Riding on the success of Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, Steven Spielberg and his Amblin Entertainment commissioned much of the same people working on those shows to come up with a new idea for a cartoon. The result was Freakazoid! A series that's so off-the-cuff and off-the-wall that its scatterbrained structure and scripts bounce off the walls more than a Ritalin-needing pre-schooler might. And, I don't know about you, but I'm all for bizarre jokes and amusing pop culture references, which is why it's too bad this first season of the show doesn't have enough focus to keep the ball rolling through all fourteen of the episodes included here.

It has to say something when the main focus of your show is one of the weakest characters. There's just something about the spiky haired, always sarcastic title hero that didn't endear him to me. As voiced by series writer Paul Rugg, this "nerd turned superhero by the internets", Freakazoid is your typical tight-wearing do-gooder who also happens to enjoy a good burst of gaseous emissions and mock flying with his arms out in front of him while fighting baddies such as the boogeyman-like Candle Jack (an episode that is oddly repeated twice during this first season) and the giant-brained, The Lobe.

Amongst all this irreverent comic book-ish mumbo jumbo are a stable of supporting characters and sketches including various "station break" winks at the viewer, the pretty awesome satirical take on Johnny Quest called 'Toby Danger', the Stephen Furst (Animal House) voiced 'Fanboy', the Green Arrow take-off 'The Huntsman', the brush-helmeted British hero 'Lord Bravery', and even appearances by some of the Animaniacs. The makers of Freakazoid! have certainly tried their best to add some variety to the show and despite a lot of the side cartoons (and their main characters) being almost as passable as their main character, a few of them actually work okay. I can't admit to thinking the 'Lord Bravery' skits are brilliantly funny, but they do offer some mild chuckles and gives us a chance to hear Jeff Bennett doing his best imitation of the legendary John Cleese (Monty Python).

On the animation front, this doesn't look too bad staying much within the same style as the aforementioned shows Spielberg put his name in front of. The colours are bright, the characters are "just so" outrageous, and it looks like enough money was pumped into the series that it even looks better than such modern cartoons as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward and the new, kiddie Anime-looking Transformers series.

There's a reason this is the lesser known of Amblin's cartoon output in the 90's, it's just not that good. Every episode seems to suffer from a short attention span as a lot of skits are cut too short for their pay-offs to work and while an okay amount of the jokes here did give me a guffaw or two, I generally found the series to grow more tiresome as the season wore on. I'll admit that it was nice they decided to start putting Freakazoid's human alter ego, Dexter, about six episodes in, but I really wish that they'd stuck to their guns and delivered the slightly more serious superhero cartoon they intended rather than have Spielberg muck things up by demanding more comedy.

Still, fans of animated shows shouldn't completely ignore Freakazoid! if only for the surprising amount of talent involved with it. Paul Dini, who was one of the main people responsible for delivering a good Batman cartoon with The Animated Series, helped come up with the concept and wrote a few 'toons and he's surrounded by many of the writers (Rugg, Alan Burnett, John P. McCann) who contributed to Spielberg's earlier cartoon fare. In fact, most of them are still working on various animated shows.

If you remember this show fondly from when you were younger (it seems a good number of people do), you'll probably want to pick this up, but for people like myself who've never seen the show going in, you might want to go the safer route and rent it first. It's not on the level of Amblin's other shows, so use your enjoyment of them as a gauge. (Chris Hartley, 8/3/08)

Voices: Paul Rugg, Edward Asner, David Kaufman, Joe Leahy.

Picture Ratio: Full Frame.

Picture Quality: As with a lot of animated fare from the 90's, Freakazoid! doesn't look great on disc. There's a lot of specking scattered throughout the episodes and it has the soft edges crop up occassionally, that's not to say this looks terrible, it just is a pretty so-so transfer that looks about the same as The Animaniacs discs (which is disappointing).

Extras: We get trailers for other Warner animated DVD (as well as the upcoming Lego Batman video game), a collection of pointless promos they ran for the show before it premiered, a "making of" featurette that somewhat explains the show's A.D.D. problems, and commentary on three episodes by series writers Rugg, Tom McCann, and Tom Ruegger.

It's not a ton of extras but what's here was generally agreeable and about on par with Warner's other Amblin cartoon releases.