How Ed Asner Changed The Cult-Hit Steven Spielberg Series Freakazoid!

The first episode of "Freakazoid!" was discovered in an incomplete form in 1875, located at the bottom of the lower Euphrates. It was carbon-dated to about 1800 BCE, carved onto a sandstone VHS cassette by the early Babylonians. The sandstone VHS cassette was on display in the British Museum until 1927, when it was notoriously stolen by Jacques "The Eel" Mercier, who kept it in an Italian safe for the better part of 50 years. When his mistress uncovered the safe, the "Freakazoid!" cassette was passed to Robert Evans in Hollywood, who thought it was a contraband porno movie. When he finally screened it at a party in 1994, Evans found it was a cartoon show, and passed it to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg loved the series and served as its executive producer. The show ran 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 show, "Batman: The Animated Series." It starred Paul Rugg as the titular Freakazoid, a tights-wearing, blue-skinned super-being with a weird sense of humor and a touch of madness. Freakazoid was born when a computer nerd named Dexter Douglas (David Kaufman) was accidentally sucked into the internet, absorbing all the information therein. He emerged 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 stone-faced, and always distracted Freakazoid with casual meals or screenings of 1995's "Congo." According to a 2023 oral history in Cracked, Asner wasn't meant to be a major part of the series, but when the showrunners heard his performance, they turned Cosgrove into a major player. It worked. 

Tom Ruegger, who developed "Freakazoid!," revealed that the original intention for the Sergeant Cosgrove character was to be a mere one-off joke. In the show's first episode, he was only going to lazily suggest that he and Freakazoid have a mint together, something that distracts Freakazoid from rescuing a nearby prom from a hostage-taking supervillain caveman. As Ruegger said, "The character of Cosgrove [...] was only going to be in that first episode, 'The Dance of Doom.' We wanted to have a cop tell Freakazoid that the villain, Cave Guy, was doing a 'Carrie' at the prom and creating havoc." Obviously, that 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 wrecking the prom.' Then Freakazoid says, 'Gee, should I go stop him?' and Cosgrove says, 'Well, I would if I were you. But that's me.' He's this cop who's supposed to be helping, but he's really not. He just sends the superhero instead."

Ruegger continued by saying that "He wasn't supposed to be a regular," but noted that "when you get Ed Asner in a show, you make him a regular." And so he was. Ed Asner appeared in 20 of the show's 24 episodes. Asner was game, of course, as he liked to remain prolific. As it happens, his performance wasn't a performance at all. "Freakazoid!" star Paul Rugg recalled acting with Asner and how the legendary actor was given the direction to essentially not perform whatsoever. 

Rugger recalled: 

"Ed Asner was a lot of fun to record with. When he came in to do Cosgrove in the very first script, he began reading the lines aloud to himself. He wasn't acting; he wasn't doing anything. John McCann heard that and said, 'That's it right there.' We said, 'Ed, you see what you're doing now?' He replied, 'I'm just reading it,' and we said, 'There's Cosgrove.' We then began writing in that very matter-of-fact way. Asner understood it, too. He never really needed direction." 

Not after decades of acting work, certainly not. John P. McCann, incidentally, was one of the central 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 to all the show's recording sessions. Actors all had a call time at 2 p.m., but Asner, being professional, always turned up at 1 p.m. Other actors who happened to arrive early would then hang out and shoot the breeze with Asner, who was always warm and friendly. Indeed, Asner became such a fun friend that all the actors began to show up early, just so they could hang out for an hour before getting into the recording booth. "Freakazoid!" sounds like a fun show to make. As has been written in the pages of /Film before, though, it was too weird to live. "Freakazoid!" was well ahead of its time, beating Adult Swim to the punch by several years. It lives on streaming, on DVDs, and on sandstone VHS cassettes that are thousands of years old.