Sawbones: Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist

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We came across a pharmacy with its windows blasted out.

Pushed on through the broken glass and had ourselves a lucky run.

The medicines, the medicines, the escalat macabre

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine.

I'm your co-host, Justin McElroy.

And I'm Sidney McElroy.

So it's been a weird week for me, a weird couple weeks.

Yeah.

You know, it's been a weird couple weeks, and we're about to go on vacation.

We are.

So this is a weird sort of midpoint between the weird time before and it's sort of a weird time after.

And so we were looking for a sawbones episode that would just be

just a pure delight.

We go straight from the school year into summer theater.

And then also with that, like we're working and touring, and then there were other things that came up and like family stuff.

And with all that, our vacation is crammed into the last possible week.

Yeah.

Before school starts.

Yeah.

Did you realize that?

Literally.

It is the last opportunity to get out of town.

We go from school to theater to

school.

School.

So we wanted to to do something fun.

Yeah.

This is our back to school episode, I guess.

Yeah, we're having fun.

I wanted to talk about Freddy Farkas, frontier pharmacist.

Woo!

Woo!

When Justin first said, I want to talk about Freddy Farkas, I have to be honest, he said it to me kind of in passing.

And we were talking about like what we're going to do for this next episode.

And he said, I'm going to talk about Freddy.

I want you to do that.

And in my head, what I sort of like took in was there was a medical history figure named Freddie Farkas that I needed to research.

Uh-huh.

And that was what I thought I needed to do.

And then you said, we need to do this.

And I said, I'll be honest, I haven't researched Freddy Farkas.

Yeah, you said, what?

Tell me about this guy, Freddie Varkas.

It did not compute that this was a computer game.

Hey,

that was great.

Is it a computer?

I don't know what system it's supposed to be on.

We played it on a computer.

Fantastic.

Okay, so that is what I'm here for, Sid.

Right.

I'm going to give some of the context, and then in the second half, we'll talk about the game itself.

Okay.

We've been playing.

Does that sound good?

That sounds great.

Okay.

So,

and a lot of this is going to be from memory and me pulling it out of my butt, but some of this will be from information that I actually am having to research because I don't, as a former game journalist, I don't want to just get stuff wrong.

Well, we actually did play the game.

So the gameplay stuff, the stuff that happens within Freddy Farkas, that is, I mean, we just played the game.

How much?

Just now.

I want to take you back to 1979.

There's Justin McElroy is just a glimmer in the eye of young Clinton Leslie.

So he is just a year away from being born.

And Ken and Roberto Williams are very much in love.

They have just released their very first game, Mystery House.

And they found a company called Sierra,

later Sierra Online.

And it is a company that focuses on adventure games, point-and-click adventure games.

That's what Sierra comes to be known for um when i say that genre if i were to say to you before

freddy farkas the point and click adventure game uh do you have like a frame of reference for that as something that you you played as a kid or is that what maniac mansion was for sure yeah it's a perfect perfect example absolutely maniac mansion interestingly this is why you love me i do yeah there's many reasons but yeah so maniac mansion is sort of the second half of the this sort of like bifurcation right the sierra lineage is a huge part of the point-and-click world.

And then on the LucasArts side, you have Maniac Mansion, Loom, the Dig, a lot of classics like a lot of Indiana Jones game classics like that.

Never beat Maniac Mansion, never knew what I was supposed to do, never could figure it out, but played it a lot.

They're tough.

So Sierra has a lot of franchises that are best known for being sort of like long-running and usually humorous takes on a different kind of genre, right?

So for example,

the one that they are probably best known for is King's Quest.

And that is a...

I've heard of that.

Okay, so King's Quest is a, I would say, slightly sort of silly

fantasy adventure.

You plague King Graham and you wander through the countryside.

You know, throughout the course of the adventure, you know, you, you, well,

there's seven games, eight games.

So yeah, the last one, Mask of Eternity, came out in 1998.

First one was in 1980 called Wizard and the Princess.

That's kind of a precursor.

And is it like he's Faye, and she's like a human, and she shoots one of his wolves, and then he takes her over the wall?

Let me give you

the subtitles of these games: Romancing the Throne to Air is Human.

The Perils of Rosella, Absence makes the heart go yonder, air today, gone tomorrow.

That's our second.

Are these romantic?

Games?

The prince.

No, they're like goofy fantasy games.

There's number seven is the princeless bride and then masquerading.

So there's no jacked fay in this.

There's no jacked fae.

There's King Graham stumbling his way through the adventure.

I am more partial to a different fantasy series.

So you want to be a hero or quest for glory, depending on which entry you're talking about.

That is a similarly kind of silly series.

Arguably, I think it's funnier than King's Quest, but that's just

me.

There's also ha ha funny.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so.

It's a little bit more refined for a more refined balance.

If you're not so punny, you know, not a punster, you know, you like a little bit more satirical thing.

You know, Shakespeare thought.

The same sort of vibe was found in Space Quest, which there were, I think, seven Space Quest games.

Same idea.

It's a sci-fi, but you are point and click

your way through the world, picking up items, interacting with stuff, et cetera, et cetera.

Sometimes you look at them.

Sometimes you look at them.

And other times you walk to them.

I'm going to have you describe mechanics at this and have Cindy because I can't wait to hear all of your great takes on the mechanics of this game.

I did want to mention a couple other because this is like one of my favorite genres in the world.

So I wanted to also mention Gabriel Knight, which is sort of like a gothic horror series.

Now, those are the sexy ones about vampires.

And they're set in like New Orleans, and you have

voice actors.

And listen, this is the cast of Sins of the Father, the first one, okay?

Sins of the Father?

Gabriel Knight, Sins of the Fathers, okay?

Tim Curry, Leah Remini, Virginia Capers, Mark Hamill, and

Star Studded.

It's a sack.

Now,

do you have any?

Computer Gaming World declared Jane Jensen the interactive Anne Rice.

So, Nita's name.

Wow.

Maybe we should play Gabriel Mike.

Okay, now listen,

I read some Ann Rice.

So now that gets down to what I like.

No, can you tell me any about the vampire lore in these books?

Like, do they sparkle in the sun or do they melt in the sun?

And, like, what's the

do they have to eat humans?

Can they eat animals?

Do they just love it?

Is garlic a thing?

Or

do they go to high school these are all of the the sierra games that are most beloved most well-known but they're in the corner who is that sitting by himself sydney it's freddy farkas frontier pharmacist okay freddy farkas frontier pharmacist is a uh a one-off in the in the sierra world it was done one time and it was not ever really sequelized it get it will get another release.

Were these companies?

Can I ask a question?

Were these, I mean, today we kind of expect that when media comes out of any kind, not just games, but like anything, that in a lot of cases, there's some sort of like idea of what demographic you're looking at and like some sort of testing that has happened.

Like we think these concepts, these ideas, these characters, whatever, appeal to the people we're trying to sell this to.

And so that's why we created this.

Was there research done that led to them thinking like old west pharmacist,

this is a demographic we that's rich for like exploitation?

Like, was there, honey, that's such an excellent, an excellent

question because that is very much at the heart of how Freddie Farket's Frontier Pharmacist was created.

If you think about Space Quest is the sci-fi one, right?

King's Quest is the fantasy one.

Fantasy, yeah.

There weren't Western games on the market, so they had the opportunity to be the Western game or as and they wanted to be a funny Western game.

So for them, that was one model.

And as one of the designers, Al Low,

called it, it was going to be the blazing saddle of video games.

But why?

Why pharmacy?

Like, I understand, like, when you say that, I get why not shooting.

Because, like, if we think of old Westerns, like the movies, think of like shootouts right like and i get that like i don't particularly love a lot of violence and so a gun violence video game is not does not appeal to me and so you want something funny you're gonna skew away from violence um

if i think old west i don't think pharmacy like pharmacy is not high on the list right like maybe like a bar thing so like i am going to tell you saloon like some sort of saloon situation i am going to miraculously answer your question even more specifically

with a quote from Alo,

or at least the anecdote from Aloe himself is that in a brainstorming session with Roberta Williams, which, by the way, I've interviewed Roberta Williams before when I worked at the Iron Ten Tribune for a story I worked at the Escapist.

Not for an Iron Tree Tribune story as well.

Okay, okay.

I was going to say the Iron Ton Tribune did a story on this.

No, no, no, not on this.

Because that's awesome.

But in a brainstorming session, they accidentally came up with the term pharmacist.

They misspoke and said pharmacist when they were trying to come up with ideas for an old West game.

So they said pharmacist, and it struck them as funny.

And that was the inception of Freddy Farkas, because the idea of a pharmacist was funny.

And he's not really a farmer.

He's a former gunslinger that becomes a pharmacist when he loses a gunfight.

Which, I mean, I don't know if we're going to talk about this more in the back half of the show, but

Do you have you ever played the entire game?

Can I just ask that have you played the game?

Do you know how it ends?

Like have you read ahead to figure out what happens?

I just like he is a former gunslinger.

Yes, and so far, we have not finished the game, but so far where we are, I don't know why that matters.

I don't know why that matters.

I assume it will.

I mean, that's, I have to trust that the fact that he is A, a former gunslinger and B, missing an ear will come into play at some point.

But so far, this was a prolonged song that I heard that has not paid off.

I will say, yeah, there is a prolonged song at the beginning that is

performed by Alo,

who is, I will say, most notable.

Okay, quick, here's my quick thing on Alo.

He was a music teacher for 15 years in public schools.

That was the first thing he did.

Then he went on the show, name that tune, and he did so well that he was a semifinalist in the championships.

This was before all this uh he worked on a bunch of different stuff at sierra uh his first three games were all disney inspired it was winnie the poo and the 100 acre wood donald duck's playground and the black cauldron did he i mean he got he got licensing

yeah this is while he was at sierra these were sierra projects so sierra has something to do with disney well they were they were licensing disney licensed it's i guess i guess in today's climate the idea that disney would license itself to anything that wasn't the most gigantic gigantic, you know what I mean?

Like, I think it's a different time that that's what I'm grappling with here.

Lo Al Lo is best known by people, most people, for his adventure game series that I did not cover.

And is the Sierra series that is perhaps the Black Sheep of the Family?

It is Leisure Suit Larry.

I've heard of that.

You've told me about this.

Leisure Suit Larry are the

sort of like sex-obsessed,

puerile

game series.

That's Alo's other,

I would say, most notable contribution.

Is that what

I have a ton of stuff?

Is that what leisure suits?

Is that the connotation?

Because the only thing I know about leisure suits is Uncle Eddie and Christmas Vacation.

And so.

Yeah.

I guess that's leisure suits, I feel like, it has that sort of vibe.

Lounge lizard.

That's a great question.

Like, what else is a leisure suit for?

Like, it's a suit.

Well, it's not for work.

That's dang shirt.

Leisure.

Yeah.

A few other quick, like, just fun, trivia stuff.

The other name on this game in the design phase was Josh Mandel, who was

not related to Howie Mandel that I could find out.

But he was.

That's the only fact you have.

No, he was the first person that played the voice of King Graham in King's Quest, the series that we talked about before.

Not romantic.

No.

And also the last person I want to talk about is Cam Clark.

He was the voice actor for the game.

Funny thing about how this worked, when the game was originally released, it was not voiced.

It was just written in text by Al Lo and Josh Mandel.

And the game did well enough that they decided to do a re-release with voices.

Al Lo got tired in the studio and got bored in the studio and he cut the script by about 15% so he didn't have to sit through all the recording.

And Josh Mandel had already moved on to a different team.

He was working on Police Quest VI at the time.

So he didn't have a hand in it.

So Al cut a bunch of stuff off.

And apparently, it was frustrating to Josh Mandel because there were like puzzles and jokes that got cut and

ad-libs that changed the original script that they had written.

Adlibs by the actors, the most notable is Cam Clark, who plays Freddy Farkas, Frontier Pharmacist, best known as the voice of Leonardo and Rocksteady and Teenage Mutinins.

Also, didn't pick that up.

Didn't pick that up.

Also, uh frequently a voice double for matthew broderick

and was liquid snake in middle gear game middle gear games um can i say that uh knowing that there was dialogue that was like cut out or left out or just not recorded or whatever um i my my personal opinion is that's fine there's plenty there's so much talk so much talk there's so much talking all the time we're gonna i think they that was an okay editing choice we're gonna talk about after this freddie farkas frontier pharmacist Pharmacist, the video game.

There's your context, but after this, the game itself, and just how closely it overlaps with the medical world right after this.

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You know, we've been doing my brother, my brother, me for 15 years.

And

maybe you stopped listening for a while.

Maybe you never listened.

And you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years.

I know where this has ended up.

But no, no, you would be wrong.

We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.

Yeah.

You don't even really know how crypto works.

The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on My Brother, My Brother, and Me.

We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening.

And if not, we just leave it out back and goes rotten.

So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Let's learn everything.

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What's cool about Freddie Fargus?

Hi, welcome back.

What's cool about Freddy Fargus to me, and the reason that I thought that it would be fun for this is it very much overlaps with an era of medicine medicine that we are uh pretty fixated and fascinated by here on cell phones.

We talk about it a lot.

Yeah.

So Sid, tell me, as a first timer with a game like this, other than Maniac Mansion, strangely, how did, how did this, tell me about Freddy Farkas Frenzy of Pharmacist?

Well, okay, to be, to be completely blunt, I've never been great at video game mechanics.

I often have trouble with just getting people to move.

in the way I need them, like to go where I want them to go.

And so they're, they're like, okay, first of all, there's, as we've mentioned, a very long song.

There's a very long backstory.

It felt very long to me because it had nothing to do with anything.

Like, at the end of it, after he's a gunslinger and he gets his ear shot off, he decides never to be a gunslinger again.

And then he's a pharmacist.

You're right, honey.

You know that that's going to be important again.

He's definitely going to have to be aware of that.

Okay, well, so far he hasn't.

And he's, he, and they're like, and he decided to pursue his childhood dream.

We met him as a child, so they could have said he wanted to be a pharmacist and then he had to be a gunslinger for some reason, but they don't say that.

So, anyway, there's the song, and then you start, and you're on like a dusty old west street in a mining town-looking kind of thing, you know, like tombstone.

I think like tombstone.

Yeah, and he's walking down the street, and there are buttons at the top, and you click on like the boot button if you want to walk, yeah.

And then you have to just like move the boot to the end of the screen to make him go there.

Yeah, but going somewhere doesn't do anything, right?

There's another button and it's a finger pointing.

And that means you've poked something.

So if you, if you use the finger button on something, you poked it.

And so if you poke a door, it opens.

Yes, that's right.

If you poke an object, you pick it up.

That's the use.

The hand button is usually like a use or interact with.

If you poke a person in this game,

you poke a person like you poked them and they don't like it and they tell you that they didn't like it.

It's not a way to interact with them it's a way to poke them and i don't like the idea that when i when i use a pokey finger on a door the door miraculously opens but when i use a pokey finger on a human yeah i literally poke them right i understand that is that's tough i understand why that's frustrating there's a set of eyeglasses there's like a pair of eyeglasses and i can use those to look at things correct yeah which means that then the narrator tells me about them.

Yes.

And that's more talking for you, which I saw that I noticed you didn't, I wouldn't say you you seeked that out a lot, the more talking.

No, because it, well, there's jokes all through the talking.

Yeah.

And so it's not just like, here's the information you need.

It's like, here's some gags.

Now, you're notably not a big fan of jokes, you've said that.

That's not true.

I don't necessarily want, I'm like trying to solve the puzzle.

I'm trying to do the thing.

I have a goal.

I have a mission.

I don't need the.

It's all a bunch of fault derall infillity.

Yeah.

As far as you're concerned.

I don't go at life that way.

Just like, tell me what you need and I will fix it for you.

I am a pharmacist, man.

I take that seriously.

And then there's a, hold on, there's a talk bubble.

There's a lot of stuff.

And that's how you talk to humans.

Correct.

And I think that's, and then there's like, you know, a little thing for saving and a little thing for your inventory.

Freddie Fergus is interesting in that

you can't die in all these kinds of games.

This is one where you can die and you die for weird reasons.

Like if you just don't figure things out fast enough you die which is very frustrating when we figured out pretty quickly that there's a manual that we did have access to because we were playing the game legally we weren't illegally That's right.

We got it on gogg.com You can get it for like five bucks I think on there But we didn't know that we had access to the manual So for a minute We're like we don't know how to play this game and it's because there's a manual that we didn't know we had but the manual is cool and I think it's kind of neat It kind of ties into this like the whole aesthetic.

Yeah, it looks like one of the medical textbooks that we've looked at.

Do you want to look?

Can you read that?

The manual is called The Modern Day Book of Health and Hygiene.

Yeah, it does.

It looks, it is a very sawbonesy kind of look.

And the introduction, just to give you kind of like a snippet, is: mankind has made phenomenal strides in the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

No longer are we taking the naive viewpoint of our ancestors, pointing our fingers at the sick and scabrous and crying, God zeus, he's infested by evil spirits and demons.

No, we know, we now know that the root causes of diseases are far less ethereal and far more commonplace.

Some are caused by the collection of toxins within the system, and some are caused by poorly shaped or missing bumps on the skull.

And anyway, so then he goes on and there's like a list of household pharmacopoeia stuff that you need, you know, everything from like an alcohol lamp and bandages to a gas spectroscope.

It's pretty advanced for the time.

I was just like pillmaking machine, thermometers,

and then all the medications.

And the medications, I mean, some of this stuff is real, right?

Like ammonia, that's a thing.

That's a thing.

Aspirin is a thing.

Anesthetic, balm, these are things.

Like balm is a general term, right?

Like there's some balms.

But like, these are actual things.

And then there are things like bimethylquinolone.

That's not real.

Not that I know of.

Okay.

Bismuth subsalicylate is bleach is real.

Borax is real.

Boric acid, caffeine, calamine.

calcium carbonate.

Um,

uh, let me see, there's some, but then there's stuff like I don't know what estro estrosterane, which is like a birth control thing.

So, there, there's some fake stuff.

So, this is cool, though, mixed in with like mirror curicrome that was a real thing.

So, like, there's real stuff in the manual.

That's a cool way of like bridging into that.

Cause I think what's kind of interesting about this game that is different from a lot of

these point-and-click adventure games.

Usually, the flow is you walk around, you collect a bunch of items, you know, you pick up whatever isn't nailed down, and then you use that to

solve the puzzle.

But you, you, you pick up those items, you'll use them together sometimes.

Sometimes you'll, you know,

you'll find the key.

The most classic example, you know, it's never that direct.

Like, there is

one sort of like very notable example where you have to create a mustache to fool a hotel clerk.

and the way you do it is you put maple syrup on some plastic and then convince a cat to run through a hole and then you get the cat hair on the plastic the monkey island games is another notable one where you have to put a pulley in a rubber chicken and that is a device that you need to progress at some point and it's very counterintuitive and kind of silly but this game you are collecting stuff around the world, but it's always in service of creating these like cures, like creating stuff in your pharmacy.

And you have a lot of those.

So you can go back to your pharmacy and you have a lab where a lot of this stuff already is, right?

Like you have the beakers and graduated cylinders and, you know, a weight and something to weigh things and measuring spoons.

And you have various ingredients and water, medicinal papers, and boxes, an alcohol lamp,

and a gas spectroscope, which is kind of cool that you have that.

I assume this was invented by this one.

I didn't do that research.

I don't know how long a gas spectrometer has been around.

That is actually a real thing.

But anyway, there's a lot of ingredients in there that you can use to make the cures that people need.

And so that's part of the game is like you're at your counter in your pharmacy.

People come in and are like, here's my prescription.

There's a drunk doctor at the saloon that you can meet.

Yeah.

I don't know that I love the doctor representation in this

game.

But at the same time, like we've done a lot of shows on patent medicines and medicine shows and sort of that era of medicine.

So the idea that the town just has this one doctor and listen, he may not be great, but he's all we got.

And maybe we pay him in booze at the local saloon

is actually not that

wild.

Like that's not that far-fetched that it is possible.

And medical education was not standardized at the time.

And so the idea that he would write these wild prescriptions.

It's just not that.

You're right, honey.

The doctor representation is they should have been more thoughtful with the way

you all were presented.

Now, once you do sort of like get the prescription, though, once you can test out what needs to happen, you have to actually go to the manual for

you have to go to the manual where it will tell you sometimes they need something that is on your shelf, but for the most part, they don't.

They need something that you have to make.

And to make it, you have to take various ingredients and do like a little chemistry experiment.

So you take liquid ingredients and pour them in a graduated cylinder to measure them out.

And like in MLs, you take solid ingredients and you've got a little balance so that you can weigh how much it is.

You've got to mix it all together in a beaker.

You have to stir it.

And then you have to either like put it in your pill maker and make little pills out of it or put it on medicinal papers sometimes or in a pill box of some sort.

And then you hand that over to the customer, hopefully the right thing.

I assume, I mean, we got it right every time.

I assume I would have murdered people if I hadn't.

Yeah, what's interesting, the manual is where a lot of the instruction, I mean, it would basically be impossible to play without that.

Do you know why they do that?

So it's

a, in this game, it is probably the most sort of like advanced form of this I've seen, but it's copy protection is what they would call it.

So this game initially was on floppy disk, and floppy disk was, if at this point, like the actual, you know, five and a quarter inch square shape floppy disks.

And they were really easy to copy.

And so what they would do is they would put something where you need to

put in information that you find in the physical manual.

Because the idea would be if your buddy had copied the game for you, or, you know,

probably not downloaded off the internet at this point, maybe.

But, you know, if your buddy had copied it, then you wouldn't have the manual and you couldn't answer the questions.

This game, it kind of brings it into the narrative.

Other games, it's more obvious.

I remember there was a Monty Python game where you had to look up a certain page and tell them what kind of cheese was on that page.

And then when you type the name of the cheese in, that's how you got past the copy protection.

And I will say, too, there are jokes in the manual.

Yeah.

I was like reading through the ingredients.

They kind of know like some of these things are silly.

They have a urea filophine, liquid version of ureafine used to alleviate the dreaded purple urine syndrome common to children who have ingested purple crayons.

Yeah.

So they've got they've got all kinds of like funny little things.

They have, we didn't get to procedures like broken bones, acne, yeah, there's a lot more fun burns, choking.

There's a lot more that you can do.

And they're all, I mean, I will say like it's pretty, it's pretty fun to read

the manual itself.

So yeah, you can look it up online or buy the game and you can get it with your your purchase.

Like I said, I got it on GOG.com.

You might be able to find it other places.

I don't know, but it was very affordable.

If you like our show, you like this kind of thing.

I don't know.

I think it's worth checking.

Can I give you?

I will say this.

Some of the gags have not aged super well.

You know, the 90s was

a different time.

And there's some, some, some.

Some representation of people from different parts of the world.

It's not great.

It's trying to be urbane and clever, but it's, I don't know.

It is very much a different time.

Yeah, like a blazing saddles thing, like you said.

I will say, I was looking through here and the heart attack.

Did they talk about like how to manage a heart attack in this manual?

One of the most feared sicknesses of all time.

Heart attack is a result of a sickly constitution.

Preventive medicine is best.

A healthy constitution must be foamed by a varied healthy diet.

Eat plenty of red meat, liver, pork, eggs, cream, cheese, and fried foods.

Supplement this with homegrown vegetables such as potatoes, corn, peas, pure white bread.

Fruits when available.

However, be worn.

Fruits may contain worms and other impurities and should be eaten sparingly.

So it's got a good sense of humor.

I thought it was a lot of fun.

I like the mixing.

I like the making the potions, so to speak, kind of aspect of it and solving people's problems.

I think that that was all really cute.

The time limit, the time thing was stressful.

It was stressful.

But it was a fun little game and it was an interesting, I wouldn't say like, did this, was this sort of a play on the medicine of the time?

Yes, but in the vaguest way.

Like they're not really depending on a knowledge of what kind of, you know what I mean?

Like they reference hysteria and the vapors and stuff in a very vague way, which would be an accurate thing.

But then they're not like.

Nobody,

well, I don't want to say nobody did any research, but it doesn't, it doesn't feel like they're trying to be accurate.

You know, they're not trying to talk about the medicines of the time.

They're just sort of joking about it.

Yeah.

But it's fun.

Man, it is a lot of fun.

That's going to do it for us.

Thanks to the taxpayers who use their song Medicines as the intro and outro of our program.

And thanks to you for listening.

That's going to do it for us for this week.

Until next time, my name is Justin McElroy.

I'm Sidney McEroy.

And as always, don't drill a hole in your hand.

All right.

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