In 1988, there was a Freddy cameo on a terrible puppet show about politics … starring ROBERT ENGLUND in full makeup!
When you run a site called Wicked Horror, you’ve got to go BIG TIME on Halloween. This is it, the day that embodies everything we believe in and hold dear: spooky movies, junk food, trashy costumes and flat out bizarre ephemera that doesn’t even feel like it was born in our reality. To celebrate 10/31/26, there was no debate what I’d put the spotlight on — what is, without question, the WEIRDEST Freddy cameo ever, in the history of ANY type of media.
There are totally forgotten TV shows. Then there’s something like D.C. Follies, a television program so obscure I didn’t even know it existed until a couple of months ago. Not too bad for a show that was only cancelled in 1989.
The more I think about D.C. Follies, the more surreal it sounds. For starters, it was a syndicated comedy series with a mostly puppet cast, aimed at adults, starring Fred Willard as the only real human character on the show. Even weirder, it was created by Sid and Marty Krofft — the same people who gave us H.R. Pufnstuf and The Banana Splits. With that kind of pedigree, you’d think D.C. Follies would be more of a fantastical variety show — only it’s a hyper political comedy where all of the jokes are instantly dated.
The show was set in a Washington, D.C. bar so most of the puppets were modeled after real world political figures like Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Mikhail Gorbachev and a whole bunch of other people you haven’t thought about in at least 20 years. Oh, and if you’re wondering what kind of political bent the show had, the fact that it was executive produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — of friggin’ Cannon Films — pretty much makes it clear.
Sort of the thematic conceit of the show is that every now and then it’d feature a real life celebrity guest, like Whoopi Goldberg or Leslie Nielsen, playing themselves for an extended bit. Which, naturally, brings us to a second season episode of D.C. Follies that aired in early October of 1988.
The name of the episode pretty much tells you everything: Freddy Krueger’s Nightmare — Dan Quayle Elected President.
Sure, we’ve seen more than one Freddy cameo in all kinds of late 1980s media. What makes this particular appearance on D.C. Follies is that it’s NOT a parody — not only do they explicitly call the character “Freddy Krueger,” he’s even played by Robert Englund himself! I guess this was an example of late-stage Reaganomics corporate synergy going on; the fourth Elm Street movie had just hit theaters and Freddy’s Nightmares was already making the syndicated airwaves rounds, so if there was a place to pimp Fred, I figure New Line Cinema would’ve taken the opportunity with pleasure.
I’m not even sure how to describe this episode to people who were born after the year 2000. It begins with Willard doing a terrible monologue about how much movie tickets costs, then it dovetails into this painfully unfunny parody of The Honeymooners and let’s be real, you don’t care about ANY of this crap. All we care about is Freddy Krueger showing up and causing havoc, and havoc, he doth cause.
If you’re wondering how the extended Freddy cameo makes it into the program, he’s the central figure of a nightmare experienced by George H.W. Bush (who, at the time, was still actively campaigning and hadn’t been elected president yet.) Freddy gets to make a LOT of obvious puns (i.e., threats to “slash the budget” and “shred the Bushes,” among others), with the punchline being that he can’t eliminate H.W. because that means vice president Dan Quayle would be in charge of the country. Man, I bet all of the zoomers reading this are REALLY confused at this point. Probably the most interesting aspect of the appearance is that Freddy admits that he didn’t vote for Bush, which would suggest he voted for Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis instead. Or hell, maybe Freddy voted for Libertarian candidate Ron Paul, or Populist Party candidate David Duke. I mean, considering some of Freddy’s unsavory comments about his Black victims in the past — why, hello there, Kelly Rowland in Freddy vs. Jason! — would it really be THAT much of a surprise if he supported a former KKK leader?
So there’s a lot of boring stuff after that nobody could possibly care about (including a REALLY racist depiction of Yasser Arafat, but that’s hardly a surprise) before Freddy returns to the episode. He cuts a GREAT promo about being evil incarnate even though the lighting is so poor you can barely see anything onscreen (made worse by the grainy VHS quality of the only copy I could find floating around in the internet abyss in full.) But hey, if you ever wanted to see Rob Englund in full prosthetics open mouth kiss a Muppet shaped like a former sitting President of the United States, here’s your chance.
The episode ends with Krueger going through a midlife crisis, Fred Willard making an odd reference to Swamp Thing and Freddy murdering a cat (offscreen, thankfully.) Then puppet versions of Elvis and Richard Nixon and show up and … well, the show just kinda ends, really. So, yeah.
It’s not exactly the same thing as watching Dream Warriors, but the pure, unadulterated weirdness of this episode even existing in the first place gives it a tantalizing allure. It’s the kind of wayyyy off the beaten, ultra-forgotten nonsense of yesteryear that just makes sense to watch on Halloween, even if its actual horror dynamics are a little tenuous.
But hey, it’s Freddy Krueger, puppets and jokes about Barbara Streisand with Shelby Forthright from Wall-E overseeing the proceedings. It still sounds Halloween AF to me, personally.
