What A Cartoon! - Freakazoid! "Dexter's Date"

I loved this show and Pup Named Scooby Doo as a kid

I just love David Warner. Tron, Star Trek VI, Batman, and the 1984 Christmas Carol.

Rhomega

This show is pretty fucking great, and the fact that I never saw it as a kid while watching copious amounts of other WB cartoons like the last season of Batman and all of Batman Beyond really highlights just how much disdain the network had for it by the end. I love it now, and I KNOW I would have loved it as a kid, but I don't remember having the chance to get into it. Luckily the season 1 DVDs still seem to be available cheap enough, but I'm going have to shill out some decent money if I want the second set too.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

Great episode, and great timing! Walmart actually just did a rerelease of season 1 on dvd! I picked it up today. Though, I was really sad to see it completely lacks any special features. I checked both disks. Frankly I feel bamboozled! But Freakazoid on my shelf is Freakazoid on my shelf. But anybody who has the original release had better hold on to 'em!

Lennycarl

It's nice that they brought back Tiny Toons and Animaniacs and such, but let's be real, a third season of Freakazoid is the real sweetest plum.

Kevin Bunch

So long as we are speaking of the “Spielberg connection” that lies with Wayne Knight, let’s not forget that both he AND David Warner were primary characters in the short-lived Fox Kids program Toonsylvania. Warner portrayed Dr. Frankenstein and Knight was his Igor, so not only did they work together but Steven Spielberg was one of the executive producer of the show. Additionally the show was in part created, written, and produced by Bill Kopp and had a bevy of other talent involved. That being said, I saw it an eternity ago and don’t recall if it holds up. Future WAC maybe?

AllTheTrophies

It’s funny that Bob mentions wanting a Freakazoid reboot that makes dated 80’s and 90’s jokes, bc we kinda already have that in Teen Titans Go. Leaving aside the actual crossover with a 90’s property, TTG definitely goes out of its way to reference 80’s and 90’s media in a similar way that Freakazoid does for 70’s media. There’s an episode where the Titans go to high school and basically re-enact Breakfast Club, a sequence where Cyborg rattles off a bunch 80’s TV shows when trying to figure out what to watch and an entire half hour special dedicated to parodying that horrific Turbo Teen cartoon where the boy turns into a car. The pieces are all there, but I think the difference between TTG and Freakazoid (and why I hesitate to elevate TTG to the likes of the 90’s WB comedy shows) all boils down to execution. Go definitely still tries to appeal to the kids with obnoxiously loud voice performances and an abundance of fart/shit jokes, while the Freakazoid crew clearly never cared about the children and only made the show to please themselves and Steven Spielberg. Clearly Go’s approach works since it’s a mega success, but it is funny how the kids who grew up with Freakazoid went on to create their own absurdist superhero cartoon and have it be way more popular than Freak ever was.

Tashmon Dimps

More on Ninja Turtles II: That film DOES have the Bebop and Rocksteady-esque characters of Tokka and Rahzar, put in only because Eastman and Laird didn’t want anything from the cartoon in the live-action movies. Bebop and Rocksteady wouldn’t appear in a film until 2016’s Out of the Shadows. I first knew of Hello, Dolly! thanks to Wall-E, and I have a few fun anecdotes about that film I've gathered through various interviews and articles over the years: First, they deliberately edited out Barbera Streisand from the song Henry mentions, “Put on your Sunday Clothes” both for likeness rights and the possibility of distracting the audience from the story. If you compare the clips seen in Wall-E, they don’t always match up for this very reason. Second, it took a shocking amount of headaches and legal red tape for director Andrew Stanton to convince Fox to give any sort of permission to use the film and its soundtrack. It only happened because Pixar’s CFO had also previously worked at Fox, and was still on good terms with the top brass. I bring this up because Disney’s acquisition of Fox gives this story a whole new level of irony. Third, the juxtaposition in Wall-E’s opening of the song and the imagery of space isn’t quite as ironic as we all thought. Michael Crawford, who performed that version of the song, told Andrew Stanton over dinner (after the film came out) that “when he had to punch the very beginning of the song with the orchestra and say the phrase ‘out there,’ he was never getting it right, and finally [director] Gene Kelly had to come out of the booth. He came over to him and said, ‘Kid, you gotta sing this like it means more than the world. This is bigger than the universe, just think of the stars.’ And the take that they used was the one where he was thinking of the stars when he sang ‘out there.’ So when he saw the opening of WALL-E and it was just this field of stars, it just blew his mind.”

Harry Thornton

I’m so glad you guys did this episode. When you talk about “Tales of the tape” I had recorded this on vhs and watched it so much i’d memorized it beat for beat. Heck, anytime I see “Guarding Tess” anywhere I bust out laughing just because of a one off joke in the episode.

Boyd Adkins IV