As if They Never Left. Animaniacs 2020 and What We Want from Television Reboots
The famous 1959 film, Ben-Hur, won 11 Oscars the year it was released and grossed the second highest box office total for any film ever made at the time. It was a cultural phenomenon the likes of which very few movies, then or now, could ever hope to achieve. It is still remembered today, though opinions on it after sixty years are of course mixed. It is something of a time-capsule of a film, a view to a very different Hollywood that made movies in very different ways with very different means of profit-making and different audiences in mind.
Ben-Hur was also a remake of a 1925 film titled: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which itself was a modernization of the 1907 silent short titled: Ben Hur. And then there was the 2016 remake titled: Ben-Hur that I guarantee every single person reading this article has utterly forgotten about if you knew it existed at all in the first place. Remakes, reboots, modernizations, reimaginings, revivals, etc… have been around since the beginning of our film and TV culture is the point of this intro, despite the understandable instinct to believe they are a recent phenomenon in modern pop culture.
But, it is true that there are more of them than there were before. While movies have actually begun gravitating more toward massive franchising and sequels and other sorts of adaptations and away from straight reboots/remakes, as the rebooted Animaniacs hilarious ‘Reboot It‘ song cleverly points out, television as an industry has embraced reboots and revivals more than it ever has before. We have new Samurai Jack, new Psych, new Sabrina being a witch, new Will and Grace, new Veronica Mars, new Wet Hot American Summer, new Twilight Zone, new Roseanne (some of these worked better than others), among a huge ever-growing list of new-old television.
This is the strange, struggling, original-unoriginal television landscape in which Animaniacs returned after 22 years off the air.
To make sure everyone’s on the same page, Animaniacs‘ original series ran from 1993 to 1998, starting first on Fox Kids before moving in 1995 to Kid’s WB. The show was the second successful television cartoon venture for Steven Speilberg‘s Amblin Entertainment, after Tiny Toon Adventures in 1990, of which it was sort of spun off from. Animaniacs was considered a hit very quickly after it premiered, garnering high ratings and eventually spinning off two of it’s own characters for the standalone Pinky and the Brain in 1995. The show was known for its wide cast of characters, its purposeful irreverence and high levels of cartoon violence, its willingness to experiment within the boundaries of its formula, and its meta and adult humor.
While I may have been just a couple years too young to get swept up in the Animaniacs phenomenon at its peak in the mid nineties, I caught the tail-end of it and then fell in love with the show on my own terms through tidal waves of reruns in the late nineties and early 2000s after it was canceled in 1998. It was a show that allowed nine-year-olds to feel smart for getting some of the jokes and (unique-at-the-time) meta commentary while being clever and winking enough for the parents of those nine-year-olds to get real enjoyment out of it themselves.
After having watched through the Animaniacs season released on Hulu November 20th of this year, I believe the ultimate goal of this reboot was to maintain the same exact balance of humor and audience as the original for a new generation of parents and children. The show is mostly successful at this, though there are a few things in either its presentation or the audience’s minds (my mind) that prevent it from being an utter triumph and inspired the second half of this article’s title.
Because the most prominent feeling I had watching the (always genuinely hilarious) episodes was one of continuation. Yes, the animation has taken a noticeable step-up in quality and it’s very nice to be able to watch this show in a format that properly fits on a wide-screen TV. Yes, there’s a whole (again, very funny) song about catching up with the last twenty years of pop culture and a surprising amount of (surprisingly) insightful political commentary for what is ostensibly a kid’s show. Yes, the show is about as ‘adult-humored’ as is possible for a kid’s cartoon, with veiled jokes about micro-dosing and internet porn in the very first episode and a whole sketch revolving around ‘manspreading‘ later on.
But the truth is while all of these jokes are very funny and occasionally really perceptive (Tuck Buckerson, anyone?), no viewer who is at all familiar with the ‘always zany’ Animaniacs would be in any way surprised their inclusion in the show. It’s the same brand of humor aimed at literally the same people who grew up with the show. Animaniacs 2020 is genuinely funny, but now it’s goal isn’t a subversive new take on kid’s cartoons. Animaniacs 2020 simply wants to be just as good, in the exact same way, as it’s predecessor.
And, really, what else can you hope for from a 2020 revival of a nineties children’s cartoon? This is a serious question, not just me, the writer, shrugging at a very good but not perfect revived TV show. What did we, as an audience, really want from new Animaniacs? Did we want the exact same show with a new coat of paint and new pop culture? What did Steven Spielberg (Executive Producer of both the original series and the reboot) want out of bringing this show back to life? A giant pile of money to go with his eighty-three other giant piles of money? What did the voice cast (almost all of whom came back) want out of this aside from a new paycheck?
For the show to really matter, for it to resonate with children and adults in a similar fashion as the original series, the answer to at least the creator side of these questions cannot simply be: money. We, as an audience, cannot accept that as enough of a rationale to give these shows our time and attention and streaming money. If we do, then we are admitting that it is okay for the dominant storytelling medium of our times (television) to be empty at it’s core. That the only reason a TV show needs to exist is that it exists.
Now, I understand that it is incredibly naïve to try to separate television and movies from money. A TV show is a massive and expensive undertaking, and those who handle the purse strings have every right to take financial matters into account. It doesn’t matter how brilliant a show is if no one knows of it or wants to watch it. But there has to be some sort of middle ground, right? An acknowledgement that shows have marketing and commercial responsibilities while still allowing for subversion and innovation. A reboot that needs to happen for reasons other than executives wanting to cater to an audience’s nostalgia in the most risk-free fashion possible.
Animaniacs 2020 comes very close to that ideal middle ground many times during the season. There’s the aforementioned ‘Reboot It’ song that cleverly rips on the industry for reboots and revivals while acknowledging their own hypocrisy. An incident with an orange cyclops, Tuck Buckerson, and various other surprisingly astute political jokes give the show a modern and specific edge it didn’t have in the initial run. Dot (the Warner Sister) is clearly the most updated character and she shines for it. Dot leads a new somewhat feminist-focused undercurrent of the show, with songs about female suffrage and all the First Ladies of the United States (Hellooooooooo Nurse has been unsurprisingly removed from this reboot, though Dr. Scratchansniff makes a welcome reappearance late in the season). There is enough new focuses and edges that the show almost justifies itself for reasons outside of nostalgia and money.
But, often, Animaniacs falls back on being the exact show you remember from your childhood. This is not necessarily the worst thing, as the initial run is a modern classic for a reason; but it does start to feel empty during a long binge-watch session. You notice repetitive elements of the formula you didn’t when you were a kid, despite that the show is now aimed squarely at you. Two different un-skippable theme songs per episode (one for Animaniacs, one for Pinky and the Brain) doesn’t help this feeling. Modern Animaniacs is best enjoyed one or two episodes at a time, especially as an adult.
To be clear, I quite enjoyed Animaniacs 2020, and I’m sure HBO Max (owned by Warner Bros.) is seething that Hulu got this revival instead of them. It was the exact same show I remember and that made me feel all warm and happy and nostalgic inside. I laughed a lot. But binging the show is a similar feeling to binging candy or fast food; after a while, no matter how it’s dressed up, it becomes less satisfying.
Animaniacs has already been renewed for Season 2. I will be happy to watch it. Hopefully, the show will be a little braver and more reckless in the second season, a little less beholden to it’s own past. But maybe it’ll just be more of the same. I know I’ll still enjoy it either way. The difference is how I’ll feel after, how the show will or won’t stick with me.
But Hulu won’t care. I’ve already given them my money, after all.
If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.
