I’ve hold off of reviewing this one in the hope Adult Swim would release it on physical media, but i’m tired, even though you can buy the series on various streaming sites… which still means technically there’s no real international release, even if you can see the whole series on AS website.
well, not quite the whole series, but we’ll get to that later.
This has been a favourite of mine for years, it’s Halloween, fuck it, we’re going through Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, from Dino Stamatoppolous, better known for his other Adult Swim cult series, Moral Orel.
It ran from June 2010 to march 2012, amassing 20 episodes, divided over for 2 seasons, but nowadays i feel it mostly faded away, and it’s never brought up in discussion, so i’m doing it now.
Also yes, we already had a Frankenstein review as an extra treat, so consider this an Hallowen treat.
Somewhere In Eastern Europe, Baron Victor Von Frankestein is in his castle, bored out of his skull after finding a way to become immortal, so use his the many wormholes – the titular “Frankenholes” – to basically advertise his services to anyone regardless of space and time, while also having to deal with clients such as werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural monsters that just already roam around the small European village straight of a ’30 Universal horror film.
He lives there with his wife, Elizabeth, and his friend-assistant Sanguinarie Polidori, both immortals via a potion concocted by Victor, unlike his own children, whom still age and get more decrepit and old as time goes by, and takes on whatever random or absurd experiments-jobs just to be less bored of everything, as he eventually just stopped even about his Creature/Creation he made out of body parts stolen from corpses, whom annoys him with his overly refined way of talking.
Obviously going about whatever insane request in a fittingly random or excessive manner, be it curing Adolf Hitler from hating the Jews, accidentally making Gandhi a vampire, Jefferson requesting Barack Obama’s penis, or kidnapping multiple versions of Ron Howard, with each episode capping off roughly at 11 minutes, the AS standard of sorts.
It’s that kind of absurd comedy, heavy on black humour, heavy on surreal and bizarre, with a cynical and irreverent bent typical of most Adult Swim programming, in this case themed in and making fun-tributing classic horror of yore, especially the classic Universal black and white monster films, a monster mash, if you will, and by extension the gothic literary classics that inspired the films.
And the creator did committ to this idea of past, present and future not really mattering at all, as they mesh into an indistinct sludge for its ennui-consumed immortal protagonists, that the first season deliberately aired out of order… which isn’t a dealbreaker but it’s also obvious how what is listed as Episode 8 was clearly shot first and meant to be the introduction, so i’m not quite sure if doing a “Endless Eight” thing was the best idea, given how the first season is 100 % episodic, following a “monster of the week” format, and de facto serves also an introduction for its cast.
Speaking about Season 1, there’s actually a Mother Teresa character but they censored an entire episode about her, she appears in others but barely has lines at all.
The censored episode, Mother To-Be-Sa, was actually the second episode of the first season, and was later found in unofficial ways, and it’s about Mother Teresa trying to get an abortion but ending up as an endentured servant to the Frankensteins, and wanting to get laid with the Invisible Man, because he literally can’t guilt trip her into doing favours like anybody else.
…. yeah, i guess there’s no need to explain why this one was never aired.
Season 2 fares differently as every episode has a more clear overarching plot (often relating to the horror or sci fi writer its titled after, such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Vagina!), gives more space to the already established cast more, while introducing new support characters (like the Mummy that’s a bad comedian using the same bad pun, Dr. Moreau signing brains for the annual Monsterfest, etc) yet keeping the focus mostly on the Frankenstein family, especially Victor, whose genius can’t still fix his self inflincted boredom via immortality, nor really deflect from his overblown ego, petty jealousy and adjacent character flaws.
While it’s still done in stop motion animation, this time Dino and team went for a Rankin-Bass style of stop motion, but the characters models are crafted with paper, giving them a distinct angular flair, somewhere between high tier papermaciè and looking like ventriloquist dummies, it’s extra funny how the characters have literal “square ass burgers” on their thin paper bodies.
Frankly the set designs and models are amazing, there’s a lot of attention to detail in everything (like how in the castle intro you can, this is the kind of show where you can just stop and admire the incredible craft you can see even in single frames, or notice how you can constantly see stuff like the “Attack Of The Puppet People” sized segretary in a jar standing in the lab ante-chamber.
The series as whole oozes of love for the classic horror of yore, spoofed with care, and its notable how it also considers the 60/70s Hammer revivals, heck, between stuff like a vampirified Gandhi speaking with what i assume was meant to be a thick Indian accent but just sounds Italian (and they clearly gave up trying to make it sound like anything else), Orlok from the old Nosferatu talking in silent movie text panels and Dracula being a Lothario-esque dirty old man (i see what you did there, Dino), a Wacky Races space through time and space, we even get a Blackula reference.
To say nothing of the Creature being able to quote Frankenstein, as in, Shelley’s novel, in effective ways, i’ve seen serious Frankenstein film adaptation that don’t even dare repeat some passages, and the committment extends to them doing an episode spoofing the old giant monster films getting that awful dub with Kim Jeong playing a racist asian kaiju charicature and dubbing every single character.
This specific one is also one of the few big “slips”, it tries but i feel it’s one of the lesser episodes, it doesn’t quite work well as it does on paper, at least for me, but they can’t all be winners.
I do think the humour more or less aged well enough, i rewatched both seasons and i found them strong as i remembered, still its own thing and distinct from Moral Orel, my only gripe is that maybe we could have gotten an even better third season, but alas i guess it was never meant to be.
I’m not gonna bash other AS shows in frustration, as tempting and easy it would be, because this was always gonna be a niche series, it was never gonna make big numbers and become “mainstream”, but i think it didn’t help that posthumous circulation of clips was either little or zero, and i can see why most people wouldn’t care by looking at the clips AS did eventually upload on their official Youtube channels.
I can imagine that in snippets, in short video clips format, it felt like a “Frankenstein-pilled Rick & Morty”, even though this series started and enden before Rick & Morty even started,
More of a victim of a unfortunate coincidence, as they just share a vaguely similar mean spirited, annoyed, cynical scientist protagonist with loose morals, and happen to be satire and black humour heavy, with a cynical bent, but that in itself describes 80 % of adult orientated comedy shows, Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole is really nothing like Rick & Morty besides surface elements, is more something akin to MST3K, the old shows that had hosts in horror costumes introducing cheesy, for one its not really nihilistic, it lacks that sense of bile and resentment for itself, for one.
It’s a great Halloween vibed monster mash, one that might actually be an “underrated gem”, but which i highly recommend seeking out if you anything you heard or seen strikes your fancy!
