The first episode of “Freakazoid!” was discovered in incomplete form in 1875, located at the bottom of the lower Euphrates. It was carbon dated to 1800 BCE and recorded on a sandstone VHS tape by the early Babylonians. The sandstone VHS tape was on display at the British Museum until 1927, when it was notoriously stolen by Jacques “The Eel” Mercier, who kept it in an Italian safe for almost 50 years. When his mistress discovered the safe, the “Freakazoid!” The tape was passed to Robert Evans in Hollywood, who thought it was a bootleg porn film. When he finally screened it at a party in 1994, Evans discovered it was a cartoon and passed it on to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg loved the series and served as its executive producer. The show aired on Kids’ WB beginning in 1995. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Freakazoid!,” created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, was a glorious send-up of superhero tropes, an ultra-silly antidote to Timm’s own po-faced spectacle, “Batman: The Animated Series.” It starred Paul Rugg as the titular Freakazoid, a blue-skinned, tights-wearing super-being with a strange sense of humor and a touch of madness. Freakazoid was born when a computer enthusiast named Dexter Douglas (David Kaufman) was accidentally sucked into the Internet, absorbing all the information it contained. He appeared as Freakazoid, a screaming weirdo with an appetite for kitsch.
One of Freakazoid’s closest companions was Sergeant Cosgrove (Ed Asner), a local cop. Cosgrove was taciturn and impassive, and always distracted Freakazoid with casual meals or showings of 1995’s “Congo.” According to a 2023 oral history in Cracked, Asner was not intended to be a major part of the series, but when the showrunners heard his performance, they made Cosgrove a major player. It worked.
Ed Asner was supposed to be a one-time guest star on Freakazoid!
Tom Ruegger, who developed “Freakazoid!”, revealed that the original intention of the Sergeant Cosgrove character was to be a simple one-off joke. In the first episode of the series, he was only going to lazily suggest that he and Freakazoid had a mint together, something that distracted Freakazoid from saving a nearby prom from a hostage-taking supervillain caveman. As Ruegger said: “The character of Cosgrove […] was only going to be in this first episode, “The Dance of Doom.” We wanted a cop to tell Freakazoid that the bad guy, Cave Guy, was doing a “Carrie” at the ball and wreaking havoc. “Obviously that has changed. He continued:
“John McCann’s writing was so funny and idiosyncratic that Cosgrove turned into this guy who was barely there: ‘Hey, uh, Freakazoid, there’s a guy destroying the ball.’ Then Freakazoid said, “Well, should I go stop him?” and Cosgrove said, “Well, I would if I were you.” But it’s me. It’s this cop who’s supposed to be helping, but he’s really not. He just sends the superhero instead.”
Ruegger went on to say that “he wasn’t supposed to be a regular,” but noted that “when you get Ed Asner on a show, you make him a regular.” And that’s what he was. Ed Asner appeared in 20 of the series’ 24 episodes. Asner was of course in play, as he liked to stay prolific. It turns out his performance wasn’t a performance at all. “Freakazoid!” » Star Paul Rugg recalled performing with Asner and how the legendary actor was instructed not to perform at all.
Asner was asked not to act when playing Sergeant Cosgrove
Rugger recalled:
“It was a lot of fun recording with Ed Asner. When he came to play Cosgrove in the very first script, he started reading the lines out loud. He wasn’t acting, he wasn’t doing anything. John McCann heard that and said, ‘That’s it.’ We said, ‘Ed, do you see what you’re doing now?’ Asner understood that too. He never really needed direction.
Not after decades of acting work, certainly not. John P. McCann, incidentally, was one of the main producers of “Freakazoid!” “, as well as a writer and the actor who played Dexter’s father, Douglas Douglas.
Rugg also recalled that Ed Asner was notoriously early on all of the show’s recording sessions. The cast all had a 2 p.m. call, but Asner, being professional, always arrived at 1 p.m. The other actors who arrived early then hung out and shot the breeze with Asner, who was always warm and friendly. Indeed, Asner became such a fun friend that all the actors started showing up early, just so they could hang out for an hour before getting into the recording booth. “Freakazoid!” » sounds like a fun show to do. As has already been written in the pages of /Film, it was too weird to experience. “Freakazoid!” ” was way ahead of its time, beating Adult Swim by several years. It lives on streaming, on DVD, and on sandstone VHS tapes that are thousands of years old.
