First season
The popular comic of the trio of stoners has become a delirious animated series for adults that can already be seen in ‘streaming’ for these payments. From the 60s they jump to the present, traveling back in time in an insane sitcom with a cat included
At the end of last year, the long-awaited adaptation of the comic ‘The Freak Brothers’ finally came to light, whose cult cartoons, conceived by the ineffable Gilbert Shelton, reflected the “hippies” and the counterculture of the 60s and 70s in the US The cartoon series for adults can be seen on HBO Max for a few days, with some changes compared to the original material – obviously, it is not so “anti-system” -. The leading skull trio makes a leap in time, nothing more and nothing less than half a century, from San Francisco from 1969 to the year 2020, after smoking a magical strain, well loaded with marijuana, that takes them to our days. The confrontation with new technologies and the current lifestyle is inevitable, giving rise to bizarre situations that yield to absurd humor and scatology, with some frankly successful dreamlike moments. When the three crazy people hit the trip, locked in the basement of their house, they do not imagine that they are going to wake up in a world that is far removed from their experiences. 50 years later, everything has changed, not necessarily for the better.
The jump to the audiovisual medium of the mythical Freak Brothers takes time from office to office, but until now none of the projects had managed to come to fruition. The cartoon format has finally embraced the tribulations of this gang of reckless, reckless stoners, who roam the planet with the sole purpose of not giving a stick to the water and being as stoned as possible, trying all kinds of drugs here and there. Once its strange time travel to our days is accepted, a ruse that may surprise, from the outset, the followers of the original comics, the series seems like a hilarious and iconoclastic pastime that follows in the wake, bridging the gap, of other animated productions such as ‘King of the Hill’, ‘Silicon Valley’, ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’, ‘The Simpsons’ or ‘Rick and Morty’. Fortunately, today the format allows for authentic nonsense to the delight of the viewer without prejudice. There are subjects that, in other circumstances, and in real image, would not have so much space. The first season consists of eight episodes, around 22 minutes long each, which are seen with gibberish. The hallucinogenic sequences that portray the highs of the three jerks are especially enjoyable, as endearing as they are desperate, immersed in a particular reality of garish colors that is visually distorted to unsuspected limits.
The father of the creatures
Ediciones La Cúpula, an example of survival within the purest underground, is in charge of publishing the starting material in our country. At the end of the 60s, in the midst of alternative cultural effervescence, his adventures and misadventures arose from the art of the ingenious Gilbert Shelton, without a doubt number two in the history of classic underground comics, behind only the undisputed talent of the legendary Robert Crumb. This cartoonist with the appearance of an endearing, incombustible hippie, always surrounded by beer cans when he signs copies like I possess in comic halls like the one in Barcelona, was born on May 31, 1940 in Dallas and graduated in Letters, although he always showed a sick interest for humorous drawing. The gossips, or the good ones, depending on how you look at it, say that just when he was beginning to build a reputation in the alternative publication circuit, he suffered an attack of inspiration that gave rise to his most popular characters, the trio in question, adored by hundreds of readers throughout the entire interplanetary geography.
A still from ‘The Freak Brothers’.
His illumination was due to a binge on celluloid that expanded his spirit as frames starring the eternal Marx Brothers and the comics The Three Stooges, inspiration for crazed film directors such as Sam Raimi, were beaten in his mind. Once in front of the blank page, armed with his pen, the craziest brothers in the history of comics emerged, three irredeemably furry, addicted to marijuana, whose only obsession in life is to do nothing. Lazy to death, the tribulations of the Freak Brothers kicked off in 1967 in ‘Rag’ magazine, stirring the consciences of the young people of the time until they became a popular icon. At that time, the restless Shelton formed, together with Fred Todd and Don Baumgart, the alternative publisher Rip Off Press, a springboard in the US for authors such as Max, Martí or Vuillemin. He is also responsible for the Not Quite Dead comics, a grotesque musical group with little future co-created with the French Pic, and the adventures of Fat Freddy’s Cat, a pussycat smarter than his human friends who also appears in the series, with enough prominence, although with an obvious change of sex.
The original version features an eye-catching cast of voice-over artists, including Woody Harrelson, John Goodman, Tiffany Haddish and Pete Davidson. Black humor, surrealism and outbursts in a grotesque sitcom that deserves your attention. It can be blamed for more satire on today’s society, through the eyes of the three unpresentables who pass from the 20th to the 21st century, but something has to be left for the following sessions.
‘The Freak Brothers’ is available on HBO Max.
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