At the beginning of 2020, people were upset about … many things … with no reprieve in sight.
SNL was no longer funny. The heroes were all deconstructed. Movie theaters were struggling. Award ceremonies were pandering. People were blaming each other for everything … based on the stupidest thing a country could possibly war over: identity labels.
The truth of what was happening was being caught on video by citizen journalists, but the news kept lying and doubling down, erupting a powder keg of its own creation.
It was fascinating watching those citizen journalists get censored and buried by biased algorithms in real time, get taken down by demonetization tactics, get sued out of existence, or even get jailed as political prisoners.
For those who could look past the thin veneer and see the lies for what they were, the world seemed like a more terrible place than ever.
We had yet to experience the dreaded lockdowns and already we wanted a reprieve, some normalcy, a chance to come up for some air. We were sick of the “New Normal”. We wanted something honest to bring us back to simpler times.
ENTER AN UNLIKELY AND POTENTIAL HERO
Well, how ’bout a new season of Animaniacs? Sounded too good to be true. After all, the original show was a genuinely fun musical sketch comedy which aired from 1993 to 1998. And getting something like that in a time where it felt like “we can’t have nice things” …felt impossible.
(Now you might be wondering why I’m suddenly talking about the Animaniacs reboot from five years ago, a show that is now canceled. And it’s because something fascinating happens to Yakko in the first episode, something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a long time.)
The original Animaniacs graced us during the high nineties, a time when creativity was exploding. The show ended only one year after Cultural Ground Zero, exiting the scene before it could do much to tarnish its sterling reputation.
With its original ensemble cast of animated characters, its high-energy creative skits, zeitgeist catch-phrases, myriad of pop culture references, slightly edgy innuendo, clever parodies, unique treatment of classical music and musicals, and nods to classic comedians such as Abbot and Costello and the Marx Brothers, it was a show universally loved by its target audience, a show that seemingly could not miss.
Following the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Tiny Toon Adventures, the show was yet another clear sign that Warner Bros. Animation was a tour de force that knew how to reinvent itself, evolving past its slapstick-heavy roots.
The Warner brothers (and their sister Dot) were absolutely charming, waiting to welcome you home after a hard day at school with open arms. They were comfort food.
“I think so, Brain, but [insert non-sequitur here].” (My favorite was always, “But where are we going to find rubber pants our size?”)
And if the main show wasn’t already great enough, it was peppered with segments featuring concepts so strong, they were practically worthy of their own shows, such as “Rita & Runt”, “The Goodfeathers”, “Pinky & the Brain”, and “Slappy the Squirrel”.
And that’s not even close to an exhaustive list.
THE RED FLAGS
The fact that referencing pop culture was a crucial part of the formula which made Animaniacs such a zeitgeist in 1993 was my first red flag. Because, with few exceptions, 2020 pop culture just wasn’t fun anymore.
In the high nineties, you could cameo in the likes of Sharon Stone or Gallagher for a quick laugh. But today’s celebrities had become insufferable pricks.
Were they going to drop in Mark Ruffalo, now? Awkwafina? Mr. Beast? I certainly wasn’t looking forward to any of that.
The second red flag was the show would be a Hulu Original. I had my doubts that Hulu could recapture even a fraction of the magic of the old show.
And the third red flag was that it was being billed as a reboot. A reboot? Really? Hm.
I know the old show sometimes featured some mild politics, but that particular aspect didn’t concern me much. The politics were usually innocuous and balanced, stuff like Michael Dukakis showing up for a cameo, or Bill Clinton playing the sax. They were as likely to have innocent cameos as poke mild fun at personalities like Chelsea Clinton and Al Gore.
EARLY SIGNS THAT THINGS WERE LOOKING GOOD
The show had been written in 2018, and they somehow managed to NOT redesign the characters in a subversive way like had happened with so many other 80s and 90s properties, like Ninja Turtles and Thundercats.
And then the Jurassic Park teaser dropped. And, oh boy was it epic:
1 minute and 41 seconds of pure bliss. THIS was the show we loved and remembered, and it was seemingly back in all its glory, as hilarious and entertaining as it ever was. Perhaps even moreso.
When this thing dropped, I was hyped, excited to introduce this show to my children. In fact, my kids were watching it beside me and they were hyped as well. They were jumping around and giddy and couldn’t wait for the first episode. My wife and I had referenced Animaniacs around them in the past, but now they got it. Now, they were on board.
And, you know what? It was nice. It was only two minutes. But for just a little while, my family could forget about all the burning and looting and cheating and identity labels and just be happy again.
AND THEN THE FIRST EPISODE DROPPED.
22 years had passed since the last episode. What could possibly go wrong?
It started out innocent enough with a joke about how everything’s been getting rebooted lately, and the Warner Bros. (and sister) not wanting to sign the deal. That is, until they saw just how much money Hulu was willing to pay them.
Queue the cast rising from their graves.
Telling. The main characters knew a deal with Hulu in 2020 probably wasn’t the best idea. But all it took was a little mammon for them to change their minds.
It fits the running gag well enough, though, that Warner Bros. animated characters are difficult-to-please actors with real-life contractual deals.
They then ran the Jurassic Park clip from earlier, to thunderous applause. Queue the new intro. Still the classic opening, with only minor changes. Okay, we’re still on board.
The first episode proper begins. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot set foot in the Warner Movie Lot for the first time in 22 years and have a conversation about how important it is they nail their opening lines.
Alright guys, there’s a lot of pressure riding on our first lines. They gotta be funny. They gotta be irreverent. Most of all, they’ve got to be carefully crafted.
After Yakko and Wakko waste their first lines on the discussion about first lines, it’s all riding on Dot to deliver a killer first line on their behalf.
And just when she takes a breath to speak, they cut her off to give a few last minute pointers.
Yakko: “Maybe something reminiscent of the first season?”
Wakko: “But modern, to show that we’re not your dad’s Animaniacs.”
Yakko: “Buuut not so modern that you’ll alienate the dads because they’re a key part of our demographic.”
Clearly, the writers understood that a lot of folks who grew up with this show had high hopes and expectations. They knew a lot was riding on the success of this show.
(Though I’m not sure why they kept bringing up dads in particular, since Animaniacs was a show that appealed widely to both boys and girls.)
Another thing that’s a little discerning is that Dot is getting very annoyed and angry at her two brothers, as if she can no longer tolerate even a minor annoyance from them. This is verified when Dot smashes the two boys into the ground with a mallet. A bit out-of-character for her. She used to have nerves of steel and rely on her cuteness and sweetness to get by.
But finally, Dot delivers her first line:
Twenty-two years later, and I’m still a knockout.
Very “classic Dot”. So far, so good!
The iconic WB water tower catches their attention and they run toward it with glee, their hearts soaring, happy to finally come home.
So far, to my delight, the show had been proving to not be a reboot, but a continuation. It felt good to be home.
But the Warners disrespectfully slap aside several iconic, heroic characters to reach it. Not the best message, given that most of our heroes had recently been subverted and displaced, but I wasn’t too worried yet.
Now’s probably a good time to mention that the extras have this strange design that doesn’t quite jive with the aesthetic of the show. They feel more like they came from a cheap animation you’d find on a typical early 90s “Interactive CD-ROM”.
There’s also a lot more Spumco-style gross-out humor here with boogers, fart jokes, extreme close-ups of disgusting things, and the original show never had to stoop to that level.
When the original used gross-out humor at all, there was a level of sophistication to it, such as when “The Great Wakkorati” burped to classical music.
We get a few meh jokes about alarm systems and Wakko’s 22-year-old sandwich (more gross-out humor), get reintroduced to the Warner Movie Lot security guard (Ralph T. Guard) who blissfully hasn’t changed one iota, and then he captures them with a security drone. This fascinates the Warners – They’ve never seen a drone before.
Cut to the “boss”.
A loathsome 2020 tryhard blathering about “micro-dosing” over her earpiece. But that’s okay, bad guys are supposed to be annoying-
“A female CEO?!” exclaims Dot. “Any interest in mentoring a young, future CEO?”
Huge facepalm.
Even though Dot’s not been around for 22 years, she’s somehow still managed to be programmed to think like a modern progressive feminist. In other words, she’s outrageously sexist.
Dot’s not aspiring to be a CEO, but a female CEO. This distinction is important to her. This, in a time when everyone’s trying to escape all the ridiculous labels in society that have set them at each other’s throat.
Not a good sign for things to come.
Perhaps Dot took Lisa too seriously while watching too many post-season 10 episodes of The Simpsons? No, wait, Season 11 didn’t air ’til 1999. Okay… so maybe she watched a lot of Designing Women, Murphy Brown, Ellen, and Will & Grace?
Because most girls in 1998 certainly weren’t this sexist. Feminists were around back then, but they were typically more like Paglia feminists, not this third-wave nonsense that Dot is somehow spouting.
But we watch on. This checkbox-laden CEO shows the Warners a tablet and introduces them to Wikipedia, claiming the tablet contains “all human knowledge.”
This whole scenario is a little absurd because the Internet was a pretty big thing in 1998. The world wide web is hardly a foreign concept to them.
And then… something awful happens.
But before I move on, I just want to briefly touch on how misguided the inclusion of this CEO character is. The problem isn’t even that she’s a walking billboard for identity politics – It’s that she’s unflappable.
The Warners break down the walls in her office instead of using the door? She doesn’t care. The Warners break her tech gear? She just retrieves a new one from her cabinet. Failing that, she just orders a replacement from Amazon and a drone delivers it straight to her window in seconds.
She’s both unfunny and immune to the Warners’ zaniness. She’s only there to boss the Warners around. And, for some reason, they listen to her and follow her orders unquestioningly.
We’re talking about the Warners here. Normally asking them to do anything is like playing corrupt-a-wish on steroids. But I guess this CEO is too clever, thanks to her micro-dosing.
The character, by her very design, proves that the writers didn’t understand why the original Animaniacs worked. The people in charge are supposed to get frustrated and annoyed by the Warners as they slowly creep under their skin.
Dr. Scratch-n-Sniff was famous for this. The Warners rarely followed his measured and reasonable advice, which drove him up the wall. But he always had a good heart and wanted what was best for the Warners.
In this reboot, however, Dr. Scratch-n-Sniff is no longer the frustrated, well-meaning psychiatrist we remember. He’s become a typical Saturday Morning Cartoon mad scientist, who’s just an angry, maniacal guy.
In fact, he’s a psychopath who just plain wants to murder the Warners. Nothing subtle or clever about his portrayal at all.
…I guess this was a “reboot” after all.
Back to the “something awful that was about to happen”: Yakko decides to swallow the tablet with a glass of water, believing it will let him obtain all human knowledge.
What Yakko experiences here is nothing short of fascinating – He gets 22 years’ worth of biased propaganda. All the news clips, all the articles, all the celeb moralizing, all the presidential race rhetoric, all the late night show commentary, all the climate alarmism, all the insufferable hip-hop musical performances and Al Roker fluff from every Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, it ALL downloads into his brain.
Other things he saw included:
- The Mars rover.
- iPods.
- Obama.
- The 2016 election.
- Tamagatchis.
- Atheletes.
- Katy Perry kissing a girl.
- MySpace.
- Gangnam Style.
- Quinoa wraps.
- Spongebob.
Yes, Yakko literally got an NPC firmware update. But not just any update, the Mother Of All NPC Firmware Updates.
Note the concern-face he’s now making. It’s the same concern-face you see staring at you anytime you flip on the news.
And when the damage is done, Yakko is no longer a witty & clever Groucho Marx parody, willing to point out the absurdity of situations and poke cutting jabs at authority figures. He’s now an NPC, 100% in line with the corporate status quo.
He foolishly announces to his siblings that he now knows “everything” about the past 22 years.
And I don’t blame him – experiencing that much propaganda in a bubble without any counterarguments would change anyone. No one is immune to propaganda.
One problem with this concept is there wasn’t time for him to slowly accept and tolerate all the new, little changes leading up to big ones. He didn’t experience the boiling frog effect we all did. The thumb screws went from loose to extremely tight in a blink.
If you went to sleep in 1998 and woke up in 2020, I’d like to think it would be a shock to your senses and look a whole lot like the world of Orwell’s 1984. But Yakko seems to have literally “swallowed the pill”, accepting everything he saw without an ounce of skepticism, boiling frog effect and all.
Of course, we could write volumes on all the things he didn’t see (or is about to conveniently ignore), such as Madonna threatening to blow up the White House.
But this is the new Yakko Warner. He’s no longer your friend, your after-school warm and cuddly entertainment. He’s now an NPC who’s been programmed to hate you.
He then sings a song about all the things that have changed to catch his siblings up, leading with Ubers, YouTube, and Neil DeGrasse-Tyson (because why wouldn’t you lead with him? Personally, I’d lead with the 9/11 terrorists attacks, something Yakko doesn’t even bother to mention in passing… #neverforget indeed).
He then pivots to climate change by claiming the ocean has warmed to dangerous levels, claims the stock market has “collapsed” under Trump, talks about DoorDash, smartphones, and smart watches. In fact, it turns out Yakko is already a proud smart watch subscriber and wearer, despite as much as admitting that it’s probably wearable spyware.
…Remember. This show was written in 2018. The writers were guessing the economy would completely collapse by 2020.
He then sings about how “Obama brought Hope” and how an inspired Hillary Clinton made a brave march to the White House, all to set up Dot making a comment about how a female must’ve finally “broken the glass ceiling” to become the president, only to be let down.
It’s confirmed now, Dot is no longer the cute, loveable character we remember. She’s now post-season 10 Lisa Simpson.
So if you were hoping to forget about Current Year for twenty-two minutes of bliss, I’m sorry to disappoint. But at least by 2020, we were used to this sort of letdown.
At this point, it was painfully obvious we weren’t going to be allowed to disconnect from modern events and just enjoy some new Animaniacs with old friends – No escapism is allowed in Current Year.
Yakko continues, claiming he unironically believes in Russian bots, and sings about how awful things now are due to who’s in charge, even comparing it to being like living under shards of raining glass.
It appears that CEO’s tablet was only loaded with liberal talking points. This isn’t funny, subtle, measured, or clever.
Remember early on when Yakko was so concerned about retaining the audience and wanted to ensure they don’t say anything “so modern as to alienate key parts of their demographic”? Yeah, about that…
They couldn’t even give us one episode.
At that moment, I knew it was all over for the Animaniacs reboot. It’s now unfunny for all the same reasons SNL is, and it belongs on the trash heap along with all the other failures.
Which is exactly where it went, since the show is now canceled.
If you do bother to watch past that point, the show makes some laughably inaccurate predictions about the future, including Trump getting re-elected in 2020, “worsening climate disasters” that are so bad people are forced to live underground… aaand that’s about as far as I can stomach.
A EULOGY FOR YAKKO
What a tragedy it was. Yakko went from someone excited to be back to his home and ready to continue enjoying living life to its fullest… to this:
Look carefully, as this is what 22 years of propaganda has done to us. It’s robbed us of our joy. It’s made us fearful of phantoms and boogiemen.
It’s changed us from people who were excited to explore the world around us to people who are paranoid of our neighbors, constantly hyper-aware of labels.
It’s replaced true happiness with parasocial relationships and the ironic worship of The Golden Girls, Funko Pops, and Bill Nye, the Science Guy. It’s changed us from people excited about sharing our culture to people who are constantly worried about offending others.
If you’d like to watch some Animaniacs, I strongly suggest you avoid the reboot and watch the originals. Yakko, it was good knowing ya.
Nick Enlowe 