Totally Freaky

The first season of Freakazoid!, which will be released sometime this summer, will have interviews (already recorded) and also three audio commentaries (still to be recorded). John McCann, one of the writer-producers, calls the interviews "a whopping bit of fun."

The rationale behind releasing only the first season is that it will be a cheaper-priced (two-disc) set and hopefully sell better than a four-disc set of the complete series. I just hope it sells well enough for a set of the second (and only other) season. The two short seasons are actually kind of different in approach, because season 1 was mostly random shorts and interstitials and included a number of shorts with non-Freakazoid characters. (Including, of course, "Toby Danger," which Tom Minton originally wrote for Animaniacs and which many people consider the best thing ever produced by the '90s WB animation department.) The second season was re-formatted to be mostly full-length half-hour stories, and had a little more of a story/character spine mixed in with the craziness. At the time I was disappointed with the change in format; now I think it worked well -- even a show as nutty as this works better when there's some semblance of a story -- but there's hilarious stuff in all 24 episodes and I don't want to settle for just the first batch.

I don't know if any directors/animators will be interviewed for this set; they should be, but probably not. (Mitch Schauer was the animation producer for the first season, Rich Arons for the second.) On the other hand, as I've mentioned in another post, the first season of Freakazoid! had the odd distinction of being mostly directed by people who didn't want to be there: the directing staff -- including prolific Batman/Superman director Dan Riba, who was caricatured at least twice on F! -- was largely assembled from directors or board artists from Batman, when it was still being planned as a comic action-adventure show from Bruce Timm; when the show was revamped into a wacky comedy, and Timm withdrew from the project, the directors had to keep doing the show, and Ronnie Del Carmen was openly shocked when he wound up getting an Emmy for it. A strange, strange show with a strange gestation -- I loved it, and I hope enough people will agree to make all the episodes some out.

One thing that may help it is that the second episode includes the cartoon "Candle Jack," which people will recognize as the source of the online Candle Jack meme, where people say the name and then they suddenl