- Accidental Aesop: You Are Not Alone when dealing with a family crisis, and know when to ask for help. Presumably, Skippy would have been less stressed if he had gotten more help after Slappy suffers a breakdown. Instead, he takes over the chores and lies to everyone that everything is fine at home. This gets foster care on his case, and they take him away from a dangerous situation. Even if he had been forced to go to foster care anyway, he could have done it on his terms and asked to keep visiting Aunt Slappy.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Slappy driven insane by the endless surge of weekday talk shows became all too real out-of-universe when weekday cartoons on syndicated television ended circa 2006 and were replaced with talk shows such as the highly age-inappropriate The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, and court shows like Judge Judy. A similar fate would occur to Saturday morning cartoons 8 years later due to their utter failure to compete with the rise of cable, video games, DVDs, YouTube and streaming services like Netflix. Ironically, Animaniacs itself would return in 2020 as a reboot on Hulu.
- The Woobie: Poor, poor Skippy. You really want to give him a hug after all he went through.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/AnimaniacsEpisode83
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