# Talk:Freaks (1932 film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FreaksPoster.jpg
when will the copyright from the poster expire? and from the movie?
190.51.182.204 (talk) 21:18, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure about the poster, but as for the film itself, 2027. MightyArms (talk) 23:59, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

The scene in which the Human Torso lights up a cigarette is the more memorable because the Torso is set on a table, supposedly listening while the "normal" circus strongman is bragging about his feats of strength, ignoring this simple yet astonishing sight of the Human Torso rolling a cigarette and managing to smoke it, which undoubtedly completely stole the scene for the audience. Sussmanbern (talk) 11:24, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

The posterity of the movie "Freaks" is important. For instance the comic stripes story "Silence" by the drawner and artist Comes (  60 p. Casterman edition published in 1984 ) was a part of the inheritance of the movie. The movie "Elephant man" was also a part of the inheritance.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.91.242.54 (talk) 15:08, 20 November 2010 (UTC) 

I bought Freaks on DVD a few years back and was disappointed that the Human Torso's cigarette rolling/lighting scene was cut short so that only the lighting of the cigarette is seen.  I had seen the film on UK terrestrial television about 10 or 15 years earlier and distinctly remember that the man rolled the cigarette as well as lighting it.  Having read the main article on this film I was wondering if there is any source which explains why this scene was truncated, and why it "does not appear in any commercial release".  There's no other information pertaining to this ambiguity save for the quoted sentence. PCLM (talk) 17:49, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

In the Goon comic Book Volume 0 number 3 The character of The Goon is shown to have lived in a Freakshow. In the panels talking about his story,the characters of the movie are easilyrecognizable, you can recognize Pip and Zip and they even say the words: Gobble Gobble One of Us! This is a clear reference to the movie and it should be mentioned on the list.bloodawn5  (talk) 23:33, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Someone has huge trouble with apposition.

The South Park episode titled "Butters' Very Own Episode" (season 5 episode 14, broadcast Dec. 2001) includes a scene where the Stotch parents are welcomed into a group composed of John & Patsy Ramsey, O.J. Simpson and Rep. Gary Condit, who all claim to have lost a loved one to "some Puerto Rican guy",  chanting, "Gooble gobble, gooble gobble! One of us! One of us!" This could be listed in the references section.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s05e14-butters-very-own-episode
Scott H 01:34, 31 August 2012 (UTC)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Scott7261 (talk • contribs)  
enlarged. Sussmanbern (talk) 02:34, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Ren and Stimpy also referenced it in "Double Header". After suffering a horrible accident and having to be surgically grafted together to survive, they are ostracized from normal society. They get jobs as circus freaks, whereupon Ren angrily insults the other performers and is tarred and feathered.   --The_Iconoclast (talk) 15:16, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

In the "cultural influences" section, where you have: "The famous line "We accept him, one of us!"", it should be: "We accept HER. . ." as the group was chanting about the manipulative Cleopatra character. I changed it. Thank you, Wordreader (talk) 01:07, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

...and its " "Gooba-gobble, gooba-gobble" per reliable sources....which are not needed for the plot section but here it is:
--Mark Miller (talk) 02:02, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Robert Smith (the Cure) is wearing a shirt with a photo of the Freaks in the music video for Friday I'm in Love.  Is that worth noting?
Clofts (talk) 01:09, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Since this article is so underdeveloped in spite of the vast amount of information available on the film, I've decided to include a list of sources that can be added to the article at a later date. PLEASE NOTE: This is only a very small list of sources that can be found on google books. If I were to add acomplete list it would span over several pages worth.--Paleface Jack (talk) 18:23, 27 November 2018 (UTC) 

Mark S. Blumberg (22 January 2009). Freaks of Nature: And what They Tell Us about Evolution and Development. OUP Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-921305-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Angela Smith (24 January 2012). Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-52785-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
https://books.google.com/books?id=dhruAAAAMAAJ&q=Freaks+(1932)&dq=Freaks+(1932)&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq--uClfXeAhUH5oMKHWh3A7MQ6AEIPDAD
Rachel Adams (December 2001). Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-00539-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Michael J. Meyer (1995). Literature and the Grotesque. Rodopi. ISBN 90-5183-793-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Thomas Doherty (27 August 1999). Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-50012-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
David J. Skal (1995). Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning--Hollywood's Master of the Macabre. Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-385-47406-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Alain Silver; James Ursini (2000). The Horror Film Reader. Limelight Editions. ISBN 978-0-87910-297-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
N.W. Erickson (1 June 2012). Celluloid Spooks & Reel Monsters. Lulu.com. ISBN 978-1-300-00706-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Joshua David Bellin (2005). Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. SIU Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2624-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Jon Towlson (13 March 2014). Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-1533-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Thomas Doherty (31 March 2009). Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-51284-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Ina Rae Hark (21 June 2007). American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-4303-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Rosemarie Garland Thomson (October 1996). Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-8222-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Tod Robbins (1 July 2013). Freaks and Fantasies. Lulu.com. ISBN 978-1-60543-076-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Marc Hartzman (2006). American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History's Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. ISBN 978-1-58542-530-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
David A. Gerstner; Janet Staiger (2003). Authorship and Film. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-93994-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Anthony Slide (26 July 2006). New York City Vaudeville. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4396-3391-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Louis J. Parascandola; John Parascandola (9 December 2014). A Coney Island Reader: Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-53819-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Robert Bogdan (10 December 2014). Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-22743-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Anna Siomopoulos (2012). Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-88293-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Franco Ricci (9 June 2014). The Sopranos: Born Under a Bad Sign. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. ISBN 978-1-4426-6882-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
K. Egan; S. Thomas (6 November 2012). Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification. Springer. ISBN 978-1-137-29177-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Heinz Tschachler; Maureen Devine; Michael Draxlbauer (2003). The EmBodyment of American Culture. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 978-3-8258-6762-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Neither reference actually uses the term. Renard Migrant (talk) 12:00, 29 October 2019 (UTC)

Just been reading the plot and this section, about the fate of Cleopatra, stuck out to me.
"The freaks then capture Cleopatra and sometime later, she is shown to be a grotesque, squawking "human duck" on display for carnival patrons; her tongue has been removed, one eye has been gouged out, the flesh of her hands has been melted and deformed to look like duck feet, her legs have been cut off, and what is left of her torso has been permanently tarred and feathered."
It seems excessively detailed. It's one shot in the film and who's to say her tongue was removed, the flesh of her hands melted and deformed? It reads a bit like someone's taken that shot and ran with their imagination. I just wanted to check there isn't a source for this? Humbledaisy (talk) 23:33, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Given that Freaks is now recognised as an important film about disability, and which actually casts disabled performers, it seems unfortunate that none of them are listed in the cast list in the infobox. Presumably this is because the infobox is mirroring the poster and the credits of the movie, but ableism likely played a part in the ordering of the cast list at the time of the film's release. The wikipedia rules do allow for divergence from the standard format: "An alternative approach may be determined by local consensus." Surely at least Harry and Daisy Earles should be recognised here? Cinefeline (talk) 23:44, 19 October 2023 (UTC)