Thursday, January 15, 2009

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.




1 comment:

Stacia said...

Yay, the 2nd season! I love this clip so much. This was one of only two episodes I never got on VHS back when Freakazoid! was still playing on WB and/or Cartoon Network.

I can't see Norm Abrams on PBS nowadays without shouting Normadeus! If I ever see him in real life, I'll probably get arrested.