The showrunners for the new Animaniacs episodes on Hulu publicly state they’re willing to give its target younger audience credit, which makes sense as the original had its fair share of topical references. I remember as a kid watching the 1990s show and laughing at a cartoon Ross Perot using Rita and Runt as his sled dogs, ranting “I quit! No, I’m back! I quit! I’m back!” while stranded on a block of floating ice. It’s one of the reasons why this return is so enjoyable, but I was surprised by how much it leaned into its political and social satire for this first season back.
From its debut decades ago it was always a self-aware series, and that hasn’t changed as Yakko Warner (Rob Paulsen) points out how creatively exhausted the recent trend of remakes are. The theme song’s updated with new lyrics referencing focus groups and internet trolls (“we were meta first”), but it’s the same composition.
Jess Harnell is still as silly and appealing as Wakko as he was before, and Tress MacNellie is still a very charismatic Dot. Paulsen and Maurice LaMarche reprise their roles as Pinky and the Brain, trying in vain to conquer Earth as usual. But Yakko still feels it necessary to look at an iPad for the first time in episode one and absorb all the knowledge of everything they’ve missed, before breaking out into song showing how caught up he is with his celebrity and pop references.
It felt to me at points like the series was slowly testing the waters on what they felt worked, mostly sticking with the Warners and Pinky/Brain shorts to start with while also adding the occasional new bit such as “Starbox & Cindy” where an alien tries to escape a girl’s house, and a gnome who acts as an angry voice of common sense for people. The Warner bits have the usual formula from before where they torment a vain bully or a snob, (like Marie Antoinette, who exits rooms in dramatic slow motion, including rolling on the floor in slo-mo) but it still works due to how good the cast is.
When an egomaniac Greek athlete chastizes the Warners for getting in the way of the ceremonies. that alone made me laugh. He’s got these ridiculous muscles. Of course, he has a Schwartzenegger voice. He throws out his arms and declares “this is not playtime, this is the Greek Games!“, and he has the biggest smile on his face. I knew what was coming- this dude’s about to get dunked on. And the Warners do exactly that. The one notable exception is “JayPac”, a cocky Kanye West-ish MC who gets into a rap battle with Yakko and it’s clear he’s seen the show and knows how it works.
There’s a skit where Dot, sick of how bleak everything is, uses a magical cupcake to make herself, her brothers, and the entire planet into a giant cute-fest (“No, I have a rakish charm!”, Yakko pleads at first). It’s funny, but also a tad ironic because the Warner siblings are cute regardless, often when they’re not trying to be. There was cute stuff all over the original series, both in the writing and character animation. At one point Brain creates Julia, a lady mouse in a lab to run for president as his puppet candidate, and she’s adorable in her little suit. The ensuing presidential debate (with a Rachel Maddow caricature that made me howl laughing) is….not so cute, but it’s probably more civil and dignified than that actual first debate was.
One of the new executive producers also worked on Family Guy earlier, and it’d be easy to imagine an Animaniacs revival couldn’t feel cutting after we’ve had animated shows like Rick & Morty, American Dad, South Park and others with their own brand of subversive humor, sometimes with their own approaches to the world news. The difference is, none of those shows are also directly targeting kids, all TV-14 or higher.
That initially might not sound so great at first if you want really edgy toons, but the end result in those restrictions is a silly and irreverent approach to the social satire here that’s focused on being fun and funny above all else.
Not to say there aren’t moments where they lean into their point, like portraying Donald Trump as a self-absorbed Cyclops during an Oddysey sendup, or depicting the gun control issue through an overzealous rabbit salesman (resulting in a pretty well-animated anime spoof in order to fight the bunny invasion off). Hercule Yakko returns in a new short solving a murder plot on a train, which features one joke involving a conductor’s speech impediment that really pushes the envelope. Like before, there’s more than enough for adults in the audience to get a chuckle out of.
Still, the Warners, Pinky, and Brain still retain the kind of engaging charm that made kids in the 90s, as well as their parents and older siblings fans. Some of the jokes do feel a bit dated at points, as there’s a two-year writing gap in production to the main airdate (and yes, this is something the characters point out). And one could argue some skits try a bit too hard to be socially relevant- they do mock Fox News aggressively with a new character named Tuck Buckerson (a clear Tucker Carlson expy).
The thing though, is how they’re using bouncy, animal-shaped toon kids to jump around him and pop his inflated ego. A key factor that stands out for me here is how Animaniacs’ PG rating limits the writers from getting too dark in their subject matter and parodies. So those classic cartoon tropes are still present, the kind of characters and gags that a young audience would obviously gravitate to.
You can tell this new Animaniacs is a show that *really* wants to make the original fans happy, and I can say there’s enough good about it here to recommend, even if it comes off like the show’s still trying to find its footing sometimes. Modern culture has more than enough that’s absurd about it to keep fueling material for more seasons, so if they can manage to not overdo their attempts to be in the now, they should only improve.