What, nobody remembers Frankenhole?
Dino Stamatopoulos' short-lived horror comedy deserves some love this Halloween season.
by Toussaint Egan
Last month, the re:frame brain trust were batting ideas around for October — the spookiest month of all — when I suggested we do a spotlight post on Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, the stop-motion horror comedy series that aired on Adult Swim from 2010 to 2012. My suggestion was met with resounding blank-faced befuddlement. "What, nobody remembers Frankenhole?!" I asked with exasperation, causing my colleagues to laugh hysterically.
Now, if Rollin and Kambole, two of the most knowledgeable animation enthusiasts I know, don't remember Frankenhole, I have to wager most ordinary folks don't either. Which is a damn shame, because the series is a certified hoot-and-a-half.
Created by writer-producer Dino Stamatopoulos, best known for his animated black comedy Morel Orel and his role as "Starburns" in the cult NBC sitcom Community, Mary Shelley's Frankenhole is a pop culture monster mash of macabre sight gags and irreverent creativity. Jeff B. Davis voices Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a now-immortal mad scientist who makes his eternal living as a consulting physician for anyone and everyone across the space-time continuum (via artificial wormholes – these are the 'Frankenholes'). Every episode, Frankenstein and his assistant Sanguinaire Polidori (based on Dr. Septimus Pretorius from 1935's Bride of Frankenstein) takes on a new case, aiding all manner of humane “monsters” and monstrous humans with their assorted benign gripes and otherworldly ailments.
"We wanted to use the look of the Universal Studios monsters, but we pitched it to them and they didn't want it," Scott Adsit said in 2010. "We had to design our own versions of classic monsters and we wanted to get that look in stop-motion animation for the show. It totally looks unlike anything else on TV right now."
The distinctive look of the stop-motion puppets seen in Mary Shelley's Frankenhole was born out of the necessity of crafting the show's many one-off characters, as Stamatopoulos revealed in an interview with David Wolinsky. "Because there were so many likenesses of people in the show," he said, "we decided early on that we can't really afford to sculpt all these heads, so I went to the puppet guy and said, 'It would be nice if we could take pictures of famous people and wrap them around these puppets.' A South Park kind of quality, only more three-dimensional. So he developed this strange, beautiful origami to wrap these paper pictures around, and it looks pretty amazing."
The humor of Mary Shelley's Frankenhole is more often than not crass and offensive, as one would expect from Adult Swim circa 2010. The sixth episode, "(John) Thomas Jefferson," centers on Frankenstein helping Thomas Jefferson get a penis transplant so he can better "satisfy" his female slaves. The prospective donors? Wilt Chamberlain, Gary Coleman, and President Barack Obama circa 2009. It literally ends with a musical number featuring Ike Turner, O.J. Simpson, Chuck Berry, and Bill Cosby singing about how the best way to appeal to a woman is never letting them think you care. That said, the second season largely gravitates away from this initial shock humor, settling into a format that instead explores Dr. Frankenstein's day-to-day misadventures in the small, Eastern European village of Somewhere. Frankenhole has never been released on physical media, but is available to stream via Adult Swim’s website.
I've enjoyed my time travelling down the memory hole of Dino Stamatopoulos' Frankenhole this past week. It was a weird, hilarious, creative, risque series that never really got the love or attention that it deserved. If you’re looking for something off the beaten path to watch during this year’s spookiest season, you could do worse than watching Morel Orel's horror-comedy step sibling.
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💀 Toussaint: Lately I have been playing the most recent The Forever Winter update, which introduces a procedurally generated underground tunnel system for players to traverse in order to scavenge for new resources, among other features. Imagine the postapocalyptic catacombs of The Matrix combined with the megastructure from Tsutomu Nihei's Blame and you’ve got a pretty good handle on what it’s like. It's not a game for everyone — but it is most certainly the game for me!
🌴Kambole: I keep watching the teaser for the upcoming Oneohtrix Point Never project on loop – a hand-drawn sequence of what looks like palm trees observed through a skylight from the UK based artist and designer Elliott Elder.
😀 Rollin: Now that Smiling Friends is back, it is imperative to highlight that another very important cultural institution has also returned: the cool autistic gamer 774.