The Lobe Buys a Hat and Freak Eats a Sandwich as My Journey Through Freakazoid! Continues
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Last month after I watched and wrote about Freakazoid! I went to Ebay hoping to buy an action figure or Funko pop of my favorite character on Freakazoid, The Lobe. I was disappointed if not terribly surprised to discover that I was looking for things that did not exist.
Even in a world ruled by comic books, superheroes and other geeky fodder Freakazoid is apparently too obscure to generate much in the way of merchandise. That’s too bad because my Freakazoid! fandom has entered the stage where I now want to buy expensive chunks of plastic and keep them around my home to remind me of some of my favorite characters in all of pop culture.
like this guy.
At this point The Lobe isn’t just one of my favorite superhero characters; he’s one of my favorite characters in entertainment. I legitimately wouldn’t mind getting a tattoo of The Lobe.
He is a goddamn delight, is what he is. I identify with him on a level that is unhealthy. The Lobe returns to wreak havoc in "Virtual Freak” but just as importantly, he purchases a new hat that he is REALLY fond of.
Of course The Lobe can’t buy hats at regular hat stores. The average haberdashery has nothing to offer a man like the Lobe so he goes to a special store where they make extra wide, extra large hats for people with freakishly large heads and/or brains.
Oh, and The Lobe also tricks Freakazoid and Cosgrove into playing a hot new virtual reality game that traps them in cyber-space while their avatars run loose in the real world, causing a mighty ruckus in the mall where Steff was hoping to spend some quality time with her boyfriend.
If this were any other cartoon, hat-buying wouldn’t enter the equation even as a weird throwaway joke. In the kooky, upside-down world of Freakazoid, however, The Lobe’s excitement over buying a stylish new hat is just as important and central to the action as the evil virtual reality game stuff is, if not more so.
The Lobe loves his new hat. His excitement is palpable and infectious and I couldn’t help but notice that The Lobe’s wide-brimmed new chapeau looks more than a little like Freddy Krueger’s hat and David Warner, the voice and spirit of the almighty Lobe was cast as Freddy Kruger before he had to drop out for scheduling reasons.
I don’t know if the style of The Lobe’s hat is a winking homage to him almost playing one of the greatest villains in horror movie history (he even had make-up tests done) but considering how pop culture savvy the show is, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Freakazoid! is a wildly imaginative spoof of superhero conventions yet its conception of virtual reality is wildly unimaginative, essentially just a matter of two guys shooting at each other in a cold, empty, cyber-realm.
Eventually a flying dinosaur enters the picture but things remain not just minimalist but perversely dull. This could very well be by design. Even now, a quarter of a century later, with Mark Zuckerberg going all on in virtual reality, it’s still hard to conceive of VR as anything impressive or immersive or resembling reality.
Freak and Cosgrove eventually get out of the game but Freak forgets the ending to the episode so The Lobe and the dinosaur take a break and discuss what they’re working on outside of the show. The dinosaur is up for a soap opera but the best The Lobe can muster is a local spot for Happy Clown Breakfast Soup.
The phrase Happy Clown Breakfast Soup is funny. The idea of a clown-themed breakfast soup is guffaw-inducing. But what really sells the gag is the air of exhaustion and humiliation that Warner brings to it, that defeated air of aristocratic sophistication.
Speaking of wonderful character actors with amazing voices making me deliriously happy with their pronunciation of specific words, Ricardo Montalban returns as Gutierrez in “Heroboy” and spends much of the episode uttering the word “weenie.”
We last saw Guttierez falling into a digital abyss to his seeming death. He survived but not without considerable damage. He’s now a hooded figure of mystery and also an enthusiastic organ player, not unlike the Phantom of the Opera.
Guttierez sends Freak a video telling him to meet him at the abandoned weenie factory or he will vaporize the world and all of its inhabitants. But first we’re treated to Heroboy, a loving parody of Astroboy, which was the first manga to make an impression in the United States, with plenty of loving Kaiju homages thrown in for good measure.
Heroboy is a Japanese, funhouse mirror version of Freakazoid while his military pal is a slightly more animated version of Cosgrove.
As is tradition, Cosgrove asks Freak if he wants to hang out and do something completely unrelated to the plot of the episode (in this case going to a dessert-themed theme park called SpumoniLand) and, as always, Freak says yes even thought is 12:55 AM and Guttierez has given him until one o’clock to make it to the defunct weenie factory or he’ll obliterate the world and that gives him about five minutes for the entire trip.
Guttierez explains that he has created a Freakazoid clone to ruin the original’s good name and commit crimes on his behalf but Freakazoid is less interested in hearing the details of his evil scheme than in talking about the sandwich he’s eating.
It’s another instance of the show’s hilarious obsession with the mundane. It has super villains and superheroes and evil schemes and plans to take over the world but what it’s really interested in are hats and sandwiches.
That’s a lot more relatable to me than the usual superhero fodder. The show’s juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane never stops being inspired and genuinely funny.
In “Heroboy” Freak squares off against his evil clone in an episode that illustrates yet again what makes Freakazoid! a dazzling original that’s truly one of a kind.
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