Odd.

I'd heard, as had other people, that there were interviews done for the Tiny Toons DVDs that weren't used on the first set -- yet the back of the box doesn't list any special features. Either they're saving them for a future volume (if any), or Warners' legal department got a hold of them, or maybe the company just thinks that in tough economic times the smart thing to do is to spend money on video interviews and then not use them.

Oh, well, at least the second volume of Freakazoid! will have interviews (people interviewed for this volume included Rugg, McCann, Ruegger, announcer Joe Leahy and producer/director Rich Arons; hopefully they'll all turn up in the final edit). Never thought that F! would wind up getting the best DVD treatment, special-feature-wise, of any of the Spielberg cartoons, but I guess it's the cult flops that often get the most care taken with them in DVD releases. (I consider myself a part of that cult, of course.)

I'm Holding Norm Abram Above My Head!

The second and final season of Freakazoid! will finally get a DVD release on April 21, on the same day as the second half of Tiny Toons season 1. (Let's hope the rest of Tiny Toons doesn't meet the same fate as the rest of Animaniacs; as I've said many times, my favorite episodes of Tiny Toons are from the later seasons on Fox.) That means we'll finally get to have a DVD version of scenes like this:



The late Ricardo Montalban was a guest star on both seasons of Freakazoid! as the Khan-like villain Guitierrez. Paul Rugg, writer and voice of Freakazoid, shares his memories of how Montalban got cast and how much fun he was to work with. Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt, followed by the "bloopers" scene he describes.

Perhaps my fondest memory was when he had to come and do addition dialogue for the episode HERO BOY. For reasons we couldn't figure out...the episode came up about 3 minutes short. So, John and I devised a solution in which Guitierrez would show Freakazoid his favorite bloopers. Our editor found some of the dumbest, old, live action black&white footage I've ever seen. We cut it together and I wrote some dialogue to cover the footage. When Ricardo arrived he had neither seen the footage nor his dialogue. I explained the setup to him. "Guitierrez is crazy about these bloopers and he really thinks they are funny and he really wants to show them to Freakazoid and..."

"Ahhh, yes. I see. I see. Yes. Let's do it." Ricardo and I went into the booth. We ran the footage and he made me laugh so much that I didn't do my lines. The sound guys were rolling. Andrea was in hysterics. Bruce Timm popped his head into the room and started laughing.