Freakazoid Tangles with the Lobe and Eastern European Baddies in Parodies of The Godfather and Mission: Impossible
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.
Big brained super-villain The Lobe has many endearing qualities. He’s unusually likable and relatable for someone intent on taking over the world because he takes such pleasure in being a bad guy.
The Lobe doesn’t just derive infectious joy in doing wrong; he gets child-like, infectious delight from doing the Hokey Pokey and that dance fucking sucks. It’s barely a dance. Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit.
The man loves what he does and that is an endearing quality even when that entails threatening continents and shooting lasers at hapless victims. In “The Freakazoid” The Lobe resorts to subterfuge and chicanery in order to keep Freakazoid from ruining his evil schemes.
The episode begins with a Shriner-themed parody of The Godfather. We open on Mr. Fizizi, a fez-wearing, silly car-driving Shriner in good standing who is apoplectic after his daughter’s boyfriend disrespects his diminutive automobile and lifestyle. Is there anything children enjoy more than jokes about Shriners? Yes, obviously, but then Freakazoid! is only intermittently concerned with amusing children and extremely interested in amusing itself with random wackiness, the more random and obscure the better.
The Shriner wants Freakazoid to put an egg down his daughter’s boyfriend’s trousers in retaliation for the disrespect and because the Superhero Code Book says that superheroes cannot reject anyone’s request on their birthday, he has no choice but to do it.
This understandably seems suspicious to Freakazoid, but all of the other superheroes are on an unspecified moon (possibly THE moon?) so he can’t check with his colleagues.
Next The Lobe gives Freakazoid a dehydrator as a birthday present, to make homemade beef jerky and whatnot, because he is a considerate individual and polite in addition to being a figure of outsized evil and makes a simple but challenging request: he wants to be left alone.
On every other day Freakazoid is The Lobe’s eminently worthy antagonist but on Freakazoid’s birthday the lovable baddie wants to be free to go about his sinister business without worrying about his arch-nemesis stopping him.
Freakazoid reluctantly acquiesces out of a misplaced sense of propriety and The Lobe runs wonderfully amok to a parody of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” that’s a little strange because the insanely catchy Dr. Seuss-derived ditty is itself a very funny comedy song Freakazoid! does not improve upon.
Washington D.C. suffers a one-villain crime wave. The masses cry out for help but Freakazoid is impotent to do anything because his hands are tied by that infernal rule keeping him from acting.
It all turns out to be a ruse, of course. Freakazoid figures out that the Superhero Code Book is a fraud constructed solely to trick him into inaction when he sees that, for copyright purposes, The Lobe is its author.
The Lobe becomes very angry at himself when he realizes his error. I love how often The Lobe gets down on himself and the flawed nature of his evil schemes. There’s something wonderfully human and relatable about his perpetually wavering self-esteem, how he swings back and forth between comic book megalomania and grandiosity and agonizing self-hatred and self-doubt.
“The Freakazoid” is a Lobe-based episode, gloriously enough, but it’s full of wild digressions and running jokes. The Lobe uses Animaniacs-themed gift-wrap for his present to Freakazoid. This foreshadows Wakko showing up for some wordplay-based shenanigans before joining The Brain and Freakazoid to ask Executive Producer Steven Spielberg which one is his favorite.
He replies that he does not know who ANY of them even are in what is an early example of a humblebrag; after all, joking that your Executive Producer Steven Spielberg doesn’t know who you are also involves acknowledging that the most successful man in show-business is ostensibly your boss.
Other fourth-wall breaking bits of business involve narrator Joe Leahy entering the show itself in order to prove himself as an actor and the writers similarly entering the fray to encourage Freakazoid to use his extremely toyetic Freakmobile to chase The Lobe instead of making pretend like he’s an airplane or motorcycle.
The Godfather and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! are awfully mainstream by Freakazoid’s standards but the episode still manages to feel kooky and subversive, thanks largely to David Warner’s wonderful performance as The Lobe, one of the funniest and most inspired characters in all of superhero cartoons. He’s truly one for the ages.
That cannot be said for the next episode’s bad guy, Janos Ivenovowels (Jim Cummings), the Minister of State Security for fictional Eastern Europe country Vukanova. He’s a garden variety Cold War era bad guy, a gargoyle-faced totalitarian goon.
The relatively straightforward main plot amused me less than bumpers toting the wares of Anubis Market, the home of the “sign of the Jackal-Headed Man”, which has “food so good you can eat it!”
The Mission: Impossible parody finds the family of Dexter Douglas, Freakazoid’s mild-mannered alter-ego, being captured while vacationing in Vukanova. The sinister European country wants to trade the family for dastardly spies so Freakazoid puts together a team to free his family.
Only instead of assembling a highly skilled aggregation of operatives Freakazoid just tosses together existing side characters like Ed Asner’s bone-dry cop sidekick Sergeant Mike Cosgrove. girlfriend Steff, who learns that Freakazoid! and “Creepy” Dexter Douglas are the same person when Cosgrove blurts it out inelegantly and Roddy MacStew (Craig Ferguson), Freakazoid’s kilt-wearing mentor.
Mission: Freakazoid! adds a new oddball to the menagerie in the form of Professor Jones, an erudite insult-dispensing Englishman voiced by Jonathan Harris who is really just Harris’ character from Lost in Space under a different name.
To underline that this new character is actually an old character from a different show altogether people are continually asking Freakazoid’s new butler if he was on a show with a robot (that show being Lost in Space, of course), only to end up on the receiving end of one of his verbose wisecracks.
Professor Jones would go on to become a recurring character in the second season because if there was one things kids in the mid 1990s loved more than Shriners, fezes and silly little cars it’s Lost in Space.
Freakazoid’s second season would be its last, alas, but there’s certainly a lot to be said for going out on top and while the show’s second season is not quite as nutty as its first it’s still a consistent delight, a glorious goof and one of the most inspired and just plain weird cartoons of the 1990s or any other decade.
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
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!
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!