The reboot lacks such variety, instead focusing primarily on the Warner siblings and Pinky and the Brain segments, with hardly any other familiar faces or new characters. In addition to the Warner siblings Yakko (voiced by Rob Paulsen), Wakko (Jess Harnell), and Dot (Tress MacNeille) the show birthed a number of distinct and memorable personalities who rotated throughout the Animaniacs universe, including Slappy the Squirrel (Sherri Stoner), a curmudgeonly veteran cartoon star Rita (Bernadette Peters) and Runt (Frank Welker), a singing cat and dimwitted dog pair and Colin (Colin Wells), the chatty boy who tells offbeat stories about his friend Randy Beaman. What makes the original incarnation still watchable decades later – even as many of the references are very of their time – is the timelessness of their original characters. Maybe not – but oh, how I wish the writers had tried a bit harder to do so anyway.
Should we have expected anything different? After all, following the last four years, is it even possible to make meta humor without speaking directly to how wild, surreal and utterly zany to the max everything in real life has become? There are still pop culture references galore, to be sure – the opening scene from the first episode hits the ball straight down the middle of millennial sensibilities with a Jurassic Park parody – but the balance has noticeably tilted more heavily toward the explicitly political. Sprinkled in among the many Looney Toon homages, Disney parodies and sprightly musical numbers was the occasional political gag or segment that surely went over the heads of millennial kids like myself, but appealed to the adults in the room who understood what was going on with the Whitewater scandal.īecause it's 2020, the new Animaniacs theme song includes a line in which the characters proclaim they are "Gender balanced, pronoun neutral, and ethnically diverse." It's just one sign that the reboot, now streaming on Hulu, is thoroughly of This Moment – among the 13 episodes, there is a segment involving a bizarre allegory for gun control (using bunnies instead of guns!), puns about fake news and "Make America Great Again," and, of course, at least one (Hillary) Clinton jab.
Clinton jokes were everywhere in that era, even in cartoons supposedly aimed at kids, and as a show specializing in meta humor and mile-a-minute cultural references, Animaniacs was no different. Animation/Huluīecause it was the early '90s, one version of the zippy theme song for the original Animaniacs includes a reference to Bill Clinton playing the sax. Yakko, Wakko and Dot return for a very politically-minded reboot of Animaniacs.Ĭourtesy Amblin Television/Warner Bros.
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