The jarring juxtaposition of smart meta humor with childish yelling, along with the compounding of already adult-skewed parodies and now-dated '90s references ensures that Freakazoid! has a very limited audience indeed. Like I said before, if you have don't possess fond memories of already watching this series back when it aired on TV, you're not likely to get much out of this DVD set.
Freakazoid!: Season 1 offers up some nice bonus features, including three insightful commentary tracks from the producer, writers and voice of Freakazoid himself, a series of cruise ship commercial parodies that served as promos for the show, trailers, and a feature describing how the development of the show transitioned it from a straightforward superhero cartoon a la Batman: The Animated Series to the non-sequitor-laced jumble it became.
An odd feature of the set is that two of the cartoons, "The Cloud" and "Candle Jack," both appear twice in their entirety on this set, the latter even appearing twice on the same disc! Now, arguably these are the two best cartoons of the series, but why repeat them on the DVD set? It's the first time I've ever heard of "reruns" being included on a DVD release, and serves to only further stoke the notion of so much of the series consisting of uneven filler.
Article comments
1 - Sterfish
Great review. I'm really enjoying watching this show again (as one of the people who watched this show when it initially came on). One of the things I'm noticing as I watch it is how much this show influenced and anticipated the type of humor we'd later see on Adult Swim and Family Guy. This is probably why it stayed in reruns on Cartoon Network for years after its run ended.
2 - Film-Book dot Com
This show was funny. I always made time for it when it initially aired. The episode with Deadpan was great as was the episode where all the action is censored and they cut to peaceful animal sequences and nature scenes.
Freakazoid! was uneven but it was also smile-inducing.