Trivia / Freakazoid!

• Acting for Two:
  • Tress MacNeille voices Debbie Douglas, the Cobra Queen and some one-off characters.
  • Frank Welker voices Mr. Chubbikins, Foamy the Freakadog as well as some minor characters.
• Creator Backlash: Freakazoid's "low bridge" chant in Dance of Doom was hastily adlibbed by actor/writer Paul Rugg and was only meant as a place-holder until he and the rest of the crew could think of something better. When it ended up being in the finished episode, he was not pleased, to say the least. Not helping is the fact that he's constantly asked to do it at conventions (although he usually abides).
• Descended Creator:
  • As one of the show's producers and writers, Paul Rugg voices Freakazoid. It was more of a fluke, as no suitable actor had been found and Rugg was just trying to provide an example of how the voice should sound. However, Steven Spielberg was impressed with the performance, so Rugg inadvertently got the role.
  • Writer/producer John P. McCann as Dexter's dad, Douglas Douglas.
• Directed by Cast Member: The French dub was directed by Gilbert Lévy, who also voiced both Cosgrove and Douglas Douglas.
• Executive Meddling:
  • As stated elsewhere, the series was originally meant to be a more straightforward superhero show with a comedic bent. Steven Spielberg asked that it be retooled into a full-blown comedy, which led to Bruce Timm and Paul Dini bowing out because they thought they couldn't do justice to Spielberg's request.
  • Mo-ron was hastily renamed as "Bo-ron" in his second appearance because studio executives feared that someone would get offended (which the show has some fun with, as Lord Bravery calls him "Mo-ron, or Bo-ron, or whatever.").
• Meaningful Release Date: "Huggbees", the Crossover episode on Teen Titans Go!, premiered on November 14th, 2020; just a little over 2 months after Freakazoid!’s 25th anniversary, and the day before Ed Asner’s 91st Birthday.
• Playing Against Type: Up to that point, David Warner was primarily known for playing serious characters, but he completely let loose and played the Lobe with a manic energy. On the DVD commentaries, the production crew noted that this was one of the few straight comedic roles Warner had taken in a decades-long career (the other is on the short-lived series Toonsylvania).
• Referenced by...:
  • Pinky and the Brain: In the episode "Ambulatory Abe", in the establishing shots of Washington, D.C., Pinky mentions that D.C. is also the home of Freakazoid, much to the Brain's ire.
  • Freakazoid makes a brief cameo in the Animaniacs episode "This Pun for Hire", where he asks Dot Warner which way to his set, and does some of his trademark randomness. He also appears waiting in line at the beginning of "The Big Wrap Party Tonight".
  • The Simpsons episode "Mommie Beerest" has Moe refer to Mr. Boswell by the name "Freakazoid".
  • The Teen Titans Go! episode "Huggbees" sees the characters teaming up with Freakazoid to stop The Lobe.
• Role Reprise: In the German dub, Frank Schaff, Santiago Ziesmer and Ranja Bonalana reprised their roles as the Warner Siblings in their short appearances, and Jan Spitzer returned as Brain.
• Screwed by the Network: The show suffered from this due to being popular with attracting the wrong demographics — at least, in the eyes of the network executives. As noted in the first episode's audio commentary:
  Paul Rugg: The WB. Can we talk about how supportive they were? No.
  • The executives didn't like how the ratings skewed much higher than they intended. It ultimately ended after two seasons when a regime change in studio management decided to clear just about everything out of their Saturday-Morning Cartoon lineup. To justify this, they instituted an ad gimmick called "Big Kids Come First", where all the adult-skewing cartoons were aired earlier than the ones skewing for younger kids, making sure that nobody watched anything and ensuring that ratings dropped low enough to justify a massive overhaul. Earthworm Jim and Road Rovers were also canned this way.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: For "The Chip", Paul Rugg had written Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA and inventor of the film ratings system, as the narrator; they were surprised when Steven Spielberg loved the whole bit, and asked them to write more lines for Valenti; being close friends with Valenti himself meant Spielberg brought him in to voice himself.
• Technology Marches On:
  • The specifications for the Pinnacle Chip that turns Dexter into Freakazoid seem downright quaint in the 21st century as computer components with exponentially powerful performance are now cheaply available.
  • An interesting case with the VR game depicted in "Virtual Freak". VR came and went in the 1990's and was considered a passing fad due to enormous amounts of equipment and money required, not to mention Nintendo's Virtual Boy being an unmitigated disaster. Then came the New Tens and the resurgence of VR with new arcades popping up featuring set-ups almost identical to the one depicted in a now-twenty-year-old cartoon show.
• Throw It In!:
  • See that Moment of Awesome from the first episode? Originally Freakazoid was just supposed to say "No!", but Paul Rugg improvised the rant. According to the DVD commentary, it apparently went on for over 10 minutes, becoming increasingly disjointed and profane. It got cut off before the swearing started.
  • Rugg actually improvised a lot of his lines in the show in general, including the part in the first episode where he sings off-key. You can hear him trying hard not to laugh at the ridiculousness of his own lines.
  • Paul Rugg noted that many lines that ended up in the final cuts were actually goofy warm ups that he was doing to get into character and that he had no idea that what he was doing was being recorded or that they'd even be used in the show.
  • Ed Asner was brought in to voice Cosgrove when he was just a minor character. The crew noticed him mumbling his lines and they said, "That! We want that!"
• Troubled Production: Bruce Timm bowed out early due to the change from a straight superhero show to a more comedic show. When Tom Ruegger and Paul Rugg took over, they were given very little time to iron out the concept and produce some scripts (less than nine months). Paul Rugg getting cast as Freakazoid himself was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Spielberg himself. A lot of Rugg's dialogue in the "Dance of Doom" pilot was just made up on the spot. The team called it, "The closest you could get to improv in animation."
  Paul Rugg: I remember thinking, "We are so dead..."
• Two Voices, One Character: David Kaufman voices Dexter Douglas and Paul Rugg voices his superhero identity, Freakazoid.
• Vindicated by Reruns: This show largely flew under the radar back when it was on Kids' WB!, thanks to the network death-slotting the show in inaccessible time slots. It wasn't until the show began airing on Cartoon Network that the show gained the cult following it has today.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original idea was for the series to be a fairly straightforward superhero show with comedic overtones (The Joker as a good guy) with Bruce Timm in charge. Steven Spielberg, however, asked for a full-blown comedy. Timm bowed out, as he honestly thought he wouldn't do a full-blown comedy concept justice. This is perhaps a textbook example of Executive Meddling improving a show. (The New Batman Adventures episode "Beware the Creeper" is a glimpse of how Timm and Paul Dini would have done Freakazoid!)
  • The series always skewed towards an older audience and there was serious consideration towards just putting it in prime-time (as was done with Pinky and the Brain). This is part of the reason why the second season largely had half-hour episodes instead of Three Shorts.
  • The commentary for the first episode implied that Valerie was intended to be a recurring character, to be used in a sort of Betty and Veronica type thing between her, Dexter and Steff^note  her appearance near Steff in the opening credits may lend credence to this theory. But of course, she never appeared after "Dance of Doom" so it all turned out to be a moot point.
  • A second Toby Danger short was written, but it was dropped due to the aforementioned switch from segmented shows to half-hour episodes. It should be noted that the episode was originally intended to be a segment on Animaniacs and would've began with a Framing Device of Wakko watching the show, but was instead put in to this series to fill space for one episode.
  • The show and Pinky and the Brain were slated to air on The Hub in late 2014, but the idea was abandoned when said channel became Discovery Family.
  • Ed Asner originally voiced Cosgrove with a lot of energy and variation in his lines. When the producers heard him rehearsing in more of a monotone, they asked for a take without any energy and the barest variation. That became the default for the character throughout the show.

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