Don't Say His Name!: Madman Marz vs Candle Jack

Before we start, I have a couple of things I'd like to get off my chest. Firstly, no, I won't be honoring that stupid meme in this piece. No no no no no. End of.

Secondly, I should be upfront with all you Candle Jack fans right from the start that my opinions on the character aren't exactly the most charitable out there. I don't dislike him, but I do consider him to be one of the most egregiously overplayed cartoon baddies of all time. Case in point: out of a total of twenty-four episodes of Freakazoid! ever made, how many times did Candle Jack appear? I'm talking about times when he was actually a part of the story itself, not when he was briefly glimpsed in title sequences, crowd scenes or whatnot. Only three. And, of those three, on how many occasions did Jack feature as the main villain? Just once. Jack faced off against Freakazoid in the second episode of Season 1 (for its first season, Freakazoid! was mimicking the variety show format which had worked so well for its predecessor Animaniacs, so the Candle Jack story was only a ten-minute segment, not a full-lengthed episode in itself) and later appeared as a side character in a couple of Season 2 episodes, "The Island of Dr Mystico" and "Normadeus" (and his role in both of those episodes was extremely minimal - "The Island of Dr Mystico" even slips in a gag about how his presence there is essentially redundant). Truth is, this guy was barely in the show at all and yet people talk about him as if he was its single biggest draw. I'd also add that Candle Jack's sole starring episode was the only one in which his most infamous character trait - that is, his penchant for abducting those who say his name out loud - was actually raised. The other two times we see Jack, it never comes up. So there's a part of me that can't help but bear a slight grudge against Jack, which might seem more understandable when I explain that my own favourite Freakazoid! character is Lobe, who actually WAS the main villain and appeared in the majority of episodes, yet only gets a fraction of the attention. So the resentment is largely on his behalf. What makes Lobe so awesome? Well, he's voiced by David Warner for one, and that's near impossible to top. No disrespect to Jack's voice actor Jeff Bennett (who, lest we forget, also voiced our good friend Charlton Woodchucks), but when it comes to voices which knock you flat on your back with their ineffable coolness, Warner's has got to be somewhere within the top 5. The man is a bloody legend. And I'll never forget my intense joy when I put it together that Lobe and Dillinger from Tron were the same person.

So why is Candle Jack the one thing that seemingly everyone remembers about Freakazoid!, despite his having such a minuscule role in the series overall? Well, there is that silly meme he inspired, but I wonder if it has more to do with the fact that his starring segment did leave quite a few people feeling genuinely creeped out. The whole premise of Jack as a villain is just a little unsettling, in that hoary old campfire legend kind of way. If Jack gets under your skin, then odds are that it's because he reminds you of some dubious piece of folklore which was recited to you as a kid and wound up costing you an inordinate amount of sleep. And maybe some viewers appreciated the fact that Freakazoid! was able to be freaky in the more sinister sense for once and not just the madcap, unashamedly anarchic sense which characterised the rest of the series ("One of us!" freaky as opposed to "C'est chic!" freaky).

To call Freakazoid! a divisive cartoon would be a terrible understatement. There's that gag in an old episode of South Park about there being fundamentally two types of people in the world, those who like Animaniacs and those who don't, but if you ask me you can discern a heck of a lot more about a person's character on the basis of how great a shining they took to Freakazoid! Although originally conceived as a somewhat darker, more serious cartoon about a superhero who was screwy, hyperactive and enjoyed playing with the villains' heads, Freakazoid! wound up seeing the light of day as one of the most aggressively meta subversions of the superhero genre out there. So committed was it to defying absolutely every last expectation the viewer might have about about action cartoons that the narratives were often themselves just elaborate teases. For the first season in particular, it wasn't so much a superhero series as a collection of bizarre non-sequiturs and extended character digressions with some vaguely superhero-related exploits going on in the backdrop. In effect, Freakazoid! was a celebration of the random, inconsequential stuff it posits would be happening in between the drama and the heroics for your everyday hero - the casual visits to the honey harvest festival with your cop buddies, the time-killing ventriloquist acts with your own hands, the slow off-days in which there was little crime for you to fight, etc (in that regard, I might even be so bold as to call it the Jim Jarmusch of post-modern 90s cartoons). The gag was further accentuated with a series of supporting segments featuring the likes of The Huntsman and Lord Bravery (loving pastiches of Charlton Heston and John Cleese, respectively), other would-be heroes whom we never actually got to see doing anything in the least bit heroic. Some viewers loved this approach, but others found it glib and off-putting (back in 1995 I recall having a conversation with a friend who enjoyed the show's humour but complained that the disjointed format made it feel more akin to watching a clip show than a series proper). To call Freakazoid! an intensely chaotic show would also be putting it mildly. Clearly, it wasn't just Foamy (Freakazoid's one-time canine sidekick) who needed a rabies shot - if any series could be described as the animated embodiment of frothing at the mouth, it's Freakazoid! But hey, that's what made it so grand, right? (Myself, I'm very much in the pro-Freakazoid! camp, although I do prefer the second season, when the series dropped the variety show format and became a bit more story-orientated, so I guess I'm at the more sedate end of the fandom.)

Jack sticks out because he was a rare venture into slightly darker territory for a show which otherwise refused to take itself in the slightest bit seriously. His segment is still fundamentally played for laughs but when all is said and done it's a cartoon about a creep in a burlap sack who snatches children from their beds just for innocently muttering his name out loud and well, that's not exactly a comforting image, is it? Face it, that set-up is only a couple of tweaks away from reading like the premise of a bona fide midnight movie. So what if I were to tell you that there really is a horror film out there about a supernatural being who goes from being placid to horrifyingly destructive at the mere mention of his name? I speak of Madman, a 1982 low-budgeter written and directed by Joe Giannone about an axe-wielding boogeyman who stalks and butchers those who say his name out loud (obviously, he's not quite as genteel as Jack). There were tons of low budget slashers made in the late 70s/early 80s, of course, and Madman isn't one of the better-known examples, so I only recently happened to stumble across this one. Upon reading the synopsis, my immediate thoughts were, "Hey, that sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Candle Jack segment from Freakazoid!" I began to wonder if this forgotten 1980s slasher might indeed have been the direct inspiration for Candle Jack. It's not so far-fetched when you consider that another Freakazoid! segment, "The Cloud", was an elaborate pastiche of cult British horror flick The Crawling Eye (1958), a homage which I somehow doubt was appreciated by a sizeable portion of its target audience. Both Madman and "Candle Jack" take place within the twilight hours at a children's camp, although that's obviously a very well-worn slasher movie cliche, given that everyone was doing it in the age of the Friday the 13th rip-off (inb4 anyone tells me that Friday the 13th was itself a rip-off of Halloween). If you're a horror connoisseur then you'll know what kids were really into back then - teen-orientated slashers offering lurid glimpses of decapitations and chopped up viscera while extolling almost incongruously puritan morals about the dangers of pre-marital sex (whores get tore, and all that). Madman follows the standard slasher plot, in which a bunch of teenagers of questionable intelligence quotients are left to their own devices and threatened by a mysterious menace, whereupon they decide to split up and look for clues and the body pile begins to mount.

Actually, Madman does have an interesting backstory, in that the original script more closely resembled the legend of "Cropsey", a lurid bit of New York folklore about a disfigured human-turned homicidal boogeyman reputed to stalk the wilderness at night, which had been a fixture of many a reluctant young camper's nightmares for decades. The stuff about Madman Marz being a local axe-grinder whose murderous urges are activated at the mere mention of his name came about as the result of some last-minute rewrites in order to downplay similarities with another production, Tony Maylam's The Burning (1981), which also drew heavily from the Cropsey legend (ever seen that gif where a guy gets his fingers severed with gardening shears and blood spurts out of a hilariously fake-looking hand? That's The Burning). Not that I believe it made a great deal of difference to how the bulk of the story plays out.

Madman opens with head counselor Max (Carl Fredericks) regaling his charges with the tale of Madman Marz (Paul Ehlers), an ostensibly ordinary (if highly unpleasant) farmer who, one night, got hold of an axe and inexplicably hacked his family to death before escaping the wrath of a lynch mob. Now he lives on in local lore as a boogeyman who becomes murderously enraged if he hears anyone refer to him by his given moniker (which he perceives as an insult); thus, it is not safe to utter the name "Madman Marz" above anything other than a faint whisper. Inevitably, one of the older and bolder campers, Richie (Jimmy Steele, who's meant to be one of the kids but frankly looks old enough that he could pass for a counselor) spies a chance to show off his bravado, so he stands up straight and bellows the name "Madman Marz!" out into the night. Max attempts to counteract Richie's fate-tempting by assuring Marz that Richie is young and stupid and doesn't know what he's doing, but he gets laughed off as an old coot trying to cover up his preposterous story. But of course, Max is entirely on the money (although perhaps he himself doesn't realise it), for Madman Marz is indeed lurking out there in the shadows and Richie really has brought death and destruction raining down upon them all. Awfully nice going there, Richie.

In the Freakazoid! segment, Candle Jack is an equally ridiculous urban legend told by children at a summer camp that likewise turns out to be terrifyingly real. Legend has it that Jack's powers are limited strictly to those who say his name out loud; doing so will summon him and result in the abduction of the loose-lipped individual. Trouble is that in merely reciting the legend people have a tendency to get themselves inadvertently nabbed by Jack - unlike the Marz legend, there don't seem to be any conditions in which you can safely say his name and get off scott-free. The segment opens much as Madman does, with kids gathered around a campfire looking to have the beejeezers scared out of them, and it isn't long before Jack's name comes up. Freakazoid is present because he's with Steff, who's landed a job as a camp counselor. Steff was Freakazoid's love interest, although the basis for their relationship was a bit iffy in the first season. Originally, Steff was all over Freakazoid but wouldn't give him the time of day in his "true" identity (shy computer nerd Dexter Douglas, who appeared surprisingly rarely throughout the series). It wasn't a case of Freakazoid simply having more confidence around Steff than his alter ego; she flat-out scorned him for who he really was. As a result, there was something very...disingenuous about their chemistry in the earlier episodes. But then, Steff's entire raison d'etre all throughout Season 1 was to get kidnapped and have Freakazoid save her time and time again (this is one reason why I'll always go to bat for Season 2 over its predecessor - I appreciate that they finally took the time to flesh Steff out and make her overall less of a useless character).

The most obvious difference between our two sharp-eared boogeymans is that Madman Marz doesn't limit his bloodlust to those careless or audacious enough to speak his name aloud; that's what's needed to get him going, but once Marz has begun his murderous spree absolutely anyone who crosses paths with him is considered fair game for winding up on the sharp end of his axe. By contrast, so long as you don't say Candle Jack's name, he won't touch you, and the segment gleans a whole lot of mileage out of just how ridiculously easy it is to slip up and end up on his list of viable victims. Also, whereas Marz butchers his victims violently on the spot, Jack whisks his captives away to an unknown fate, and his motive and intentions are kept deliberately fuzzy. "Cos he's a nut" is the only explanation we get when one of the kids inquires why Jack is a serial abductor, and later on when Steff challenges Jack as to what he what he plans to do with them, we get this delightful exchange:

Steff: What are you going to do with us?

Jack: I don't know, I've never gotten so many at once before. Not a very bright group, are you?

Steff: What do you mean by that?

Jack: Oh, nothing.

You know, when I watch the episode and try to forget how appallingly overhyped the character is, I have to admit that I find Jack to be pretty enjoyable on his own terms. I like the menacing, yet somehow incongruously nasally way in which Bennett voices him, I like how few bones are made about his scheme's complete lack of direction, and I like the two-faced sardonicism with which he taunts his captives. It's not enough to excel him to voiced-by-David-Warner levels of coolness, but it does make for an entertaining antagonist in that most brilliantly convention-defying of Freakazoid! traditions. I think it's fair to say that Jack becomes slowly less threatening as the segment goes on (once it's established that he's basically a kook with no real agenda) and there comes a point where the segment loses interest in his machinations altogether. It peters out in typical Freakazoid! fashion - Freakazoid realises (eventually) that Steff and her charges are in trouble and willfully gets himself captured by Jack just so that he can slip in a reference to 1960s Wild West sitcom F-Troop. There follows an extended moment in which Freakazoid breaks the fourth wall and wanders around set in order to reflect on how wonderful it is to be working with each of his co-stars. A Paul Harvey duplicate then hurriedly explains how Freakazoid was ultimately able to vanquish Jack by exploiting a totally out of left field weakness (apparently, Jack has insatiable cravings for pumpkin pie; who knew?)

The "Candle Jack" segment gets an additional boost in zaniness through its presentation in Scream-O-Vision, a gimmick purporting to enhance the audience's viewing pleasure by pre-determining what they are to find scary (in practice, this amounts to an onscreen caption lazily prompting the viewer to scream whenever something vaguely threatening appears). It's a gag that peaks almost immediately when the effects are demonstrated by cutting to a shot of Carol Ohmart shrieking her lungs out in the Vincent Prince classic House on Haunted Hill (1959) - after which, the Scream-O-Vision gimmick is deployed largely during scenes with Freakazoid and Steff kissing (mind you, I get the joke; I think they make a pretty revolting couple too).

Naturally, Madman doesn't boast anything half as glorious as Scream-O-Vision, although if any sequence therein merits it it would be the protracted hot tub scene between counselors TP (Tony Fish) and Betsy (Gaylen Ross), which is by far the most hideous set-piece the film has to offer. It's a sequence that's downright hypnotic in its appalling chintziness. Madman is fairly conventional in terms of its morality; like most slashers of its era, the youths who end up dead tend to be those obsessed with matters of the flesh, although this isn't strictly the case - there is at least one counselor, Dave (Seth Jones), who seems more interested in brandishing a knife and unnerving his fellow counselors with vaguely philosophical musings than he does in getting laid, and ends up no better for it - leaving me unclear as to whether Giannone was purposely honoring the conventions of the day or if he just didn't know how to write teenagers as anything other than rampant sex freaks with the odd raving misfit among them. The real irony of the film (-spoilers-) is that Richie, the loud-mouthed little snot who brought the wrath of Madman Marz upon them all, is ultimately spared his axe; he spends most of the film vacantly wandering the deep dark woods, so by all rights he should be an easy target for the undead farmer, yet he's the one who makes it out safely to carry news of Marz's rampage. In the end (and quite unlike Jack) it seems that Marz was never interested in avenging the impudent utterance of his name so much as perpetuating his own mythology and purging the local land of contamination in the form of those leering teens and their lustful ways. Richie lives because, in his slack-jawed witlessness, he exhibits a kind of purity which allows him to ride out the night unscathed (physically, anyway).

Madman's strongest component (other than the end-credits ditty, which is a stonker) would be our aforementioned head counselor, Max. Fredericks plays him with a strange affability which manages to shine through even when he's spewing the most hilariously wooden dialogue (had it seriously never occurred to this guy that the Madman Marz story could be upsetting to some of the younger campers?). After the opening campfire scene, Max is removed from the story and stays absent for the entirety of Marz's rampage. This is certainly enough to arouse suspicion, although nothing ever comes of it (not that we expect Max and Marz to be one and the same exactly, but there is a scene early on where Max hints to TP of a darker side that never goes anywhere). There are no real twists or surprises regarding Marz himself; he is exactly what Max describes him to be, and it's here that we run into the greatest obstacle to the film's enjoyability - namely, how aggressively straightforward it is. Once Marz's reign of terror has begun, the film quickly erodes into a monotonous chain of events in which character after character opts to venture into the woods alone in search of the increasing collection of persons who've mysteriously disappeared, only to add themselves to that list in the process. Madman dices them one by one, until he runs out of dumb counselors to slaughter and the credits start rolling. As a result, there's not really a whole lot of interest happening once we get past our opening campfire sequence. Marz himself is not an amazingly distinguished antagonist (despite Giannone's last-minute rewrites, he could easily be swapped out with any number of boogeyman from 1980s slashers), although he does maintain a sufficiently spooky air for as long as he remains an indistinct figure lurking in the darkness (there is a particularly effective shot where Dave is alone in woods and we see Marz looming toward him as a murky, hulking silhouette of monstrous proportions - with its intensive focus on Marz's ill-defined girth, it succeeds in making Marz appear genuinely other than human). Whenever Marz does reveal himself (and he does so with irritating frequency), he looks like an albino Bigfoot who's gotten hold of an axe somewhere; sufficiently "other", but altogether less frightening.

Whether or not I'd recommend Madman depends on how much of a completist you are for old-school slashers. If you're a hardcore connoisseur then you'll presumably want to see it no matter what. If you have only casual curiosity then there are certainly better examples of the genre out there. The original Friday the 13th hasn't exactly aged well, but if you're after something schlocky, fun and mindless then you can't go far wrong with it. Despite a promising set-up, Madman is ultimately quite uninventive and lacks a real pay-off (other than the closing credits tune, which serves as a decent enough punchline in its own right). Madman Marz may be the meaner of our two boogeys, but the Freakazoid! segment beats the slasher hands down in terms of demented creativity. For the Madman, the entire "Don't say his name" gimmick is really just a means to an end, a way of getting the ball rolling for its true preoccupations with good old-fashioned carnage. His Freakazoid! counterpart is practically the opposite - Jack is all about pedantically seeking out those who say his name out loud but has no idea just what to do once he's bagged himself a wad of victims. He is in effect a screwball drifting without direction, which isn't an altogether unfitting description of the segment itself. "Candle Jack" lacks a proper ending, opting instead to fizzle out in a whirl of fourth wall-breaking, F-Troop referencing glory. But that was par the course for Freakazoid!

Next time, maybe I'll track down The Crawling Eye and see how it compares to "The Cloud". Which is a really neat Freakazoid! segment and has Lobe in it.