On tonight’s fifth-season premiere of TBS’s cult-hit comedy Cougar Town, there’s a subplot in which Ellie and Andy Torres’s preschool-aged son Stan can’t sleep because he’s afraid of Freddy Krueger.What’s one of the first things Andy comes up with to assuage his son’s fears?”I tried telling him that Superman is also real, and on the hunt for Freddy Krueger…but he didn’t buy it.”Of course, we wondered immediately whether there was any existing art to go with that.A quick Google Image search, though, finds that Andy didn’t come up with that idea. There are, in fact, over a dozen different Superman-versus-Freddy Photoshop jobs–including a few by DeviantArt user Angry Dog Designs. that one up top, one of the Angry Dog posters, is our favorite.Cougar Town had an Avengers-themed episode last year, too, if you remember, and they’ve also made numerous references to nerd-friendly shows like Spaced and Community (who reciprocated with a Cougar Town-themed episode as part of a running joke that Abed is a fan of the series). Series co-creator Kevin Biegel is an affirmed comic book nerd, and took to Twitter before Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was announced to offer Marvel an alternative choice for their first live-action series: Madrox.Freddy, of course, has been featured in a number of comics over the years, including a Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash miniseries written by Freddy Vs. Jason producer Jeff Katz.And of course, Freddy sucks a kid into a comic in Nightmare on Elm Street 5, turns the kid himself into a comic and rips him apart from there. You can see that below. Note that all of the comics there, except for the prop comic, are Marvel–so Freddy presumably doesn’t have a lot of experience with Superman himself.Cougar Town airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern on TBS. It’s better than the name suggests.
