Animaniacs

I'm a Venezuelan living in Venezuela and found the Nicolas Maduro gag to be absolutely hilarious. Sadly Truth in Television too, which speaks a lot about our situation...

As for Hello Nurse, since she was a 'normal' human and not a cartoon in-universe (granted, she also was seen in a 1930s flashback, but that can be handwaved as Identical Ancestor), maybe they should have brought her back but aged and less sexualized? Maybe as the new doctor? That would have made sense, they don't even have to make a drama out of it.

Yakko: "Oh, so you are... you are..."

(Hello Doctor nods).

Yakko and Wakko: (awkward silence).

Dot: (laughs) "Oh, boys! Always so shallow, only looking at the appearances, and—"

(A strapping blue eyed blond hunk walks in): "Hey, Mom, I was passing by and came to say hello, I'm going to—"

Dot: "HELLOOOOOOO, SON OF NURSE!" (Jumps on him).

I wonder what the general consensus of Wakko's Wish is. I say this mainly from how it's referenced in universe of the 2020 series how it was 22 years since the show ended, putting it in 1998, though Wakko's Wish came out in 1999. So I'm guessing that, in universe, it never happened?

Edited by jessicadicicco610 on Nov 22nd 2020 at 5:03:18 AM

Wakko's Wish doesn't take place in present day, so it couldn't be 'in continuity' regardless.

Continuity? In Animaniacs?

...ehh, I was pondering(heh), in theory, that since the show ended having relevance in the early 2000s, the Warner Siblings were locked backed into the Water Tower and they stayed there for (Insert Reason Here). But then, in late 2020, the new CEO decided, out of curiosity, to reopen the Tower and given the Warner Siblings another chance. The Warners decide to accept, just to sprang loose again.

If they're they're consider Animated Actors, makes me wonder they would think of all the newcomers they see? From Disney, WB, FOX, CN, Nick, Video Games, etc. And what the Newcomers(and veterans) would think of them.

I want to see something like this officially!

Edited by asiacatdogblue on Nov 22nd 2020 at 1:12:19 AM

There is some, at least in the episodes that include the slavic jock dude.

His appearance end with him falling into hell and when he returns in Hindenburg Cola Wakko acknowledges that.

Scratchansniff lost his hair in the very first episode of the original and stayed that way. The Warners' teacher also sticks around to some degree after being introduced in an episode (I wonder if we'll see her again? There's nothing terribly problematic about the character).

Pinky and the Brain had more of a (still loose) sense of continuity, with characters like Billie, Snowball and Pharbynewton being introduced and then returning or being mentioned in later episodes. The new series seems to be setting something similar with Julia, and of course, the Elmyra spinoff had even more of a sense of that, what with the government agent thread, or Elmyra's cat being reprogrammed into acting like a dog as a change that sticks for the rest of the series.

So yeah, the franchise sometimes does try to achieve some vague sense of continuity. More than Looney Tunes or Tiny Toon at least.

The only attempt at Tiny Toons continuity that I remember (outside of recurring characters of situations) was the photo of Buster's pet dinosaur that was in his locker at the end of How I Spent My Summer Vacation, which was a callback to the episode "Rock and Roar."

x4 Animaniacs did still get some new video games in the 2000's, same with Tiny Toon Adventures.

Edited by CookingCat on Nov 22nd 2020 at 5:16:44 AM

There was a distinct lack of uhhh....this.

Watching this on regular TV, yes really, and I'm five episodes in. So far, every episode is a Warner segment, a Pinky and the Brain segment, then a short Warner segment. Are we going to see any of the rest of the cast from the original series? Are we going to get Slappy, Goodfeathers, Rita, Mindy, Katie Kaboom, or any of the other classic Animaniacs characters? Episode 5 was the Chicken Boo episode (great mythology gag there) where we do see most of these characters, but I can't tell if that was a one-off thing, since none of the characters have any lines.

Edited by WillKeaton on Nov 22nd 2020 at 7:35:51 AM

None this season, I do hope they bring Slappy back at least. Wabbit had the same problem with the lack of cast.

Presumably not in Season 2 either, since it was ordered early in production and apparently the only chance the cast is expanding is if the first two seasons do well.

"Wabbit" was a bout Bugs alone. That was expected.

Only if they bring back Sherri Stoner.

"Are we going to get Slappy, Goodfeathers, Rita, Mindy, Katie Kaboom, or any of the other classic Animaniacs characters?"

I don't know that I'd call Katie Kaboom a "classic Animaniacs character." Didn't she appear only once (I know Minerva Mink appeared twice, and then not until the second season, even though she's in the opening credits)? The problem with most of the rest of the Animaniacs cast was that most of them were very one-note jokes. Chicken-Boo's really a chicken, we get it. They mostly just put him in different situations, but played the scenes exactly the same way without variation. Katie causes explosions when she gets upset (cuz teenagers are volatile and emotional; hilarious). It isn't that these situations couldn't be the foundation for funny shorts; all of the Animaniacs characters are built on limited premises, but their success depended on how much humor could be based on, or injected into, those premises. In a lot of cases, it just...wasn't. The Warners themselves, and Pinky and the Brain, are generally considered to be the most successful characters to come out of the show.

While I did find the Warners funny, they were occasionally hard to take. In the original shorts, the people they heckled were not always deserving of heckling. I remember feeling particularly bad for Albert Einstein.

According to the Animaniacs wiki, there were six Katie Ka-boom cartoons.

As I tend to mention every time someone tries to claim this, this was very blutly the case for the Warners as well. Off the top of my head, the only exception to this was Pinky and the Brain, which is probably why they got their own show, and maybe Slappy.

This wasn't a "problem," it was an intentional design choice: as a means of emulating the classic Looney Tunes shorts - many of which featured characters who were based around one or two gags at most, and was further emphasized by the variety show nature of the original Animaniacs program. Many of the concepts therein were one note, but because you got so many different cartoons in a single episode you were still getting a wide variety of humor.

As such, the show was intentionally built around delivering a lot of simple characters all at once.

This was ultimately the primary difference between Animaniacs and - say - Tiny Toon Adventures: while Animanics features a lot of characters very different characters and concepts all with very simplistic and uncomplicated characterizations and humor styles, Tiny Toon Adventures features a shared universe and fewer primary characters, but whom tended to have more shades to them and carry more narrative plots.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 22nd 2020 at 10:07:21 AM

Right, and that's why I went on to say that a limited premise isn't necessarily a problem, it's how that premise is handled, how much humor could be derived from the premise or could be injected into it. In some cases, that turned out to be a lot; not so much in others.

The Warners seem like a mix of Bugs & Daffy really where they'll just heckle someone for no real reason in one short or they'll react to someone who wrongs them first in another.

They'll really wanna up the "variety" aspect in season 2.

Your post does come off a bit more as you personally not liking the jokes than the jokes inherently not being entertaining, to note. But to be fair that is, admittedly, the pitfall of simple comedic shorts.

If the joke doesn't land for a person, the person won't find anything in that short to entertain them, since the short is built around a single gag: Either you find them funny or you don't.

It's one of the reasons why, say, many fans either like screwball Daffy and or greedy Daffy, why characters like Screwy Squirrel are so polarizing, why programs that stick entirely to formula tend to have to maintain a very specific fanbase, etc and so on - because either you like the joke or you don't.

But that said, I don't agree that that's a good reason not to bring those characters back at all.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 22nd 2020 at 10:16:01 AM

Gotta say, I only watched the first few episodes of the reboot, but it's pretty good. Pinky's lines usually hit me the hardest, though.

In the first episode alone Pinky had at least three lines that completely floored me.

The Goodfeathers had one-note routines (Pesto's with Squit got old really fast and never went away), but didn't have one-note plots. Every cartoon followed its own kind of story with different beats, it's just these gags would be inserted at some point between those plot beats (the Godfather shows up and mumbles, Pesto beats Squit up) and happen every time.

But the plots could be about anything from Pesto's mother remarrying to Bobby being challenged to a boxing match to the birds playing roles in Hitcock's The Birds to them working as messenger pigeons in WWII. It's not like Chicken Boo, which had a single plot with different setting dressings.

Edited by AmazingSpiderHam on Nov 23rd 2020 at 9:42:55 AM

I'm watching Suffragette City. Is that Tress MacNeille singing? Her voice sounds oddly deep and resembling Rob Paulsen's voice, so I thought for a moment it was a cross-dressing Yakko singing about the suffragettes.

I can't watch it on Hulu, though on Youtube there are already several short clips such as the ones on this channel, so here's my short take on it: it's fairly good and a decent adaptation of a show created more than 2 decades ago... however, of all the 90s shows tropes they could resurrect I'm not too happy that they chose the Grossout Show. Between the grotesque designs of the human characters (celebrities included), and some lovely moments like the Warners licking a diseased pigeon or a poodle slobbering all over her owner's lips (not to mention the hunter reverting back to Chicken Boo in the style of The Fly), and the general mean-spiritedness of some gags, it feels like something made by John Kreepfalusi at times.

I can say though that the anime sequence is pretty great and spot-on in being an Affectionate Parody while nailing the style of the more action-oriented shows, far better than crap like Neo Yokio or Ballmastrz 9009.

Agreeing with you, I'm not a big fan of the gross-out gags either. The Gross-Up Close-Up of Marie Antoinette's un-manicured nails and Odysseus getting rubbed at Trump-cyclops's nipples were two particularly uncomfortable moments to me.