Freak Show CD-ROM Liner Notes
These notes are a mix of notes taken from the booklet which came with the CD-ROM and a promotional booklet.
The Residents Freak Show
Dedicated to P.T. Barnum, whose legacy of "suckers" and"freaks" defined the yin and yang of outcast culture. I don't see freaks. I see people. -- Federico Fellini
Hurry, Hurry, Right This Way...
The Residents' Freak Show CD-ROM transforms your computer into an amazing animated twilight zone, unlike anything you've ever experienced. Meet Tex the Barker, Herman the Human Mole, Harry the Head, Wanda the Worm Woman, Jelly Jack, Benny the Bump, and those freaks of contemporary art, The Residents. See their incredible performances and navigate through bizarre backstage worlds.
Freak Show's Big Top offers amazing spectacles, but the freaks' stranger-than-fiction stories come magically to life when you sneak behind the circus tent and into their trailers. Discover fetishes, fantasies, rituals, and tragic secrets through photos, comics, music, music videos, and animation. You can even explore the history of freaks. Your fanscination with "difference" will ultimately illuminate many other paths through this theme park of the imagination. Featuring spectacular animation designed by Jim Ludtke, Freak Show is a revolutionary new audio-visual experience, envisioning the future of interactive stories, music video, and digital art.
The Residents, based in San Fransisco, have created pioneering music, music videos and performance art since 1972. They are regarded as one of the world's most innovative audio-visual concept groups.
Jim Ludtke, also based in San Fransisco, is an award-winning animator and illustrator whose work has been presented by a variety of venues including The Museum of Modern Art and Nickelodeon.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up to The Residents' Freak Show, a 3-D animated interactive CD-ROM based on the music and stories of the world's best-known unknown musicians. In their ever-unique style, The Residents, animator Jim Ludtke, and the Voyager Company, bring you Freak Show.
A Brief History of the American Freak Show
The exhibition of human oddities dates back so far that it really has no traceable beginning. Records clearly indicate that early Renaissance English fairs offered glimpses of "human variations" for a small fee. These exhibitions became the basis upon which the American "displays" were modeled. During seasons when there were no fairs, managers or showmen would continue to tour, exhibiting one-person "curiosities" in rented tavern rooms.
It is not surprising that people did not know what to make of these strange exhibits. The elephant was not shown in America until 1796, the first giraffe in 1837. The "scientific" age was dawning and people were interested in how all these new species fit into God's great order of creatures, for the "human curiosities" were naively believed to be just that: new species of humans -- or in some cases -- creatures from the moon.
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, a few enterprising scientists began to open private museums in major American cities. Human curiosities were usually the most popular displays.
Due to the amazing interest people had in the unusual, promoters soon began to embellish their exhibits with presentations that were, in some cases, half-truths if not out right deceptions. Although fraudulence and exaggeration have always been a part of the presentations, American shows of the mid-nineteenth century institutionalized them as fundamental and lasting conventions of the freak show.
By 1840, most American cities had at least one "science" museum, and major cities had multiple institutions in close competition. This was the year that P. T. Barnum, a man of great promotion and public relations skills, purchased a museum in New York opposite the Astor House, the city's most prestigious hotel. Quickly it was transformed into a fashionable and legitimate entertainment center: The American Museum. He accomplished this by introducing an amazingly diverse crop of human oddities and by fabricating outlandish stories of their origins and histories.
Within a decade, The American Museum had become the premier attraction of New York City. The lavishly decorated lecture hall seated three thousand patrons eager to be amused and educated by "scientific demonstrations" and other entertainment. Its reign was short as the museum was destroyed by fire in 1868, but this freed Barnum to take his show on the road. Though many large and popular "museums" still operated in all the major cities of America, by the 1870's, the circus had become the dominant exhibitor of human oddities. Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus still had a traveling freak show in 1956.
In the first decades of this century, public opinion of the freak show began to shift. People were beginning to view "freaks" as unfortunate and diseased beings rather than as interesting curiosities. The press declared that the oddities were to be pitied, and that the public exhibition of these people was morbid and unwholesome.
Whereas the freak show was previously the main attraction of of the midway, by 1940 respectable people were turning their backs on the shows. Once seen as the entertainment of the intellectual, it was now viewed as the playground of the morally corrupt.
Usually overlooked was the fact that while numerous freak roles did require congenital malformations, hormonal dysfunctions or chronic disorders, the great majority of the freak show characters were enterprising troupers. These career performers took pride (and often wealth and fame) from their uniqueness and actively molded their presentations. They viewed the outsider you and me -- in contempt for our naivete and ordinary drabness. They may have been the "freaks," but we were the "suckers," and that was much worse.
Today, with the exception of a few small well-worn freak shows, the domain of the freaks has been overtaken by daytime television talk shows and the pop music entertainer's quest for attention. We can safely assume that as long as voyeurism and exhibitionism continue to march hand-in-hand there will always be a freak show... and suckers to buy tickets.