Check it out -- Freakazoid is returning to broadcast television for the first time since it originally ran! You can catch it Saturday nights at 12:30 AM Eastern on MeTV Toons. That's quite a jolt, Freak!
To this day I remain surprised at how many millions of people are AWARE THIS SHOW EXISTS because that sure wasn't the case when I was originally watching it. It was this tiny thing that ran Sunday mornings on our upstart WB affiliate that only me and my cousins knew about. We'd quote from it all the time whenever we saw each other, and whenever I wasn't around them, I would still quote it because I lacked the social awareness to know I looked insane.
I was also, apparently, the only person who deliberately set out to tape each episode on VHS. I've crossed paths with a lot of tape-traders and archivists now and the only collections of Freakazoid in its original airings are pretty much mine. I didn't tape every episode with commercials, but some I did. What follows are the FULL EXPERIENCES from the original airdates for episodes 1, 3 and 6. Now as Freakazoid would probably say, where's my thank-you smooch?
| The bumpers for Kids WB's first two
seasons all had actors from their prime-time programs on
them. The two you'll see here didn't stay in rotation
long, as they featured Harland Williams, the focus of the
new WB sitcom Simon. Critics weren't kind to the
majority of offerings within The WB's first year, with
the exception of Simon -- that one, they liked.
It didn't help the show's chances though. That's Warner Bros was the transplanted version of Merrie Melodies, the compilation of Looney Tunes shorts that fitrst ran in syndication and then on Fox Kids. Why they called it this weird name when it first moved to The WB I don't know, but they must have regretted it, because the following year the name was Bugs 'n Daffy -- far more recognizable by parents as to what you're getting. |
| I find it bizarre there were so many
ads for tractors during Kids WB's premiere day. (It would
not stay this way.) My guess is that whatever aired in
those time slots the week before targeted a rural
audience, and these were leftovers from a block of time
the tractor company bought. The promo for the "Looney Tapes" contest is still there by Week 3's batch of ads, but I don't think anything ever came of it. I watched this block every week for months, and a winner for the Looney Tapes contest was never announced. They might have received no submissions at all. You have to realize this entire channel was brand-new. |
| You don't see many contests from toy
companies where the prize is a car -- I mean a REAL car,
as opposed to the tiny, swallowable Micro Machines the
contest was attached to. The announcer has a lot of legal
rules to get through in a short period of time. Maybe
they shouldn't have fired John Moschitta. The Big Green was one of the last "kid sports movies" of the 90s -- we got a ton of them, up until the point we didn't. One of the kids from The Sandlot is the star of this one. |
| Princess Wishing Star is just a Magic
8-Ball reimagined as a plastic toddler. It would have
been pretty interesting if the girl asking the doll if
she will be famous...actually grew up to be famous. A lot
of celebrities started out in ads like this. That's
probably what the people making the ad were hoping for --
would've been neat, but oh well. I like how the announcer of these Lego Mania ads really GETS INTO IT. In all three ads that will appear here, he starts out low-key and then works himself up into a frenzy. The man knows how to sell a Lego set. Eventually, the Sky Dancers were pulled off the market because they were launchng themselves into kids' faces. They frequently made lists of "Top 10 Most Dangerous Toys" but it took a while for Galoob to admit anything was wrong. They bought a Sky Dancer Macy's balloon -- they had a lot invested in this. |
| This next break is mostly repeats of ads from previous breaks, so I'll just point out how cringeworthy Harland Williams' ad-libs are in these bumpers. "Stick around for more Kids WB, it's a stick of gum, get it? FREAKY LIIIARRRRRRR???" He needed the writers from his show! |
| My apologies for the over-the-air
reception in this one. My antenna wasn't always reliable. But the
"Crossfire" ad is a classic no matter what it
looks like. Yes, Pinky and the Brain aired in prime time for its first season, in addition to its spot on Kids WB. It was creamed in the ratings by 60 Minutes, a fact the show itself would joke about. We've reached the "Smud" portion of Nickelodeon's venture into gooey inedible consumer products. Gak was a huge hit, and Floam didn't do that bad, but I guess Smud was the saturation point. It was Nick's "improvement" on clay by making a substance they claimed would never dry out. Now's the time to find out if they were right. If you've got some Smud, how's it holding up thirty years later -- is it dry yet? |
| So many robot babies required
batteries by this point that it was a unique selling
point for your doll to function without one.
Going oldschool seems to have worked for Baby Born. This
doll stayed on the market for decades after the
bot-babies left. "Crazy Careers" was Kids WB's first interstitial segment. Not all the careers they profiled were truly crazy -- they interviewed a dentist once. Eating Kix in the car is definitely not Mother Approved. |
| Well, it goes without saying -- this station's Halloween offerings were kind of sad. But like I said before, the operation was new. They'd only been in business a year -- hardly enough time to wrestle some truly hair-raising material away from the other stations. |
Freakazoid didn't truly find its audience until the repeats were dumped to Cartoon Network. I'm told it did well enough there that CN considered ordering a third season, but the cost of all that full amimation and orchestral sound was too much for their budget at the time. Freakazoid and friends eventually did return for a reunion of sorts on CN -- in the form of a Teen Titans Go episode, giving Ed Asner and David Warner the chance to reprise their characters while they were still alive.