The Weird MTV Sketch Comedy Series That Alex Winter Made Before Freaked

Alex Winter’s and Tom Stern’s bizonkers comedy film “Freaked” opened to almost no fanfare in October of 1993. Made for a budget of $12 million, it earned a paltry $29,000 at the box office before slipping into the deepest crevices of obscurity, seemingly forever. Luckily, the film was eventually rediscovered by enterprising weirdoes on VHS, and its cult began to grow. By the late 2000s, “Freaked” had been salvaged, making regular appearances on the midnight movie circuit. These days, it is deeply beloved by about as wide an audience as it will ever attract. It was never going to be mainstream; it’s too wild and weird for that. And, frankly, thank the Lord. 

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“Freaked” is about a former child star named Ricky Coogan (Winter) who takes a lucrative financial deal to promote an environmentally dangerous fertilizer in the Central American nation of Santa Flan. While there, he, his friend Ernie (Michael Stoyanov), and a bitter protestor named Julie (Megan Ward) discover an off-the-beaten-path freak show run by the carnivalesque Elijah C. Skuggs (noted weirdo Randy Quaid). It turns out, though, that Skuggs has been using the aforementioned fertilizer to bodily mutate curious guests so that he can include them in his show. The makeup in “Freaked” is astonishing by any measure, featuring at least 13 different “creature” characters. Winter becomes a bifurcated beast boy, his left side turned into a gremlin. 

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“Freaked” didn’t come from nowhere. Those watching MTV in the early 1990s might have seen it coming. The film’s origins can be seen in an obscure, angry, aggressively violent sketch comedy show that Winter and Stern created, wrote, and directed in 1991. The show has a lot of the same cast members as “Freaked,” and even carried over at least one common character. This show also sported a similarly unhinged sense of humor. Only the most adventurous among us may recall the series: MTV’s “The Idiot Box.”

Winter, of course, had achieved a notable amount of fame after starring in the sci-fi slacker comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1989, which gave him, Stern, and a mutual friend named Tim Burns the license to pitch “The Idiot Box” to MTV. “The Idiot Box” wasn’t MTV’s first sketch comedy show, but it was pretty darn close. It was, however, the network’s weirdest yet, tapping into the station’s penchant for deconstructionist anarchy. 

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There was no unifying premise to “The Idiot Box” other than to murder comedy, sometimes literally. Alex Winter appeared on camera to introduce each episode, and was frequently attacked and/or killed in the middle of his intros. In the show’s first episode, he is seen in the trunk of a car, smiling and promising a night of crazy comedy as a trio of gangsters stab him repeatedly. In another intro, Winter has a bomb strapped to his head, “Saw” style, unable to remove it before the timer goes off. 

The series would then cut to one of its regular sketches. There was “Eddie the Flying G*mp,” who wasn’t as kind or heroic as people thought. There was “The Huggins Family,” a 1950s sitcom wherein the characters all had horrifying hidden personal problems, from alcoholism to pet murder. “The Battle of the Bands” was a physical altercation between a then-modern pop band like Wilson Philips and a fake group of toughs called The Boo-Yah Tribe. Like with all sketch comedy shows, some of the bits were hilarious, while others fell flat. Some also aged a little poorly. 

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Each episode would then be recapped by Votar, a CGI announcer who would describe the program you just watched in a computerized voice. “The Idiot Box” ran 30 minutes, but half of that was, by MTV mandate, populated by music videos. Accounting for videos and commercials, each episode was only about 10 minutes of original material. 

“The Idiot Box” lasted only six episodes, perhaps too intense for an MTV audience. One can find compilations of all the original “Idiot Box” material online, but it was certainly not meant to be mainlined. One would need to edit the comedy bits back into a block of music videos to really jibe with the pacing. Winter appeared on talk shows in 1991 to promote the show, and he calmly said that it was meant to be violent and chaotic, of course, in the tradition of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and Bugs Bunny cartoons. 

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Although “The Idiot Box” wasn’t a smash success, it did fortunately dovetail with another project that Winter, Stern, and Burns had previously abandoned. It seems that the experimental band the Butthole Surfers had once recruited the trio to make a monster-based horror movie with them, for a project that never really came together. With the MTV clout of “The Idiot Box,” however, Winter/Stern/Burns reimagined the Butthole Surfers movie as a slapstick comedy, eventually co-writing a movie called “Hideous Mutant Freekz.” They pitched the movie to 20th Century Fox, and the company’s president, Joe Roth, adored the weird-ass project and offered him a $12 million budget. 

As happens too often, though, there was a regime change at Fox while “Hideous Mutant Freekz” was in production, and the new studio head hated it. The budget was cut, and the title was changed to “Freaked.” When the film tested poorly (and, really, it’s no wonder), Fox reduced its presence, releasing it on only two screens nationwide. Hence, the film only making $29,000 during its initial run. 

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Weirdly, even though “The Idiot Box” was short-lived and “Freaked” was a failure, their fast editing and anarchic spirit came to influence the MTV house style. It’s one of the least popular MTV shows, and yet may be one of the station’s most important. Rolling Stone even called it one of the best of all time.