Freddie Freaker

About

Freddie Freaker (more commonly known as Freddy Freaker) is a toy character created in the 1980s by L.A. Toys advertising a telephone number one could call, "1-900-490-FREAK," whereupon the character would tell jokes. The character's bizarre appearance and lack of known background made it an object of fascination on internet forums and the commercial was often referenced and remixed.

Origin

While concrete information about the character is sparse, anecdotal evidence points to the character being created in 1987. On November 10th, 2008, YouTuber Sylvacute84 posted the commercial featuring the character, gaining over 505,000 views (shown below).

In the comments section of that video, a YouTube commenter named Patrick Simmons took credit for creating the character, writing:^[1]

Ok dude, you just made my day. I was the artist who designed and created this puppet for this commercial back in 1987 and until this moment I had never seen the final video for it. I was a very young buck at the time, just getting my start in the FX industry, so it was a pretty big deal to create something for a national ad. Thanks for posting it, my coworker and I laughed our asses off. By the way, the arms were designed to move and bend, so I have no idea why they left him in a Jesus pose. Peace.

Spread

A fascination with the character began spreading online, particularly in the mid-2000s. In July of 2013, a Tumblr page devoted to the character, fuckyeafreddyfreaker,^[4] launched. On July 31st, 2014, Breaker.com^[2] wrote about the character and spoke to Simmons about what he knew of the project. There, it was revealed that the terms "The Party Freak" and "Freddie Freaker" were trademarked in 1988 and cancelled in the mid-90s. Simmons also said he believed the toy was supposed to tell college-age jokes and it was advertised on MTV. In a small Facebook group devoted to the character,^[3] it was revealed that the admin of that group, Kevin Leto, was the likely CEO of LA Toys, the company that made Freddie Freaker. On March 21st, 2015, the commercial was posted to /r/NotTimandEric,^[5] where a commenter said they had called the number once and were told jokes in a free-form grumbly voice. A Wikia^[6] has been created documenting all known information about the character.

The character began seeing use in remix videos around 2016. On October 3rd, 2016, YouTuber BluShades uploaded a video of himself watching a long playlist of Freddie Freaker remixes and YouTube Poops, gaining over 24,000 views (shown below, left). The character gained more popularity after being mentioned by the Oney Plays Let's Play channel on December 25th, 2017 (shown below, right), which in turn inspired popular animations of their Freddie Freaker scenes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References