Animaniacs Reboot in the Works
- Thread starter JD
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So is that were the sound Zoidberg makes when scuttles comes from?
Not to mention the nyuk-nyuk-nyuk. The ooh-ooh-ooh at the end sounds like Larry though.
Yakko's World, updated for 2017!
Impressive. Most impressive.
Yeah. The 1990s were a different time. There were fewer sacred cows back then and people could make jokes about political events without making their own political statements. One of my favorite Histeria! bits is when Stalin gets a musical number singing about his favorite things. Can anyone picture Stalin getting a musical number in a kids show today?
There's also the tone of modern American politics. Animaniacs could gently make fun of Bill Clinton and it would be understood that he was only the target because he was the president. (This was pre-Monica Lewinsky, before he became the #1 target of the late night comedians.) I can't see modern Hollywood making gentle, apolitical jokes about George W. Bush or Obama, let alone Trump.
I'm not sure I'd put Animaniacs in the same category as South Park though. South Park usually has an agenda, even if it's a fairly evenhanded a-plague-on-all-your-houses one. Whereas, even when Animaniacs made fun of politicians like Clinton & Reagan, they were making fun of them as cultural figures, not political ones.
Fine with me. My favorite Darkwing Duck moment is when he was in this M.C. Escher-like house and he goes through one door, ends up on the ceiling, then falls to the floor, flattened. Then he says, "I've got to find the designer of this place SO I CAN HURT HIM!"
There was also the "Mr. Skullhead Show," which started out as an Elmyra bit from Tiny Toons but later on appeared once or twice as its own thing on Animaniacs. I also recall Tiny Toons characters occasionally appearing in the background of Animaniacs cartoons and getting minor shout-outs, like in "I Am the Very Model of a Cartoon Individual."
A show so reviled that they only bothered to release it on DVD 7 years after they'd finished releasing all of the other Pinky & the Brain cartoons on DVD.
And then, at the end, Larry is replaced with Zeppo, the unfunny member of the Marx Brothers. (Although, in different ways. Larry was just kind of an unnecessary 3rd wheel in a series of shorts about Moe endlessly abusing Curly. Zeppo was specifically designed to be the straight romantic lead to move the plot along while Groucho, Chico, & Harpo provided the jokes. Even after Zeppo stopped performing, they still brought in a series of other handsome straight men to drive the plot, get the girl, and give the audience some actual rooting interest.)
In fact, Zeppo was only the romantic lead twice, in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers (the third and fourth of his five films). In The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, and Duck Soup, Zeppo had smaller roles as Groucho's assistant or secretary, usually having just one or two major scenes with Groucho and otherwise being essentially irrelevant aside from providing an additional voice in the musical numbers. Oscar Shaw was the romantic lead in The Cocoanuts and Hal Thompson filled that role (such as it was) in Animal Crackers. Duck Soup was unique in the Marx canon in having no young-lovers subplot.
I think part of the reason Zeppo's role was usually so small was because in the stage plays these films were based on, he was essentially the understudy for the other three. Because the brothers looked so much alike, and because he was the youngest and had grown up watching the others perform, he could double all three of them almost indistinguishably. So I guess his usual role had to be bland and generic so that someone else could take over when he was subbing for Groucho, Harpo, or Chico.
My favorite of those comes at the 2:50 mark. "If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why does he keep doing it?"
I don't recall a young lovers subplot in Room Service either. Or at least not much of one. But then, Room Service barely feels like a Marx Brothers movie at all. It's just a stage play that awkwardly tries to use the Marx Brothers as its main characters. (IIRC, Room Service & Duck Soup are also the only movies that don't feature any musical numbers for Chico or Harpo. And considering how strained their attempts to put musical numbers into some of the other movies were, that's saying something.)
There was one, involving the playwright Leo (Frank Albertson) and his girlfriend Hilda (Ann Miller).
Yeah, it's very unfunny. The Brothers (who were under contract to MGM at the time) were loaned out to RKO for that one picture, in a deal arranged by Zeppo, now working as their agent. It really didn't work. The MGM films (and their one United Artists film, A Night in Casablanca) may have been very formulaic, but at least they were fun. Room Service is the weakest "official" Marx Bros. film -- although it's not quite as bad as Love Happy, the Harpo-centric 1949 film (also from UA) in which Chico co-starred and Groucho "narrated" because it was the only way Harpo could get funding.
All it needs is some good writers.
Will they hire good writers? Who knows. What's their budget and time slot?
Will they hire good writers? Who knows. What's their budget and time slot?
I remember the one where Brain ran for President, and the one where he took a night off and nearly got what he wanted. And there was the episode where he directly parodied something Orson Welles did.
Which one? They did a War of the Worlds parody, a The Third Man parody, a Citizen Kane parody, and that "Frozen Peas" segment built around Maurice LaMarche's comedy skit based on candid audio of Welles recording a commercial. And possibly more.
I was thinking of the "Frozen Peas" bit. The changes to Orson Welles' original dialogue was priceless.
I never liked that segment. It was too much of an industry inside joke, essentially incomprehensible if you didn't know what it was homaging -- which I didn't when I saw it, and which most of the kids in the TV audience probably didn't either.
One of the fun things about animaniacs is that they had jokes that would fly over the little kids heads. It really had a good balance of humor for everyone (well, some of the segments did, although Chicken Boo, Rita & Runt and Buttons were just boring and repetitive in my opinion). I liked that segment parodying Welles commercial, and honestly I think kids would laugh just at the performance from Brain even without knowing its a reference.
I didn't fully understand it as a teenager, but thought it was funny. But as an adult when I found out more about it, it was even funnier!
Animaniacs was really an attempt to ape that aspect of Looney Tunes--that plus the industry-poking that was a facet of the earlier Looney Tunes period.
I'm not sure it was ever 100% successful but it was bold to try compared to the more strained/crass attempts to make Looney Tunes "relevant" afterwards (Space Jam, Back in Action, etc...)
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