The popular strip of the stoner trio has become a frenzied animated series for adults that can already be seen in ‘streaming’ for these payments. From the 60s they jump to the present and travel back in time in a crazy sitcom with a cat on the side
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 unspeakable Gilbert Shelton, the “hippies” and counterculture of the 60s and 70s in the US The adult cartoon series will be on HBO Max for a few days, with some changes from the original material – obviously it’s not so “anti-system” -. The leading skull trio takes 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 back to our days. The confrontation with new technologies and the current lifestyle is inevitable, giving rise to bizarre situations that give way to absurd humor and scatology, with some downright dreamy moments. When the three crazy people go on a journey, locked in the basement of their house, they don’t think they will wake up in a world far removed from their experiences. 50 years later, everything has changed, not necessarily for the better.
The leap into the audiovisual medium of the mythical Freak Brothers takes time from office to office, but so far none of the projects had managed to come to fruition. The cartoon format has finally embraced the trials and tribulations of this gang of reckless, reckless stoners, who roam the planet for the sole purpose of not giving a damn and being as stoned as possible, trying all kinds of drugs here and there. Once accepted the strange time travel to our days, a ruse that may surprise followers of the original comics from the start, 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, the format today allows 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 of approximately 22 minutes each, which are viewed with gibberish. The hallucinogenic sequences portraying the highlights of the three sissies are extremely enjoyable, as endearing as they are desperate, immersed in a certain reality of bright colors that is visually distorted to unexpected limits.
Ediciones La Cúpula, an example of survival within the purest underground, is responsible for publishing the starting material in our country. In the late 1960s, amid alternative cultural buzz, his adventures and misadventures sprang from the art of the ingenious Gilbert Shelton, arguably the 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, fireproof hippie, always surrounded by beer cans when he signs copies like I own in comic book halls like the one in Barcelona, was born on May 31, 1940 in Dallas and graduated in Letters, although he always showed a morbid interest in humorous drawing. The gossip, or the good one, depending on how you look at it, says that just as he was starting to build a reputation in the alternative publishing circuit, he had a fit of inspiration that gave rise to his most popular characters, the trio in question, adored by hundreds of readers across the interplanetary geography.
His enlightenment was due to a celluloid binge that blew his mind as frames starring the eternal Marx Brothers and the comedians The Three Stooges, inspiration to wacky movie directors like Sam Raimi, popped into his mind. Once in front of the blank page, armed with his pen, the craziest brothers in the history of comics, three irretrievably hairy, addicted to marijuana, whose only obsession in life is to do nothing. Laziness to Death began the trials of the Freak Brothers in 1967 in the magazine ‘Rag’, which piqued the conscience of the young people of the time until they became a popular icon. At the time, the restless Shelton, together with Fred Todd and Don Baumgart, formed the alternative publishing house Rip Off Press, a springboard in the US for authors such as Max, Martí or Vuillemin. He is also responsible for the comics of Not Quite Dead, a grotesque musical group with little future in co-creation with the French Pic, and the adventures of Fat Freddy’s Cat, a female cat who is smarter than his human friends and also in the series, with enough prominence, although with a marked change of sex.
The original version features an eye-catching cast of voiceover 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 attributed to more satire on today’s society, through the eyes of the three unpresentables moving from the 20th to the 21st century, but something must be left for the next sessions.
‘The Freak Brothers’ is available on HBO Max.
Source: La Verdad
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