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Watch the original Animaniacs today is probably the closest you can get to scrolling through a mid-90s TikTok stream. The crazy variety show was like Looney Tunes as a golden age Saturday Night Live, a social media-era meme factory that seemed more interested in parodying show business and celebrities than entertaining kids. (The first episode is on a dang psychiatrist to the starsFunny thing is, kids loved the antics of the Warner siblings as they laughed and went wild in the studios. Adults, on the other hand, didn’t care about the jokes that actually took place. sure Said studio lots – jokes full of innuendo and reference aimed at consumers hungry for celebrity gossip, alongside deep jokes about the history of animation. It was unusually smart and baffling in hindsight.
New Animaniacs, rebooted and now streaming on Hulu, replicates the manic energy of the original but not really in the service of anything that seems transgressive or revolutionary. The premise is simple: After the show was canceled in 1998, Warner Yakko siblings Wakko and Dot spent the intervening years wandering through forgotten lands until the Steven Spielberg cartoon – in a jurassic park pastiche alongside the cartoon Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum – find them. And then they’re brought back to the Warner Bros. studio.
This jurassic park mashup is a good teaser for what you can expect from these antics: Looney Tunes– picturesque characters riffing on pop culture and current affairs. In one episode, the Warners recreate The odyssey, posing as Greek deities who aid and hinder Odysseus on his journey, while also sprinkling a pop culture satire (the cyclops of the story is Trump). There are a lot of jokes about reboots and the creative bankruptcy they mean, and how Hollywood has or hasn’t changed since the ’90s. When Dot meets a female senior executive, she asks for advice, but one said to him: “I think we must pull the ladder high after I climbed it!
There are also segments that feature songs (satirical and semi-educational), while stories featuring other characters are mostly limited to Pinky and the Brain. The original show’s large roster is largely missing from the reboot. Part of this is for good reason – Hello Nurse, a pin-up comeback mainly there to lead the Warner brothers wild, is a surprisingly sexist character for a 90s children’s cartoon – but if not, don’t expect segments all about Slappy Squirrel or gangster pigeons The Goodfeathers.
Above all, the new Animaniacs seems to be trying to succeed using the old formula. The problem is, there have been other shows that have done excellent showbiz satire in the Animaniacs‘absence, like BoJack Rider, which has managed to confuse Hollywood and the new media ecosystem that now covers it. Rick and morty is an adventure that jumps in the genres as well have a lot to say about the entertainment landscape. And Family guy created a whole genre of television where all the interest lies in the self-awareness of the audience. (It should be noted that the showrunner of the Animaniacs restarting is a Family guy alum.) Animaniacs, meanwhile, spends an entire segment of Pinky and the Brain blasting Seth Meyers and cute animal memes. It’s an odd segment that pokes fun at a version of Seth Meyers with no basis in reality – Meyers being the late-night host most openly interested in giving air time to unusual topics and commentary more incisive policies. Applying the same joke to a more frivolous host, like Jimmy Fallon, wouldn’t be much funnier, but at least it would make sense.
Part of the problems with the show lie in the changes in the industry around it. The original Animaniacs existed at a time when monoculture reigned; the alleged audience watched the same shows and movies, which the children picked up on. (A recent GQ George Clooney’s profile has the star highlighting how different this industry was in an era when a TV show could have 40 million viewers to watch.) Celebrity parody was a reliable pleasure in a time when no one had access easy to navigate a celebrity’s Instagram account, and it was even more fun to see a ‘kids’ cartoon doing these parodies. Things are different now than they were when Yakko, Wakko, and Dot began to rampage through the Warner Lot. Reboot seems stuck by just highlighting it.
BoJack Riderof comedy succeeds because it was specific. The show was performed by people who knew exactly the kind of person who looked at him, and it almost exclusively disturbed their tastes while as well being a work of rare emotional honesty. This makes Animaniacs feel like a relic from another time. It might as well be a dinosaur.
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