Let's talk about The Crawling Eye, or The Trollenberg Terror as it was known in its native UK. Adapted from a 1956 TV serial (which came about as part of the science fiction bandwagon that was kick-started by the BBC's The Quartermass Experiment in 1953), this 1958 horror/science fiction low budgeter was directed by Quentin Lawrence and produced by British B-movie outlet Tempean films, and concerns a mysterious cloud that menaces the fictional mountain town of Trollenberg, Switzerland by engulfing unsuspecting climbers and spitting out their bloodied, decapitated remains. Sounds like ideal pastiche material for one of those zany, postmodern children's cartoons that were big in the early-to-mid-90s? Well, it happened, and you get instant curiosity points if you assumed that any cartoon other than Freakazoid! would have tried its hand at such a demented parody. Frankly, I'm not convinced that even Animaniacs, for all of its audacity and innovation, would have gone that far - oh sure, they pushed boundaries in having a recurring skit based on a certain Martin Scorsese film that I doubt too many of its target audience would have appreciated, but then that was still a very mainstream parody, particularly for its period. The Trollenberg Terror, on the other hand, is enough of an all-round obscurity that I'm not convinced that the majority of adults who happened to catch the Freakazoid! homage didn't come away scratching their heads at what they had just seen. But then Freakazoid! always had a taste for the incongruous and esoteric. Case in point - the series finale, "Normadeus", was structured heavily around a special guest stint from celebrity carpenter Norm Abram. Because I'm sure that there were hundreds of nine-year-olds out there all clamoring with excitement at the prospect of seeing their idol Abram in animated form and battling it out alongside Freakazoid.
As to The Trollenberg Terror, I can only assume that someone in the Freakazoid! production team really, REALLY loved the film and was hoping to net it a few more fans, or they were just intent on picking out the most obscure, arbitrary source material possible to construct an elaborate spoof around, one that was certain to befuddled the wits out of a significant percentile of its viewers. I would not put either scenario past Freakazoid! It was nothing if not a show that loved to troll. As I noted in my piece on Madman Marz and Candle Jack, much your enjoyment of Freakazoid! will likely depend on how comfortable you are with the knowledge that just about every joke is on you the viewer. This was certainly the case throughout the first season, where the series avoided logical plot progression in favour of any weird and non-sequitur digression it could gather in its clasping hands and throw at you. It was like watching a particularly hyperactive cat attempting to navigate its way around a jungle gym and getting side-tracked by every tiny piece of string dangled over its head. In effect, Freakazoid! was a superhero show for people who didn't really like superhero shows and were happy for all the heroics and world-saving to be kept in the backdrop while far kookier stuff took centre-stage. We see this in "The Cloud", a segment from the 10th episode of Season One, where Freakazoid is summoned to the fictional Swiss town of Schnitzel in order to investigate a mysterious cloud that is having a devastating effect on anyone with whom it crosses paths. Only, Freakazoid! being Freakazoid!, the characters are less concerned about the origins and effects of the cloud than they are with the (then) recent developments at Disneyland. More than just an intricate parody of an obscure 1950s B-movie, "The Cloud" was also a heartfelt lament about the closure of the Motor Boat Cruise, among other attractions, at Disneyland, for it recurs an awful lot throughout the script. There can be no denying that someone in the Freakazoid! production team was clearly very deeply affected by that turn of events.
Before I begin, a note on the title - when I referenced the film in my aforementioned Madman/Candle Jack piece, I referred to it solely by its US title The Crawling Eye. This is because I was introduced to the film under that title and it is by habit the title I associate with it. It would probably be fairer to refer to the film by its original title, however, and besides, in researching this film I have stumbled across some fairly passionate arguments on why the US title was a poor substitute - none more so than in this recap of the film on Braineater. Here's an extract, although the actual argument is a fair bit longer:
"The original title -- "The Trollenberg Terror" -- has some good Lovecraftian associations (for example, think of the crawling, hill-climbing monstrosity which is "The Dunwich Horror"), and those associations are appropriate under the circumstances. After all, we are faced with tentacled monstrosities which hint at unnamed cosmic horrors. We don't really know what they want, or how they got here, or where they come from... only that they have crawled down from the "vast skyey void", and are bent on destruction. It's difficult to imagine these creatures piloting a space ship, so perhaps they creep from planet to planet through hidden dimensions, like Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth. Their apparent craving for human heads adds an extra level of ghastliness. It's the sort of half-thought-out story that Lovecraft might have helped a young author to re-write.
But the crass new title is a letdown. At best, it steals the thunder from the monsters' eventual appearance (and to grown-up eyes, their appearance needs all the extra help it can get). At worst, it promises something the movie has no intention of delivering. After all, these things aren't eyes, though they do have a single bulbous eye at the bases of their bodies. They're brains."
(The title of this post stays, however, if only because I think it's more aesthetically pleasing to have two titles with capital "C"s stacked up against one another.)
The opening to "The Cloud" is, without doubt, one of the most exceptionally caring and affectionate pastiches I've ever seen, in that it recreates the opening sequence of The Trollenberg Terror...not exactly shot-for-shot, but it does nevertheless mirror the happenings of the sequence extremely faithfully. The Trollenberg Terror opens with a trio of student mountain climbers attempting to scale their way up Trollenberg, only for one of them to go on ahead of the others and to wander into a mysterious fog-like substance, where he is attacked and thrown off the mountain by an unseen entity. His two companions attempt to hoist his tethered body back up to safety, but one of them panics and lets go of the rope upon noticing that his head has been severed. "The Cloud" goes for an alternative that's both more kid-friendly and more mind-bogglingly inane - instead of losing their heads, the victims are transformed into "clown zombies" (although the zombie part doesn't actually come into play - victims simply end up caked in clown make-up and looking mildly vacant). This, of course, is every bit as horrific as a head with no body in the eyes of the coulrophobic. "The Cloud" throws in a cracking good line from one of the surviving climbers which I sincerely regret wasn't lifted directly from The Trollenberg Terror - namely, "Why did you drop him? His wife will be furious!" "The Cloud" also makes the sequence a lot more family-friendly by having the unfortunate victim land upon a conveniently positioned ledge right after his rope breaks, thus indicating that he, unlike his counterpart in The Trollenberg Terror, survived - although what's grim about the situation in "The Cloud" is that the segment never actually addresses whether or not the clown zombification process can be reversed. Perhaps Unag's wife will still be furious after all.
We then move onto the title sequence for "The Cloud", which is, again, lovingly recreated from that of The Trollenberg Terror, what with the arrows pointing here, there and everywhere. A note for non-fanatics: the credit for Weena Mercatur as "The Hopping Woman" is one of the greatest mysteries of Freakazoid! Whenever they have a drawn-out title sequence we always get this credit and to this day I still have no idea what the origins of this gag are (if indeed it has any discernible origins).
We join Freakazoid on the train to Schnitzel where he encounters Lyle Spanger, a light bulb dealer intending to investigate if the mysterious happenings up in the mountains are in any way connected to faulty light bulbs (spoiler: they're not). This is an analogue to the scene from The Trollenberg Terror in which we're introduced to our principal character, U.N. worker Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker), who's on his way to Trollenberg to investigate the recent strange phenomenon and ends up sharing his carriage with sisters Sarah (Jennifer Jayne) and Anne (Janet Munro), a pair of professional entertainers on their way to perform a mind-reading act in Geneva...only Anne, whose telepathic powers are far freakier and more genuine than her sister's, has a premonition and insists that they too should get off at Trollenberg. At this point, Freakazoid's in Anne's role (although he later switches into Brooks'), so he gets to murmur gibberish in his sleep and sabotage Spanger's newspaper reading.
On arrival at Schnitzel, Freakazoid is greeted by a peculiar man named Hans, who escorts him up to an observatory by cable cart, and it's here that we get into the real, underlying concern of "The Cloud" - namely, the tragic goings-on at Disneyland within the past decade.
Freakazoid: It's just like at Disneyland!
Hans: Not any more, I'm afraid.
Freakazoid: What?
Hans: At Disneyland. Ze sky buckets, they are gone. Kaput. And ze ride where they shrink you down tiny, nicht.
Freakazoid: Oh no...well, at least they still have those little motorboats...
(Hans bites his lower lip anxiously.)
Freakazoid: NOOOO! NOT THE BOATS!
The cable carts are a nod to the favoured method of transportation in The Trollenberg Terror, as is the physical appearance of the observatory in "The Cloud".
Within the observatory, Freakazoid meets a character named Professor Heiny, the segment's equivalent of Terror's Professor Crevett (Warren Mitchell), whom we learn has summoned Freakazoid in response to the cloud, which he fears has the entire fate of mankind hanging in the balance. Ah, but who cares when those motorboats have gone at Disneyland? Mankind has already lost the one thing that mattered to it the most.
Significant stuff does happen while the characters are inside the observatory, still sobbing their hearts out about various Disneyland attractions that have gone the way of the dodo. Through a video monitor, the staff witness Spanger become the cloud's latest victim, when he makes a valiant attempt to face it down with only a pair of light bulbs. The cloud then surrounds the observatory, leaving the occupants trapped inside, only it doesn't prevent Freakazoid's best friend, Cosgrove (voice of Ed Asner, who was also the voice of Carl in Pixar's 2009 film Up) from fulfilling his usual raison d'etre of showing up just to dangle another non-sequitur piece of string above Freakazoid's head, before casually suggesting that he refocus on the plot. Ultimately, Freakazoid decides that he must head out into the mountain and confront the cloud directly, whereupon he discovers that the malevolent force behind it is none other than his archnemesis, Lobe (voice of David Warner). In a deliberately anti-climactic twist, the "cloud" that had the local scientific community baffled was merely the exhaust fumes exuding from Lobe's custom-made vehicle as he scales the mountains looking for unsuspecting victims to zap with his atomic demoleculorizer, causing them to mutate into horrifying clown zombies. At first glance, this seems like a massive departure from the revelations in The Trollenberg Terror, where the menaces lurking within the clouds are a squad of tentacled, cycloptic blob-like aliens intent on taking a big bite out of humanity (remember, it's a low budget 1950s B-movie, so expect the creatures to look characteristically ropy). But as the author of the aforementioned Braineater article points out, the creatures in The Trollenberg Terror are visually closer to crawling brains than to crawling eyes. Lobe's a guy whose head is comprised pretty much entirely of brain. So it's only appropriate that he should be the one to have been hanging around inside the "cloud" this whole time.
Lobe explains the bizarre thinking behind his fiendish scheme to turn people into clown zombies - everyone loves clowns, so logically the fast track to world domination would be to get a bunch of clowns to do your bidding and have them take over on your behalf. People won't realise what the clowns are up to until it's too late. Freakazoid hits back by pointing out the two gaping flaws in Lobe's plan - firstly, coulrophobia is a prevalent thing and secondly, Lobe is conducting his scheme out in the middle of nowhere, where there aren't even that many people around (the last one is a particularly good point, as the segment never does explain why Lobe would pick out a mountain in Switzerland as the prime spot harvesting his clown zombie army). And that's all it takes to break Lobe's confidence in his scheme, putting him in floods of tears and convincing him to switch off the machine and give up. That's right, Freakazoid defeats Lobe by making him cry - although there's a typically Freakazoidian twist in that Freak didn't actually believe in either of those points he just made. He makes it clear once Lobe's out of earshot that he actually considered the scheme to be total genius.
As I mentioned in my earlier Freakazoid!-related post, of all the characters in the series I am fondest of Lobe in particular, and I attribute my mild grudge toward Candle Jack as being born from petty resentment in seeing him repeatedly upstage Lobe in the series' online representation. I once had it explained to me by somebody that the reason why Lobe isn't as celebrated as Candle Jack, despite being featured in a significantly higher number of episodes, is because Lobe never felt like he posed all that much of a threat to Freakazoid, and if there's any one segment that really bears that out, it would be "The Cloud". To which I respond, that was kind of the whole point, was it not? Freakazoid! was intended to be a subversion on the conventions of superhero/action-based cartoons, so we shouldn't be overly surprised that the hero's archnemesis would follow suit. Lobe is an evil genius with crippling self-esteem issues; he's got the brains and the fiendish aspirations but is ultimately too soppy and sensitive to carry them out to the full. Warner, of course, has a fine history of playing memorable cinematic villains (including the main triad of antagonists in Tron and Evil in Time Bandits), and he was fully capable of making the character sound truly malevolent when needed, but he also gave Lobe a whimsical, genial quality which fit in perfectly with the "frenemies" vibe that he and Freakazoid evidently had going. Lobe and Freakazoid were so accustomed to running into each other wherever they went and being the proverbial thorn in one another's side (not to mention, they were both so attuned to the sheer absurdity of their respective existences) that they were able to go about it in a manner that at times seemed full-on familiar. As I've always said, the series was never about the superhero exploits, but a collection of oddballs hanging out together and enjoying one another's company. If you came to Freakazoid! expecting drama and peril, then you were with the wrong program, my friend.
"The Cloud" ends with Freakazoid reuniting with Cosgrove and agreeing to take him up on his earlier offer of attending a go-karting session. As I noted, the segment never addresses what became of Unag and Spanger after they mutated into clown zombies. Was there a way to reverse the process? How did Unag's wife receive the news? Those threads are just left dangling, like so many decapitated climbers off a cliff edge.
And The Trollenberg Terror? I'm as partial to good B-movie mayhem as the next person, but if I'm totally honest, I didn't go much for the film itself. Once we'd gotten past that early sequence that Freakazoid! lampoons with so much care and precision, the rest of it was frankly a snooze, and I found it downright tedious to trawl through the picture in search of additional references (although Hieny calling Spanger a "poor devil" is one). Once the characters in "The Cloud" start getting hung up on all those lost attractions at Disneyland the Trollenberg Terror homage becomes a lot looser anyway, so we might as well touch a little on the segment's genuine preoccupations. "The Cloud" laments the closure of three different rides at Disneyland, California - the Skyway (which closed in 1994, reportedly because of general wear and tear and not because of an incident in which someone threw themselves out of a carriage earlier that year), the Motor Boat Cruise (which closed in 1993, after a short-lived attempt to bring it into the modern world by rebranding it as a Gummi Bears ride) and Adventure Tru Inner Space (which closed in 1985, to be replaced by the Star Tours attraction), details of which can be seen in the video below. According to this article on Yesterland, Walt Disney always envisioned the Skyway as being the "transportation system of the future" and hoped to see them installed in shopping malls with large parking lots. I think there were only two possible ways in which the world we live in would come to resemble Disneyland, and somehow we ended up with the naff version.
Oh, and Professor Hieny also makes reference to Red Skelton, an American comedian who later in life achieved additional fame for his artwork of clowns. Assuming you are not coulrophobic you can look some of them up here.
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