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Freakylinks

In late 1999, Haxan Films' Gregg Hale had an idea: take part of the pilot money from a television show deal and put it into a web counterpart. In January 2000, Freakylinks.com launched and by July 2000 (when the television show was first revealed) the site had broken the top 3,000 most trafficked websites list with 325,000 ardent monthly fans of Derek Barnes' adventures who were convinced Fox Television was ripping off his life for a series. And they spent, on average, nearly 32 minutes on the website each visit.

Despite the troubled history of the television half of the story and the controversy over the paranormal themes, the fan base around "Freakylinks" was an amazingly vibrant alternate universe. When Fox Television canceled the series (and thus, the website) in February 2001, some fans described losing the site as "the death of a friend," while others organized fan efforts to save the show and the website.

Little wonder it ended up on all of our "most favorite" lists at GMD Studios and remains one of the high-bars in audience experience. Three-legged strippers, civil war dinosaurs, inappropriate chocolate chip cookies, and the boiling of gasoline certainly didn't hurt either.