This Friday marks the release of director Steven Spielberg's latest The BFG. Among the hype that comes with every film from the legendary director, it's the first children's movie that he has done since 2011's The Adventures of Tintin. It feels right then to honor the director's work in helping children to have enjoyable and lively youths by providing quality entertainment. Where I could easily focus on the family films of yesteryear, I am deciding to focus on something less spoken: the work that ran through the early 1990s on the WB and created some of the best cartoon characters since The Looney Tunes. While not a comprehensive list, the following is a tribute to the works that showed the director's true side, even if he was just a producer, in helping kids make the most of their childhoods. He may continue to produce various shows like Smash and Under the Dome, but very few will match the inspired nature of his television universe for kids.
The 90's was a very animated time for Spielberg. Following a spin-off TV series of the Don Bluth film An American Tale called Fievel's American Tales, the director produced a series called Tiny Tune Adventures. If the title doesn't tip one off, it's a series focused on the children of the Looney Tunes with Babs and Buster Bunny being descendants of, you guessed it, Bugs Bunny. With a supporting cast that seemed like vague rip-offs of their counterparts, the series started the WB wormhole into a universe that has only begun to be attempted by the likes of Marvel movies and every studio with half of an idea. While the show was a successor to Looney Tunes in its ability to go on wacky journeys, they felt updated to an audience that liked their comedy a little differently. Yes, there was always fourth wall breaking and madcap action, but this time it was surrounded by contemporary settings and a lack of constraints. True, most of the Chuck Jones characters weren't secure enough to stay in their own series, but they rarely crossed into shows of different formats. Spielberg's Amblin brand sought to make characters get bored mid-episode and visit somebody else for a few.
While Tiny Tune Adventures was the starting point, Animaniacs may very well be where things began to, for lack of better phrasing, "go off the rails." The plot was simple: The Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister) escape from the WB lot to go on adventures. It was a throwback to vaudeville and variety shows, rarely ever going a whole episode without introducing a variety of supporting characters that included espionage thrillers (Pinky and the Brain), musicals (Rita and Runt), violent cat and mouse chases (Mindy and Buttons), and even mafia parodies (The GoodFeathers). The show sought to explore every genre that a kid would love in time, but had no idea what to expect. If you were in the age bracket, the references to old culture was as dense as The Simpsons. While it leaned on some more familiar icons of the 90's, such as the notorious "Finger Prince" joke, it was deceptively intellectual and often found itself diving into musical numbers that educated the audience.
Animaniacs was the subversive landscape for high and low brow humor that appealed to so many age groups. This was also where things started to get creative, as characters on the WB lot were seen running in the background. And this was in the first episode. By the time that Pinky and the Brain received their own miniseries and gained larger acclaim than their parent series, the show was fine doing things more creatively. In one episode of the spin-off series, mouse Pinky looks from above and says that he sees a Dot. The series were fond of clever wordplay, and in this case had a gag lasting seconds in which Animaniacs character Dot waves towards Pinky. Considering that Spielberg himself - though not played by Spielberg - would appear occasionally on these episodes, it was a self-referential landscape of 90's pop culture as well as a tribute to the producer's own body of work.
If there's one thing that should be greatly noted, it was that this show was unabashedly in love with its producer. Whereas most series adapt tropes of their creator, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain were fine cutting whole cloth from the director's filmography. Considering that Jurassic Park and E.T. were widely popular films at the time, it made sense for these characters to make brief cameos, if just to exploit a gag. To make things more subversive, it also featured the violent hijinks of The Looney Tunes, often using Acme anvils and giant mallets to solve their problems against usually pretentious or obnoxious types - sometimes played by Ben Stein. For a show that could be read as a series of inconsequential gags, it felt so much like Chuck Jones if he had a passion for pop culture.
This only continued to get more fascinating with the introduction of Freakazoid!, which played into the ongoing trend of superhero culture started by Batman the Animated Series - whose creators also animated the series. It was business as usual, but this time with references often to D.C. properties and a bunch of fictional characters such as Lord Bravery and Freakadog. They were meant to parody superhero culture, but in their own way embodied the tropes in exciting ways. After all, the series had Ricardo Montalban as a regular villain and ended the series with a Norm Abrams-centric episode. Norm Abrams, for those who don't know, was a carpenter. The series was the most madcap of the main series, and also responsible for some creative crossover. In an episode parodying The Godfather, "The Freakazoid," Animaniacs character Wakko appears claiming to be Steven's favorite. Then Pinky and the Brain's Brain appeals. The three argue before going to "Spielberg" himself, who claims that he doesn't know who they are. It's a brilliant joke on how little involvement the producer actually had on their day to day existence.
The only issue is that it ended on a bit of a dour note with Pinky, Elmyra & The Brain. To summarize, it was basically combining the laboratory mice from the most beloved Spielberg-produced show with the obnoxious girl Elmyra from Tiny Tune Adventures who in the credits is called "A pain." Had the show been live action, PETA would likely be all over the show's animal abuse humor, which was frequent and only paused long enough for Brain to insult Elmyra's intelligence. The show was meant to combine the low and high brow humor in a way that had worked before. The issue was that Elymra is at best a sidekick reduced to episodes of Animaniacs such as "Lookit the Fuzzyheads," where even then her overbearing adoration of hugging and squeezing cute things is a one note joke. Whereas Pinky and The Brain had a deep well of jokes, they had to be pitted against young girl fads of the 90's, such as home music videos and, for some reason, juggling meat.
While Spielberg has produced a lot of programs in his time, it is hard to undermine the impressive achievement that was the shared universe of these series. To an extent, they embodied a variety of the cultural zeitgeist throughout the 90's, with plenty of Bill Clinton jokes to spare. What remains be at times a dated relic of its period, but it also embodies what ambitious children's television could be and rarely does achieve. There are some shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer an Angel, who try to make intersecting stories. Thankfully, Animaniacs only needed to run around in the background of Freakazoid! to get the point across. Combined, there's over 200 episodes of TV to mine from these animated series, and they all amount to one of the most impressive bodies of work period. Yes, Spielberg will always be remembered for his phenomenal movies. However, he should get some credit for creating an animated universe unlike any other. Even if it started as a rip-off of The Looney Tunes, it evolved into oh so much more.
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