It's odd to me to see them bringing Jason Todd into the DCAU, given that their Tim Drake was basically Jason with his name changed and his attitude softened somewhat. (Since their Dick Grayson had already had Tim's costume and computer skills.)
Animaniacs Reboot in the Works
- Thread starter JD
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It's odd to me to see them bringing Jason Todd into the DCAU, given that their Tim Drake was basically Jason with his name changed and his attitude softened somewhat. (Since their Dick Grayson had already had Tim's costume and computer skills.)
This almost felt like a KidsWB promo. Just needed the announcer
That's a shame.
I never liked Elmyra, so I'm fine with this news. I hope Max doesn't return, too.
Hmm... The conceit of Tiny Toons was that every classic Looney Tunes character had a young protege/counterpart (with Bugs getting two, Buster and Babs). Elmyra Duff was the counterpart for Elmer Fudd (the twist being that she loved animals to death rather than hunting them) and Montana Max was Yosemite Sam's. It seems... asymmetrical to revive it with one or more of the counterparts missing. But then, the target audience may be more familiar with Tiny Toons as a self-contained entity than with the classic cartoons it was riffing on. Weird when the thing created to be a nostalgic look back at some earlier creation becomes the target of the next generation's nostalgia. (Although I've seen it before, with all the people who accuse modern fiction of "ripping off Star Wars" when Star Wars is itself a nostalgic remix of the things George Lucas loved as a kid.)
The whole Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain fiasco was due to meddling WB network exes who wanted to retool the show to be more sitcomy like the Simpsons.
The Pinky and the Brain staff hated the networks "genius" retooling ideas and even made the episodes "Pinky & the Brain...and Larry" and " You’ll Never Eat Food Pellets In This Town Again!" as a responses to them. They even take a jab at the networks forced retooling in the Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain intro with the "It's what the network wants, why bother to complain?" lyric and Brain's "I deeply resent this." line.
Weirdly, I kind of hope they do make some vague gag reference Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain. Something like having Brain suddenly waking up screaming and telling Pinky he had a terrible nightmare where they were living with some little girl.
Pinky would need to be under the shower for this. They obviously now need a shower in their cage for this to work.
Perhaps Elmer and Sam will get new counterparts?
He could be using the water bottle.
Yea really liked it, just hoping the show eventually comes out on DVD so I can catch up on it.
Io9 has posted their review of the new series, and they were not impressed. I do find some of their complaints a bit concerning, but I'm still open minded since I tend to not always agree with them on this kind of stuff.
The first episode will be on Twitter for free on Thursday, 9 pm eastern.
That was a lot of fun. In fact, I was grinning pretty much the whole time. A little on the self-aware side, but that's okay for the first episode in 22 years.
The Warner Siblings segments were weak and pointless -- too meta and self-absorbed. Okay, we know you're back, just tell us a story rather than dwelling on it. And what little story there was didn't make much sense. The original premise was that the Warners were locked in the water tower for 50-60 years until they escaped. So one would expect that their absence for the past 22 years would be the result of them being locked in there again. So if they weren't there, where were they? None of this worked for me. I didn't laugh once.
By contrast, the Pinky & the Brain segment was genuinely funny and a welcome return to form. It acknowledged the passing of time and incorporated modern tech into the story, but not in an overly self-conscious way or as a mere substitute for a nonexistent story as in the rest of the episode. There was still a classic P&tB-style plot that updated very smoothly to modern times. I love the idea that the Brain invented the modern Internet as part of a 20-year master plan (my, those gene-spliced mice have seriously extended lifespans) to numb our minds with cute-animal memes, and the quote of my favorite part of the Buck Rogers theme song was a fun touch.
And the first "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" in two decades was actually very funny!
Yup - Pinky and the Brain was the better part but, the Warners weren't that bad either. Not hilarious but, still funny enough to pass for now.
Give 'em time to work out the bugs (and keep the better writers).
Give 'em time to work out the bugs (and keep the better writers).
Wow. They inserted the 80's Buck Roger theme into "Pinky and the brain"
I hated the reboot song. It was just the old lazy, whiny "Hollywood is out of ideas" crap that people have been saying for nearly as long as Hollywood has existed -- the perpetual recency fallacy that there's something new about Hollywood creating new versions of old stories, when in fact it's been doing so from the very beginning. (For instance, the most famous version of The Wizard of Oz, the Judy Garland film, was something like the eleventh film adaptation of the Oz series in just over three decades.) People were saying the same "There are too many remakes today" nonsense when the original Animaniacs was on two decades ago -- and they were saying it two decades before that, and two decades before that, and so on. The ironic thing about the complaints regarding Hollywood's "unoriginality" is how profoundly unoriginal the complaint itself is.
It's particularly preposterous and lacking in self-awareness coming from Animaniacs, whose entire core premise is an homage to the early black-and-white cartoons of the 1930s with a liberal dose of the Marx Brothers thrown in, and whose best character is an homage to Orson Welles. The whole show was rooted in nostalgia -- one segment was an extended pastiche of Goodfellas (a bizarre thing to do in a children's show), one revolved around an aging cartoon star reliving her glory days, one was an extended homage to the classic "chasing a baby through danger" formula used by '30s Popeye and Chuck Jones's Marc Antony/Pussyfoot cartoons, etc.
I suppose maybe they felt they had to put that song in to pre-empt the inevitable complaints they'd get from the audience. But I wish they'd mocked the attitude rather than playing it straight.
It's particularly preposterous and lacking in self-awareness coming from Animaniacs, whose entire core premise is an homage to the early black-and-white cartoons of the 1930s with a liberal dose of the Marx Brothers thrown in, and whose best character is an homage to Orson Welles. The whole show was rooted in nostalgia -- one segment was an extended pastiche of Goodfellas (a bizarre thing to do in a children's show), one revolved around an aging cartoon star reliving her glory days, one was an extended homage to the classic "chasing a baby through danger" formula used by '30s Popeye and Chuck Jones's Marc Antony/Pussyfoot cartoons, etc.
I suppose maybe they felt they had to put that song in to pre-empt the inevitable complaints they'd get from the audience. But I wish they'd mocked the attitude rather than playing it straight.
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