Animaniacs Reboot in the Works

[JirinPanthosa]

A couple observations about episode 11.

First, this was written in 2018 right? If so they predicted distance trick or treating.

At the risk of over analyzing a children’s show. I find it very interesting that Yakko is the only one Nickelwise almost beat. This feels like a super insightful look at the characters. That Yakko is the only one whose irreverent behavior is an act that requires reciprocation. He’s the only sibling who is acting and seeking approval from others. And dressing up as Groucho Marx after the rap battle episode called him a reboot of rebooted Groucho Marx feeds into that.

This reboot feels like it was written by the guy who wrote his senior thesis on a critical analysis of the Animaniacs.

 

[Sci]

I saw the first five episodes. It’s enjoyable and nostalgic and feels more targeted at adults than the original.

In fairness, the original Animaniacs did a lot of stuff geared towards adults that would go over kids' heads. Parodying The Agony and the Ecstasy in "Hooked on a Ceiling," parodying The Seventh Seal by having the Warners play checkers with Death in "Meatballs or Consequences," Rita and Runt doing a version of Les Mis in "Les Miseranimals," the entire Goodpidgeons thing being a combo of GoodFellas and The Godfather, doing Heart of Darkness/Apolcaypse Now/the Hearts of Darkness documentary in "Hearts of Twilight" (with Jerry Lewis as the combination Kurtz/Francis Ford Coppola character!), etc. Heck, the cartoon "Yes, Always" was just one long in-joke about the Orson Welles Frozen Peas commercial outtakes.

I'm noticing the background music a lot more than I did the original show, like they'll play things thematically appropriate (I assume the original did this as well). Like there was a scene in Episode 4 involving Australia and the background music was Waltzing Matilda. Or earlier there was a reference to Yakko's country song from the original series and the background music switched to a hint of that.

The original did that too -- my girlfriend and I were re-watching "Roll Over, Beethoven" last night and we noticed a bunch of leitmotifs from Beethoven's works in the score.

They both remind me more of Ren & Stimpy than Animaniacs.

The half-naked Greek guys have definitely had a Ren & Stimpy vibe to them. I would have preferred them to be done differently.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

The half-naked Greek guys have definitely had a Ren & Stimpy vibe to them. I would have preferred them to be done differently.

The way the gnome came out of people's mouths reminded me of 90s Nickelodeon style animation, and with Starbox it was the embellished buttocks.

I guess Animaniacs did always have those kinds of references, but also children 8-13 are already aware of pop culture mob movie references even if they haven't seen the movies. But a lot of the more meta jokes feel like they are casted at people who remember watching it as a kid.

 

[Sci]

I guess Animaniacs did always have those kinds of references, but also children 8-13 are already aware of pop culture mob movie references even if they haven't seen the movies. But a lot of the more meta jokes feel like they are casted at people who remember watching it as a kid.

*shrugs* To me the new show feels like the meta jokes are no more adult-directed than the old show.

 

[Christopher]

I guess Animaniacs did always have those kinds of references, but also children 8-13 are already aware of pop culture mob movie references even if they haven't seen the movies. But a lot of the more meta jokes feel like they are casted at people who remember watching it as a kid.

I think the mob-movie references in the "Goodfeathers" sketches were always aimed at the parents watching with their kids, and for the makers' own amusement, while the kids would've missed them and focused on the more basic comedy antics and slapstick. That's been the pattern for cartoons going back to the original Looney Tunes theatrical shorts -- a surface layer of sight gags and explosions for the kids, a deeper layer of cultural allusions and innuendos for the grownups.

Heck, I saw the show as an adult and I didn't get the mob-movie references, since I've never seen Goodfellas. Or rather, I realized they must have been references to characters and lines from that movie, and maybe other mob movies I haven't seen, but my only familiarity with them came from "Goodfeathers"' own relentless, formulaic overuse of them.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I think the mob-movie references in the "Goodfeathers" sketches were always aimed at the parents watching with their kids, and for the makers' own amusement, while the kids would've missed them and focused on the more basic comedy antics and slapstick. That's been the pattern for cartoons going back to the original Looney Tunes theatrical shorts -- a surface layer of sight gags and explosions for the kids, a deeper layer of cultural allusions and innuendos for the grownups.

Heck, I saw the show as an adult and I didn't get the mob-movie references, since I've never seen Goodfellas. Or rather, I realized they must have been references to characters and lines from that movie, and maybe other mob movies I haven't seen, but my only familiarity with them came from "Goodfeathers"' own relentless, formulaic overuse of them.

When Animaniacs came out though, Goodfellas was only three years old. I had never seen it or the Godfather but I knew about 'Make em an offer you can't refuse' and some of the other big takeaway lines cause I'd seen it being parodied for a long time.

But also in the original show I remember a show where they made fun of Barney the Dinosaur. That was clearly aimed at the kids who had outgrown Barney the Dinosaur. There's nothing like that in the reboot so far, specifically exploiting 'Edutainment fatigue' the way the Buddy Bears in Garfield and Friends did. And the Marx Brothers slapstick is arguable accessible to all ages.

Not to mention all the repetitive formula characters since kids have more patience for repetition, all gone in the reboot.

 

[Christopher]

But also in the original show I remember a show where they made fun of Barney the Dinosaur. That was clearly aimed at the kids who had outgrown Barney the Dinosaur.

Or else it was aimed at the parents who hated having to watch Barney along with their kids. Like I said, it's always been the norm in kids' cartoons to have a second layer of adult humor that goes above the kids' heads -- partly to amuse the parents watching with their kids, and partly to amuse the creators themselves.

Not to mention all the repetitive formula characters since kids have more patience for repetition, all gone in the reboot.

The thing is, there's a good way and a bad way to do a formula. A good formula is just a framework that many different things can be built on; the setup repeats but the payoff is always different. A bad formula is one where the payoff is always the same, a single joke or a single punchline repeated over and over. Pinky & the Brain is a good formula -- it's always about trying to take over the world, but there are countless different ways it plays out. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering" is a good formula, because only the setup repeats and the punchline is always different. Goodfeathers was a bad formula because the punchlines are always the same, an obligatory set of mob-movie catchphrases and running gags. Chicken Boo was a terrible formula, a completely backward formula, because the setup changed but the payoff was always identical, and was never funny to begin with. Buttons and Mindy was a mix of good and bad formula; the meat of the cartoons were a good formula because the "chase the baby courting disaster" routine can play out in many different ways, but the frames of the cartoons were a terrible formula because it made the same mistake of changing the setup but reusing the exact same beats every time.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

Hah, just watching episode nine. Ralph Garman is the conducter.

 

[Sci]

When Animaniacs came out though, Goodfellas was only three years old. I had never seen it or the Godfather but I knew about 'Make em an offer you can't refuse' and some of the other big takeaway lines cause I'd seen it being parodied for a long time.

Side-note: When my girlfriend and I finally got around to watching The Godfather earlier this quarantine, we both had this weird sensation of deja vu the entire time because we knew so many beats and important scenes and quotes from the movie, but we just didn't have a full context for them. It was like seeing a movie you'd forgotten about even though we'd never seen it before -- and I'm pretty sure Animaniacs is one of the places some of those familiar beats and quotes came from!

This imaginary Animaniacs pitch meeting from The Toast points out that that's a very common experience for us Millennials who grew up on the original series:

EXEC #2: Hey, I love a clever parody as much as the next knucklehead, but will the children even understand a majority of these jokes?

THE ANIMATOR: No, they will not.

[…]

THE ANIMATOR: Animaniacs will not make sense to them now. It will make the world make sense to them later.

[Silence, but for EXEC #1’s barely-breathed ‘narf’]

THE ANIMATOR: In the past there were no divisions between children’s and adult entertainment. Everyone sat ’round the kerosene lamp reading The Leatherstocking Tales and everyone at the trading post made the same puns. But in our PG-13 age, who’s going to introduce your daughter to essential Americana, if not the Godpidgeon?

EXEC #2: I mean, maybe she doesn’t need to know about organized crime just yet?

THE ANIMATOR: Cultural literacy is an Always food, my friend.

EXEC #2: You’re saying that ten years from now, a young person will watch The Godfather or read Freud for the first time and realize that the Viennese shrink archetype in their minds was actually from Animaniacs all along? And the mumbling mafia don and the plot of Les Miserables and the fall of the Tsars? That the show will act as a sort of contextual membrane through which kids absorb quintessential images that will one day render direct source material more accessible, and that the cultural déjà vu they experience when they encounter said material will recur throughout their adult lives?

THE ANIMATOR: Quite. Research indicates that 90 percent of this generation’s cultural associations will have been shaped by Animaniacs.

EXEC #2: Wait. That’s not even — you’re just making up whatever —

THE ANIMATOR: Rearranging the lines, is all. Rearranging the lines. Now…

[rolls pencils across the table]

THE ANIMATOR: Are you ready to draw the future?

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Huh, I just made a post, saw it appear twice, tried to delete one and both disappeared.

I didn’t see Citizen Kane or Thelma and Louise until I was 20, I still understood what Rosebud was and what was being referenced when two women drove off a cliff.

And I don’t know if you had a different experience of being 8 than me but I loved it whenever anything made fun of the kids programs trying to teach me something.

I’ll compare it to the Buddy Bears in Garfield again. Roy got an acting job on the Buddy Bears show and it went like this:

Bear “I always squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom.”
Roy “I always squeeze it from the top!”
(Giant safe falls on Roy)
Bear “You see kids, if you squeeze the toothpaste from the top, a 16 ton safe will fall on you!”

That sort of thing feels like it’s directly pandering to 8-12 year olds. It’s what I loved when I was that age.

Repeatedly dropping anvils on Barney’s head feels like the same thing.

Also they finally stopped using anvils. Nobody knew what they were for in 1993 much less now.

 

[JD]

Does anybody even use anvils at all any more? I'm thinking these days blacksmiths have machines for most of that kind of stuff.

 

[StarCruiser]

Some still use actual anvils for detail work or for hobby related smithing.

Some also use them just to recreate the methods used in ye olden times...

 

[Turtletrekker]

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[Samurai8472]

Season 3 has been greenlit

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1365043897882312711

 

[Turtletrekker]

Tress Macneille has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy for Animaniacs. "Outstanding performance in a daytime animated program".

You can take my word for it, or you can go all the way down to the bottom of the article linked below, because it's literally the last category they posted.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/variet...childrens-animation-lifestyle-1235006729/amp/

ETA: she's been nominated for an Emmy twice before. In 2015, a Primetime Emmy nomination for The Simpsons, and a Daytime Emmy in 2018.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Rest in peace to the voice of Pesto, Chick Vennera.

https://www.animationmagazine.net/p...ZxKZoC944d2OvHdOUwG8_uuVSNzVJ-PQ53JdKWcegwLgA

 

[Turtletrekker]

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[JirinPanthosa]

Is season 2 out? I am not on any Animaniacs related news streams.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Is season 2 out? I am not on any Animaniacs related news streams.

November 5.

 

[Tuskin38]

Is season 2 out? I am not on any Animaniacs related news streams.

The trailer above gives the release date.