Alternate Aesop Interpretation: The well-written but nonetheless anvilicious episode "Inherit the Wheeze" focuses on the message "Smoking is bad." However, since the Brain only became addicted as a result of clearly painful experiments the lab forced him to go through, which he didn't enjoy one bit, the message "Experimenting on animals is cruel" comes across much more powerfully.
Alternative Character Interpretation: Sure, "one is a genius and the other's insane". But who is insane? The megalomaniac bent on world domination or the one who saves the world every night and seems to be a pretty happy guy? Never mind that Pinky is much more literate than Brain, or the few times Pinky has gotten much further than Brain in taking over the world, even becoming President of the United States once. In contrast, many of Brain's evil schemes run on Insane Troll Logic, and even while some of them can be excused since they live in a crazed cartoon universe, the way he goes about achieving them is often stupid enough that Failure Is the Only Option anyway. Word of God has confirmed that the theme song leaves it open to the viewers to decide...
Aluminum Christmas Trees: The opening to "Inherit the Wheeze" — think strapping a mouse into what looks like a medieval torture device and forcing him to smoke cigarettes is a cartoonishly outlandish way of studying the effects of smoking that real scientists couldn't actually do? Well, that's actually exactlyhow they do it — all the animators did was alter the layout of the device, which in real life places the rats in tubes or in a cage with smoke piped in.
Dark Pinky, a competent, superpowered, and evil version of Pinky from the first issue of the comic series. has ended up quite popular on tumblr.
Romy, Pinky and Brain's Two-Donor Clone, only appeared in one episode, but is quite popular among fans, especially those who see Pinky and Brain as a domestic couple.
The episode where Pinky and the Brain create a papier-mache replica of the Earth, so that they can convince everyone to relocate and they can take over the real world. The background music during the montage of them building the thing? Dvorak's Symphony no 9 "From the New World."
The mice made cameos in the two prime-time Tiny Toons specials, and both cameos had them in scenes prominently featuring Elmyra. Apparently, this must've been where they got the idea for the much-reviled RetoolPinky, Elmyra & the Brain.
Similarly, the episode "Pinky and the Brain and Larry" became this after Elmyra became the third character in the Retool. Particularly hard to swallow considering the whole point of said short was to protest the demands of the network executives to add a third character, which obviously fell on deaf ears.
Memetic Mutation: It is difficult to say "What are we going to do tonight?" to someone who watched this show without getting "The same thing we do every night, try to take over the world!" as a response.
"I think so Brain, but where are we going to find a duck and a hose at this hour?"
More Popular Spin Off: The series was (and still is) way more popular than Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures will ever be. This is partially due to the fact that those other two shows based a lot of their jokes on pop culture references that passed over the heads of most of the audience, and untranslatable puns.
Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain. Not only do the fans hate the series, but also the writer; Peter Hastings not only wrote an episode of the original series predicting the series' downfall because of the executives' demands ("You'll Never Eat Food Pellets in This Town Again"), but later left Warner Bros.
To a lesser, yet still reviled, extent, when the show was rerun on Nickelodeon, the channel superimposed their logo onto various objects in every single shot of the intro. Nobody liked it.
Values Dissonance: Brainania has a touch of this. This is partially from the portrayal of South Pacific Islanders as naive and easy to dupe, and partially because foreign aid is nowadays seen as favorable.
Values Resonance: While it results from a bizarre situation, "Brinky" shows a two-father family in a relatively fair light for the 1990s, with most humor coming from Pinky and Brain's clashing parenting styles rather than them both being men. When they appear on The Rikki Lake Show, nobody seems to mind that they're two men (or mice, for that matter), and Romy's quip about having two dads is more a segue into a Full House joke than something homophobic.
The Woobie: Both mice are examples in their own ways.
Pinky, despite his cheerful personality, gets hit with Break the Cutie quite a bit (like when he was crying in "The Family That Poits Together, Narfs Together" when he remembers being taken away from his family), and he could really use a hug at times in the Christmas and Halloween special episodes.
Brain tirelessly works to achieve his ambition, but is constantly thwarted by various means. It may be that his gene-splicing experience has deprived him of much of his emotional sensitivity, hence his cold and jerkish tendancies. He slips into Jerkass Woobie territory on several occasions when he realizes how badly he treats Pinky and gets upset about it. It also doesn't hurt that he's capable of pulling off some serious Puppy-Dog Eyes — and does so in the opening theme.
— all the animators did was alter the layout of the device, which in real life places the rats in tubes or in a cage with smoke piped in.