Chicken Boo, for me, was an absurdist art piece that wouldn't have been out of place on Monty Python.
Monty Python would've done it better. The fundamental problem with
Chicken Boo was that it was structured backwards. It
began with the punch line -- the giant chicken passes for human and everyone somehow falls for it -- and then introduced a crisis (the chicken's discovery and persecution) that was never resolved, so that the cartoon just petered out on an unfunny and depressing note
that was exactly the same in every damn cartoon, just like so many of the other infuriatingly repetitive bits on
Animaniacs. (And it was a dumb song, too.)
I think you could've gotten one decent cartoon out of the premise if it had been inverted -- say, a giant chicken is born on the farm, is ostracized by the other chickens, then through a series of unlikely accidents ends up in civilization and wearing human clothes and finds itself accepted as a person despite being just an ordinary chicken in every respect except size. And the cartoon ends, rather than begins, with the chicken being inexplicably successful in its human persona and the easily fooled masses ignoring the lone naysayer insisting it's just a giant chicken, because that's a ridiculous enough situation to be the punch line.
Even the Warner sibling cartoons were a mixed bag, but at their best they could be very funny, sort of the Marx Brothers as done by Tex Avery or Bob Clampett. I particularly liked the "Anvilania" cartoon that was a direct homage to the Marx Brothers (particularly
Duck Soup). But they could do a lot of different styles of humor, and that versatility was a refreshing change from the plodding repetitiveness of most of the show. "Chairman of the Bored," with Ben Stein's rambling but surprisingly coherent shaggy-dog anecdote about cheese balls and Bob Barker, is a classic, combining the old Tex Avery formula of a ubiquitous pursuer/nuisance that the protagonist can't escape with a more modern, verbal sort of humor.
Oddly,
Pinky and the Brain never felt repetitive to me despite its formulaic aspects. True, every cartoon ended with the same line, but it wasn't dragged out as much as in Buttons & Mindy. And there was the recurring formula of "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" but that worked better than most catchprase gags because it was only the setup that repeated, while the punchline was always different. And the various schemes Brain tried were so wildly different and unpredictable that it stayed fresh. Plus the characters, and the performances by Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulsen, were just so much more entertaining than the pigeons or the squirrels or whoever. It's no wonder P&tB was the only segment that got its own spinoff. Honestly, I'd rather see a revival of just that.
