Yakko, Wakko, and Dot could be coming back. Image: Warner Bros.
The totally insane-y ’90s cartoon Animaniacs might be back on its way to a screen near you.
IndieWire reports that Amblin Television and Warner Bros. Animation are currently in the early stages of “kicking around a brand new version” of the show. Nothing is certain yet, but according to the report, the show’s original producer Steven Spielberg will be part of this new version.
Running from 1993-1998, Animaniacs was an animated sketch-style show that featured a huge list of characters who appeared in various different stories across an episode. The most famous of those were the three siblings Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, as well as Pinky and the Brain. Stories would cross over, blend in, and have a healthy mix of more adult-ish humour as well as traditional cartoon stuff. It also had one of the catchiest animated opens of all time.
Bringing back a show like this isn’t a huge surprise. These days, any popular show from the past could end up as a hit on Netflix (like Full House) or a live-action movie in theatres (like Baywatch). Corporations are constantly looking at the back catalogue to see what titles audiences might still connect with today, and Animaniacs has just the right level of timelessness and smart-meta humour to do just that.
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17 responses to “Cult Cartoon Favourite Animaniacs Could Be Staging A Comeback”
I dunno. Maybe instead of making a new “version” of the cartoon, why not take the ideas and make a new IP?
Or in the least take that same money and make a better restoration of the cartoon.
I know one can get the cartoon on DVD but provided they still have the negatives and not just the broadcast tapes I wouldn’t mind a BluRay release.
I mean it’s all good but I doubt it’s going to have that goddamn razor wit the 1990’s version honestly had… that hidden, dirty as HELL spirit…
“I dub thee, Sir Yaks-A-Lot, Lady Dots-A-Lot and Sir Waks-A-Lot” (giggity)
:O
It would be hard to get away with a lot of the jokes they used to have. Like Finger Prince. Even Hellooooo Nurse would probably get them in trouble.
I dunno, kids cartoons have always had a lot og shit that went under the radar because the censors only ever kept an eye out for the overt stuff, and even then theres the south park method of having stuff thats so blatantly wrong that it makes the other stuff look quite tame.
Indeed but the early 1990’s, even the 1970s, had a special kind of humour that simply doesn’t exist in cartoons today. At least not in the scale it did. I’m not condemning the show before it’s even had text put to paper, I hope seriously it can come back as good as it was, that would be awesome and I hope they keep its dry wit and sense of self, I just hope it doesn’t fall into the ‘everything needs to be overtly blatant and overexplained with a ‘NUDGE NUDGE HEY HEY WINK WINK LOOK WHAT WE DID’ Jonah Hill/Rebel Wilson/Melissa McCarthy style humour that seems to have invaded everything this last decade or so.
I think it can be called dual humour. The kiddish mind will see one element but as the person goes through life and learns more, the hidden jokes and sexual innuendos become clear.
And that is what I like, humour that grows with the viewer. Even Disney himself once said “We’re dead if we only aim at kids.”
This is the times we currently live in right now. Nobody is allowed to have dual humour in animations anymore.
It’s for the same reasons that the classic Looney Tunes is no longer shown on FTA and when one gets the DVD boxset it actually says “Intended for the adult collector and not for children” on the back.
Yeah right. These are cartoons are not for adults nor children. They are for all ages for all generations.
The original Looney Tunes cartoons were intended for an adult audience, believe it or not. They would show as a 5 minute short before the feature movie at the cinema. If you watch those classic cartoons back you’ll see that it’s true too, because so many of the jokes in them are adult oriented. You watch them as kids and think they are amusing but then you watch them as an adult, you understand all the jokes and you’re rolling on the floor laughing – and sometimes even wincing a bit as you think “oooh, did they really just say that?”.
I don’t know about the original Looney Tunes being for adults. But I can see the logic – the Muppets started the same way.
However it started though, I think it matters naught. In both cases, the humour grew with the viewer – something I don’t see happening anymore.
Eh. I used to feel that Animaniacs was a poor-man’s Tiny Toons.
I dunno, Tiny Toons just never caught on unfortunately, and Animaniacs gave us Pinky and Brain and the Goodfeathers
Ha, I think I used to feel that way too. Though also feel like I appreciate Animaniacs a whole lot more looking back on it (not that I can actually remember it all that clearly).
I always thought that the Animaniacs took the most refined formula of Tiny Toons and ran away with it. Many Tiny Toons episodes never went beyond its most basic premise of kiddy versions of old Warner Bros cartoons, funny and all but nothing overly remarkable but from time to time, they tapped into really witty meta humour, especially whenever they explored the “academy to learn to be a cartoon” angle. I feel that Animaniacs had that level of brilliance as its /base level/
I see this reboot being much like the powerpuff girls reboot: something I don’t want to show my niblings.
I’ll show them the real versions when they’re old enough, and implore them to ignore the “new” versions. Same as I did with Star Wars (there are no prequels, there are good movies).
It’s shocking what they did to the PPG reboot.
Not to mention that one writer who has a self-insert love-interest in every episode he writes…
I Love You.
You Love Me.
He’s as dumb, as dumb can be.
But we’ve found a way that we can get along.
I stand still for the anvil song …. Bong!
As long as they still keep this I’ll be happy: