boy Blubber” has maybe a joke and a half in the cleverly named Fat Man being very large but also really loving to eat food but it is rare to see the quality of a show plummet so severely.

Even Freakazoid!, it seems, is not immune from the tacky siren song of the lazy fat joke. The character is even more unnecessary and counter-productive considering how much he shares with Fan Boy (Stephen Furst), another portly, bumbling would-be super-hero.

But where Fan Boy has a clear satirical target it pounds relentlessly in the annoying, self-obsessed myopia of fanboy culture and feels prescient in its depiction of superhero super-fans as entitled creeps with no social skills and an endless capacity for mindless, pointless trivia, Fat Man is just a sentient fat joke.

In “Limbo Lock Up” Freakazoid is sentenced by the Idiotic Police to spend a half hour with Fan Boy while he rattles off information and opinion about the relative box-office grosses of various Disney genre films of the late 1970s and early 1980s like The Black Hole, Tron and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Like the best children’s entertainment, very little of Freakazoid! feels even remotely pitched towards children. That’s true of this goofball riff and an even sillier and more specific run involving heroes and villains alike being devastated to discover that the boat rides have been phased out at Disney Land.

It’s the kind of obscure reference that’ll have kids scratching their heads, pointing angrily at their television screens and saying, “Huh?” out loud in what is, honestly, an unusually demonstrative display of confusion, a burlesque even.

The show is never afraid to go super obscure, to follow its wandering muse wherever it may go, even bucolic scenes of nature set to the soothing sounds of “Theme from (A Summer Place).”

That supremely soothing ditty, the twenty-third top-charting song of all time and a jam that, as the kids say, slaps, figures prominently in “Relax-O-Vision”, a live-action/animated goof that takes a very silly, very inspired conceit as far as it can go and then further.

The segment begins on an incongruously straightforward note, with Freakazoid squaring off against a phalanx of demon ninjas. Before things can get going a droning sleeping pill of a man voiced by Ben Stein introduces himself as H. A. Futterman, the Professor of Broadcast Standards at Kids WB! and the man behind Relax-O-Vision.

It’s a process, not unlike Smell-O-Vision, where scenes of violence and danger that might be unsuitable for a family audience are interrupted by “Theme from (A Summer Place)” and a peaceful scene of animals living in harmony or the beauty of nature.

And then it’s back to the action, albeit after a reversal and losing a scene or two. It’s the kind of ballsy conceptual gag that Freakazoid! does brilliantly. It also ends on a crowd-pleasing note, with our hero beating up someone who looks and talks just like Ben Stein.

“Cold Open” features the introduction of villain Booger Beast, a mucus-laden bad guy who causes Freakazoid to tap out rather than risk the mess. It’s yet another intentionally idiotic villain in Freakazoid’s absurdist rogue’s gallery of spectacularly silly adversaries.

I’m talking about foes like Arms Akimbo. Arms Akimbo inspired in me a kind of stupid double laughter where I laughed at something for being unbelievably dumb, and then I laughed at myself for finding it funny.

Arms Akimbo (John Schuck, M*A*S*H, The Munsters Today) is the son of famous models who was forced into the business at a young age, leaving his elbows stuck at a jaunty angle. He turns to a life of crime in which he extorts “oops insurance” from helpless small businessmen by threatening to knock over their inventory with his freakishly large arms.

It is either an incredibly stupid idea brilliantly executed or a brilliant idea that also has the advantage of feeling very dumb.

The ninth and ten episodes feature multiple instances of Freakazoid facing pretty much all his enemies, including a flashback where the show’s heroes and villains compete, MTV Rock N’ Jock-style, in a friendly game of softball.

But the villain who dominates these episodes is perhaps Freakazoid’s greatest foe, the Joker to his Batman, and also, amusingly enough, someone on his Christmas list, The Lobe (David Warner).

Warner lends the Lobe a hilarious air of vulnerability, melancholy and sadness that finds exquisite expression in a bit both sad and guffaw-inducingly funny where The Lobe explains his plan to take over the world by creating a cloud that turns people into zombie clowns who will then be invited into people’s homes so they can take over the world to Freakazoid, expecting him to be impressed.

Freakazoid informs him in no uncertain terms that his plan is, in fact, insultingly idiotic, as everyone hates clowns, and certainly are not going to invite them into their homes. Now I’m a Juggalo…

But as a comedy buff and a Freakazoid! fan I was delighted by what happened next.

A suddenly mortified Dr. Lobe apologizes to Freakazoid explaining, “I was over-tired! It was the best I can do.”

A bad guy guiltily fretting of a sub-par scheme to take over the world, “I was over-tired!” is funny enough but it’s Warner’s delivery—deeply regretful, embarrassed, with just the right note of withering self-hatred—that really kills. .

A deeply remorseful Lobe continues to apologize for his dumb plan, breaking the fourth wall to apologize to us for his ill-advised scheme involving zombie clowns.

Casting is one of the many areas Freakazoid! excels. Warner brings a lot of great iconic baggage to the role. He’s a fixture of fright flicks and the films of Sam Peckinpah who was also very nearly cast as Freddy Krueger, to the point where make-up tests exist of the actor in character and costume.

But Warner also has a great supervillain voice and great timing and delivery. You don’t just laugh long and hard at the Lobe’s apologies and explanation. You feel for him as well. This may be my single favorite moment in the show so far and considering how much I dig Freakazoid, that is high praise.

The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only! 

PLUS, for a limited time only, get a FREE copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al when you buy any other book in the Happy Place store! 

Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al  here and The Weird Accordion to Al here

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons! 

Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.

I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!