Freakazoid!
I recently got around to doing something I've been meaning to do for a heck of a long time - that is, importing in Season 1 of
Freakazoid! and a couple of seasons of
Animaniacs. Still waiting on the
Animaniacs DVDs, but
Freakazoid! arrived yesterday (and even better, in spite of being advertised as Region 1, they turned out to be Region 0, meaning I can play them on any DVD player around here, not just the one on my computer). Unlike
Animaniacs, which has enjoyed repeats on the Boomerang Channel in recent years, I haven't seen any episodes of
Freakazoid! in their entirety since they were first broadcast in the mid-90s - just the odd clip or segment over on Youtube - so it's been really wonderful to be able to catch up with all those childhood memories at long last.
I've always had fond memories of the Lord Bravery segments (he's my favourite character, along with The Lobe, who I think is absolutely adorable), and of course the Hunstman ("Darn the luck, darn!"), though there's also an awful lot of great stuff in there which I seem to have completely forgotten - not least of which is the affectionate
Johnny Quest parody,
Toby Danger (oh god - that swimming pool joke!
). I really regret that the concept was restricted only to a one-off segment - unlike
Gargoyles send-up
Lawn Gnomes, which was very much a "punchline"-based story, and probably better suited to a single instalment anyhow. As I recall, in Season 2 they dropped the variety show format altogether, opting instead to focus more extensively upon Freakazoid's adventures - the results of which were still wickedly funny, but I did have to miss a lot of those supporting faces.
In brief, a truly inspired and hilarious show, and yet one with so esoteric a fanbase that for a long time I'd seriously doubted it would ever see the light of day on DVD at all. How wonderful it was to be proven wrong about that...and now, to finally have a copy of my very own.