Animotion and Car Tunes

[Thad]

Prospect of new Animaniacs got me jonesing for some old Animaniacs.

You know how you can tell someone's a good caricaturist? When you see their Batman and you can tell it's Michael Keaton.

[Thad]

Tiny Toons is coming back too.

So that's Animaniacs and Tiny Toons...come ooooon Freakazoid announcement.

[Niku]

freakazoid without ricardo montalban is not really something i want unfortunately

[Büge]

At least we've still got David Warner.

[mharr]

I'm not how you write a Freakazoid for 2020's internet without going all Watchmen with it.

[Thad]

Well, the gags in this preview ain't great, but between Loren Bouchard and that cast I'm thinking this is gonna be pretty good.

Takes at least half a season for most shows to figure out what they are anyway.

[beatbandito]

Did you see Central Park? Same Bob's Burgers team, absolute trash fire (the writing, not just the white people voicing black characters and token nods to racism so they can get past that to the "actual story").

[Thad]

Nope, looks like I missed that one entirely.

A gander at Wikipedia says they've at least had the sense to recast it. And it didn't even take them 31 years!

[beatbandito]

Bob's Burgers just promised to recast Marshmallow for... Their(? The wiki page and references in stories say she's trans, but in the show seems to identify as a male drag queen) next appearance, too.

This is just the year of "finally getting around to it", I guess.

[Thad]

Funny thing is X-Men figured out "wait maybe we shouldn't have a white lady as Storm" before season 1 even made it to air. And then recast her and redubbed all her lines. And that was in 1994.

(Course, then they recast her again with a non-union actor and re-dubbed all her lines yet again so they wouldn't have to pay residuals, so let's not give the show too much credit for its ahead-of-its-time progressivism.)

[Thad]

And the new season of Animaniacs is up on Hulu.

Vulture has a pretty good article up about the first big musical number in the new series, Catch Up Song.

(Also, fun fact: the lyrics to the Pinky and the Brain theme were written to the tune of Singin' in the Rain. And Catch Up Song was, appropriately enough, written to tune of the Mexican Hat Dance, the same tune as Yakko's World.)

[Thad]

Anyhow, I liked it. New animation style looks fine (and the caricatures are as good as ever). Not a lot of big laughs, but that's how I always felt about Animaniacs; it's more clever than laugh-out-loud funny. (Though I had a pretty good laugh at Brain saying "We're going to give the people what they want" and Pinky taking off his robe and saying "Okay, but only if it's tasteful and fits my character." Goodnight, everybody.)

I like the new lyrics. "Dot has wit" is a good change. And then the second verse not just introducing the new, more-diverse supporting cast but explicitly tweaking the trolls who don't like it.

(And while he may no longer be in the theme song, Bill Clinton still plays the sax.)

[Niku]

I liked the second episode quite a bit more than the first. The first was cute but a little too preoccupied with itself and its existence as a reboot, while the second felt a bit more classically zany. I agree Animaniacs always felt more "clever" than "hilarious", so it's a pleasant surprise when it edges toward the latter. I mean, I legitimately groaned at the inevitable Trump bit in the Odysseus short, but then they went and made me actually laugh at a Trump bit when Trump as the Cyclops talks about his "two strong eyes".

The thing that made me most excited for this reboot in the first place was Katie Rice's involvement, and I definitely feel her style bleeding into the old guard in a way that works really well. The Odysseus short in particular felt like it had extremely Skadi energy while combining with the "Warners annoy a historical figure" trope.

[Thad]

I mean, I legitimately groaned at the inevitable Trump bit in the Odysseus short, but then they went and made me actually laugh at a Trump bit when Trump as the Cyclops talks about his "two strong eyes".

Yeah, I keep thinking about that joke and how good it is.

Something I think a lot about is satire as teacher. Whether it's Simpsons or Mad or Weird Al, satire pulls back the curtain and shows people, especially kids, the way the world really works.

As Trump jokes go, it's a relatively mild one, but it's surgical. It's perfect. It strikes right to the heart of who Trump is and what he does, and it does it concisely and effectively. It's educational, just as surely as the women's suffrage segment that follows. (Maybe moreso; the mid-song pivot into cartoon characters' suffrage was funny but I'm not sure if it was the right time to undercut the seriousness of the topic. I laughed at the Loonatics burn, though.)

[Thad]

New Animaniacs got me jonesing for old Tiny Toons.

I just watched the second episode, A Quack in the Quarks.

There's a bit where they're in the school lab and you see Plucky's face distorted through a flask.

The storyboard artist on this episode, one B. Timm, would reuse the same visual a couple of years later in On Leather Wings, the first episode of Batman: The Animated Series.

It's interesting to see some of Timm's distinctive stylistic touches in a show that's so different from the later work he's more known for, and it's also interesting to think about how the same visual trick can be funny in one context and creepy in another.

[Niku]

I’ve been slowly picking my way through nu Animaniacs as it makes for a pretty awful binge, and I’ve gotta say: if they could hit the quality like they do in episode 8 all the time I think the reception would’ve been a lot stronger. It’s got a gag-a-second Warner short that seems more on point and energetic than just about any other one I’ve seen so far, a great Pinky and the Brain that sets up their new potential “Snowball” esque recurring nemesis in another genetically altered mouse voiced by Maria Bamford and concludes with a completely new short with a lovely art style and a fun conceit.

In season two, way more of this please. There have been some other highlights (loved the P&tB where Brain builds a robot son and the Warners short that explains the absences of all the other side characters) and some real lowlights (oof to the rap battle) but the roller coaster of quality .. well, that’s authentic Animaniacs at least.

[Thad]

Yeah, the new segment at the end of episode 8 was really where the show started to feel more like a template for new Animaniacs than navel-gazing at old Animaniacs. I like to think this was a case where they felt they had to play it safe to get people onboard before they started rolling out the new stuff; I guess season 2 will tell.

[nosimpleway]

Oh, good, so sliding off the first several episodes isn't just me

[Thad]

I liked the first few fine but it gets better.

I just watched episode 9 and it's rather a nice combination of old (very old -- the first Warner segment homages Long-Haired Hare and Fantasia) and new (another original segment, which features John DiMaggio yelling a lot).

[Niku]

Finished up the season; Ex-Mousina, Mousechurian Candidate, and Future Brain definitely felt like the strongest of the P&tB segments across the thirteen episodes, but there weren't a lot of stinkers in the line-up there. Overall I'd say they maintain a middling-to-good quality pretty much start to finish, and even the worst of them are pretty alright.

The Warners are waaaaay more hit and miss, especially even grading during the course of a single segment. Like, there's some funny Werker und Parasite type stuff in the Russian episode, but it's mostly left flat by the completely strange pastiche of USSR and Putin jokes coexisting together. Why on earth was the gun control episode the one with the over the top anime sequence? The rapping sequence. The olympian games strongman not being especially funny in either appearance (though getting a pretty big laugh out of Wakko seeing him after his first appearance and just asking "Shouldn't you be in Hell?"). It took me a bit to come around on the fact that the human characters of the reboot really just feel like an intrusion of Spumco into the Warners' world, and sometimes that works for me and sometimes it doesn't.

Overall I think I appreciate that it drags forward another style of extreme and obnoxious 90s cartoon, but it simultaneously reminds me that I can do without the extreme close-ups on things just for the sake of being gross.

For the Warners, I'd think I'd go with WhoDonut, Good Warner Hunting, and Here Comes Treble as the strongest three. The Cutening gets an honorable mention for my favorite song segment.

Cindy and Starbox and the John DiMaggio bit were both 100% gold in my eyes. I hope they remain one-offs and we continue to get more one-offs going forward.