Animaniacs/Headscratchers

• The constant fourth-wall breaking in Animaniacs is one of the most refreshing aspects of the show. However, they break the fourth wall on so many different levels that I don't understand what's supposed to really be going on. A good example is in the episode "This Pun for Hire", when Freakazoid "accidentally" bursts into the office where they're shooting the episode, and Dot tells him where to find his own office, then saying to the viewer, "This is a zany episode!" But why would she have said that if that had been unscripted, like it was supposed to seem? How much of the show is meant to be scripted, and how much is "real"? Do we ever meet the "real" Warners, or is it all just an act?
  • The 4th wall gags are subject to the Rule of Funny, and don't need to line up with a coherent story.
  • Alternatively, the scenes that take place in the "real world" could be somewhat like a reality show, where the basic plot of each "episode" is scripted but a lot of the dialogue and slapstick is ad-libbed.
• Related to the above question, what are we to make of Wakko's Wish? It would probably be best to assume it's meant to be a play/movie all the characters are in, rather than "real". But then why are we supposed to care when it's revealed who the Warner's parents are? Whereas if the world of Wakko's wish is supposed to be "real", then how did they get there?
  • It's an Alternate Universe, so to the characters it's real.
• What the hell did happen between Yakko and Milton Berle?
  • Just a Throwaway Gag, but basically the two have had some kind of rivalry going on for years.
• Why does Dot appear to have two sets of ears?
  • Rule of Cute, and the ones on the side are just tufts of fur.
• Why is the last image in the last episode (the Animaniacs suite; a compilation of clips from previous episodes) the Warners getting caught in a net with looks of terror on their faces?? Was this intentional, or just a very poor choice of editing?
  • The video was kind of a Clip Show, so that's actually from a previous episode.
    • Yes, I get that, but that still doesn't answer the question.
    • I would assume it's to signal the end of the segment. They're locked back in the tower for now.
• What happened to Minerva Mink?! I loved her skits! They were funny, and Minerva got her Karmatic Retribution at the end! How come they kept the Hip Hippos, but got rid of her ? I know half of it was from the innuendo, but I re-watched her only two episodes, and nothing caught my eye as "risque", and yet they keep Hello, Nurse!. Such a Double Standard.
  • One joke character. Same as the Hippos and the pigeons, yes, but a one-joke character nonetheless. There's only so many funny ways you can show people freaking out to her prescence.
  • Another thing...maybe they thought she was too much of a bitch. Granted, she did get a Karmatic slap in the face, but her character was one that KNEW how hot she was, and used it to her advantage. Hello Nurse didn't go that far. She was simply a hot nurse; didn't manipulate people (not on a regular basis anyway) or lead them on. Or, maybe it's as simple as the character was not popular enough to warrant her own segment like Slappy or Rita & Runt.
• Where the hell did they get "Dot" from "Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fanna Bo Besca III"?
  • From the fact that it sounds cuter.
  • From master comedian Jack Benny's Si, Sy, Sue skit featuring Mel Blanc. Sue's full name is Conchita Guadalupe Lolita Hernandez, Gonzalez Clarita del Frado Ramirez.
  • It comes from her name being a sentence. The Dot is the period
    • ... How is her name a sentance?
  • Rule of Funny?
• Since Yakko, Wakko, Dot, and Rita all have white feet, I can't tell whether their hands are actually white or are wearing White Gloves over their hands sometimes, especially when they are drawn crudely.
  • I personally think the Warner's hands, which are usually covered by White Gloves are white, just like Rita's gloveless hands are white.
  • Also, are the Warner's hands white like Rita's hands or the color of the rest of their arm?
    • In "Chalkboard Bungle" and "Space Probed," Wakko's hands were drawn white, but in "White Gloves," Wakko's hands were drawn black like his arms.
    • In the movie "Wakko's Wish," Yakko's hands are drawn black like his arms.
    • In one picture of Rita, she is shown with hands the color of the rest of her arm. Makes some people (including myself) think she was wearing White Gloves all along, just like what the Warner Sibs wear most of the time.
    • Some fanart pictures of Yakko, Wakko, and Dot show them with white hands and some fanart pictures of them show them with hands the color of the rest of their arms.
    • Tom Ruegger replied in his blog, Cartoonatics, "Without gloves, I think their hands/paws would/should have white fur on them. In any case, they should wear their gloves so that these issues do not plague mankind."
• Buttons can't talk, yet his mouth moves in the opening like he's singing. What gives?
  • He can talk, he's just too shy to do so unless in an ensemble.
    • Really?
  • Chicken-Boo sings too. Maybe the animators thought it would have looked weird if they were there with the rest of the cast but were just doing the same motions and not singing.
  • Buttons stars in cartoons as a non-speaking role. If he were ever given one, he'd be able to talk.
• Why were the Rita and Runt segments dropped in the latter half of the show? Seriously, I've heard so much conflicting speculation about this, but no official, definite explanation. Some reckon that it was because Bernadette Peters couldn't (or wouldn't) commit to the show, but I've also heard that she really enjoyed voicing Rita (having once owned a cat just like her) and was upset when the R&R cartoons stopped. Others say that Executive Meddling was involved, the R&R shorts being considered too dark in tone (nearly all of their potential homes tended to contain some kind of hidden peril) and just not wacky enough compared to the rest of the show. Me personally, I think it's a bit unfair that Buttons and Mindy were able to keep on recycling the same basic scenario over and over, while the Rita and Runt cartoons which, like all the Animaniacs segments, played to formula, but had a lot more heart and depth, were shafted. Although the show did make a Brother Chuck gag at their expense (they showed up as "Missing" on a milk carton in one sequence), the fact that they remained in the opening credits and eventually reappeared in the DTV movie "Wakko's Wish" suggest that the show's staff had no desire to completely eliminate them from the viewers' conscious memories.
  • This troper seems to remember reading somewhere that Rita's VA was the most highly paid on the show, and believes that they were chopped as a cost cutting measure.
  • It was probably due to a number of reasons. The most commonly cited reason (and probably most likely) is indeed Bernadette Peters being too expensive to keep on the show. It's also been said that it was hard to come up with new songs for each segment - this is probably the least likely, when you consider just how many unique songs pop up in the series as a whole. Running in the middle of the believability road is the darker tone of the segments: Rita and Runt never got a home for long, so many of the segments could be seen as having Downer Endings (though very mild ones, considering the people they ran into were all villains).
• If the Warner Brothers were animated in the 40s, does that mean they're actually as old as Slappy, just drawn/animated younger?
  • Presumably it's because the Warners have been locked up in the Water Tower for the past 50 years, while Slappy has been out and starring in Cartoons for all this time.
    • I'd say Rule of Funny. They're toons, and they go with what gets a laugh. Slappy is old because she made it her comedy shtick; the Warners remain young because it's fundamental to their characters (and comedy stylings) that they remain "children."
    • Maybe being in the Water Tower for 50 years made 'em beautiful preserved!
• I think the Warners are cats just like Rita, even though their ears look almost nothing like cat ears.
  • Unlike Rita, they are supposed to be an ambiguous species that follows the Rule of Funny, but I like to think of them either as housecats (like Rita) or as members of an ambiguous looking species of cat.
  • I like to call that ambiguous cat species a newcat, more specifically a red-nosed newcat or a loce.
    • Newcats, which a fictional creature I like to think the Warners are, have higher foreheads and longer dewclaws (or "thumbs") than actual cat species.
  • A lot of people think that they look equally canine and feline, but that's primarily because their ears look like a floppy, over-stylized version of semi-prick dog ears.
    • And what about all those Warner design based Animaniacs fan characters with convincingly cat-like ears.
    • To be fair, they have paws, faces, and tails like those of cats.
  • Some people like to draw the Warners on all four legs.
    • When drawn on all fours, they are usually depicted with mannerisms somewhere in between that of a dog and that of a cat - sometimes being more like a cat, sometimes being more like a dog, sometimes being equally like both.
    • Some people like to call the four-legged "Warner" design that has a white furred face and hindpaws, but with forepaws left the same fur color as the rest of the body "puppycats."
  • Perhaps they're some sort of weird hyprid of several different species?
• Are the Warner Bros and Warner Sister really considered Chaotic Neutral? They are not really malicious with their trouble making and in fact, quite friendly compared to Slappy the Squirrel whom is more Chaotic Neutral.
  • Personally, I'd say they are more Chaotic Good with moments of Chaotic Neutral.
  • Well, according to the Chaotic Neutral page, Karmic Tricksters are Chaotic Neutral, and Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are Karmic Tricksters, so yes.
• If the Warners are only supposed to torture jerks, why are they always torturing Scratchensniff? What did he do wrong?
  • They're children they just want attention and have fun, like kids are to their parents and babysitters.
  • He's trying to "cure" their chaotic tendencies and stop them having fun.
  • I always figured that they didn't mean to torture Scratchy; they're just so poorly-socialized that they don't realize he's not having as much fun as they are.
• The Warner brothers (and their Warner sister Dot)are essentially Omnipotent beings capable of bending reality to their whim (so is Slappy and she shows it off more), constantly being able to teleport, procure items from nowhere and even freeze time itself. How on earth were they ever captured to begin with? and why have they remained up in the water tower all this time?
  • Toon logic.

Eddie Valiant: You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time? Roger Rabbit: No, not at any time. Only when it was funny.

• I won't say that a little Parental Bonus is a bad thing, but good lord, Animaniacs seemed to run on it. Seriously, if you want to make a show for adults, then do it. Don't make a show "for kids" and then leave the parents to try to explain why "finger Prince" is supposed to be funny.
  • At the time, the idea of a cartoon for adults was still completely new, with people predicting the Simpsons wouldn't last three seasons. Plus, the show had enough humour for kids to run on that. The kids will think of "finger prince" as two nouns, not an action.
    • The Simpsons was in its fourth season when Animaniacs premiered. It's pretty safe to say people had warmed up to the idea of animation for adults by then.
      • Not only that, but many cartoons in the 40's onward (MGM, Merrie Melodies, etc) contained jokes that kids wouldn't really get (like hating Mothers-in-law, why Catstello couldn't give Babbott "the boid", or cracks at the expense of the Axis powers). Even earlier, cartoons weren't even aimed at kids. I once saw clip of Porky Pig saying the phrase "son of a bitch".
        • The "son of a bitch" clip was made by the animators as an in-house gag never meant to be shown to the public. They would never have put anything like that in a real Looney Tunes short. (It is true, though, that before the Hays Code, some cartoons did have things that they wouldn't be able to get away with once the Code was in place, Ub Iwerks's Flip the Frog being a notable example.)
    • And the original Warner characters had been doing it 50 years earlier, too.
      • But those were intended for adults; they were originally created as a way to draw people into movie theaters. It was only later that kids became a bigger audience for cartoons than adults, and we all know what happened then...
  • Nothing wrong with having a Periphery Demographic, is there? Besides, that's one of the major appeals of the show: that you can come back to it as a grown-up and find a whole slew of new things to laugh at. This also effectively made it a show that the family could watch and enjoy together. Besides, parents don't have to explain the more "mature" jokes. Sometimes saying, "You'll get it when you're older," or, "It's a grown-up's joke," is acceptable.
    • Yeah, and it's not like it was a new thing either - Rocky and Bullwinkle did the same thing with pop culture and literary references that no kid would have gotten. Besides, Animaniacs also ran on wacky humor, so I figure most kids would just giggle because "finger prince" sounds funny.
    • As an actual kid who was watching through its first run (10 years old at the time), I can confirm that my friends and I got the slapstick, crazy antics and the songs. It didn't matter to us that we couldn't understand most of the references (fruenlaven). Actually, I still don't really understand many of the references to actors/directors/characters of the time. However, it was pretty exciting to me when my father sat me down in front of The Pirates of Penzance and I recognized the Modern Major General song. It was fun for the parents to get jokes their kids didn't, and gave them an opportunity to expose their kids to things they might not have. And, heck, Sesame Street had been doing that to kids for years. A lot of their guest puppets were based on things only adults got. As a kid, you either don't notice, or don't care.
• In "Critical Condition", after Hisskill and Eggbert (spoof of Siskel and Ebert) give Slappy Squirrel's cartoons a bad review, Slappy and Skippy decide to get even with them by making them go through a lot of hell. In the end, Hisskill and Eggbert have apparently changed their minds about Slappy and say that her cartoons are actually quite good. Now this leaves me to wonder: are Hisskill and Eggbert's new opinions on Slappy completely real, or is it just out of fear of having to go through more hell? It begs an explanation.
  • Apparently they were watching the preceding cartoon (but didn't have stunt doubles)? Maybe? So it's possible that they only found her funny because they were in one of her cartoons.
• Between this show, Tiny Toon Adventures, and Freakazoid!, there are a lot of references to pop culture, celebrities in particular. However, I also noticed that most to all of the jokes are affectionate to the famous people involved and are playful in nature. What I'm wondering is the people who write these shows--do they have any thoughts on South Park and its mocking of pop culture and celebrities, which is far more malicious and are more like personal attacks? (For instance, an episode has Kanye West portrayed as a narcissist who becomes violent when offered help or suspecting anyone through wild accusations. The Steven Spielberg group of shows would never do something like that.) I know Trey Parker takes every opportunity to let people know that he hates actors unless they give him a reason to like them. Don't get me wrong; I love South Park. But the way the Steven Spielberg batch of shows and South Park handles jokes on celebrities and some pop culture movements is like night and day.