The original series, which ran from 1993 to 1998 (a direct-to-video movie was released in 1999), was the brainchild of Tom Ruegger, who had previously worked with Warner Bros. Nuts! Crazy!” one holdover from the borscht belt exclaims. “Put your hand in a bowl a’ nuts, pull out three-that’s the Warner brothers and their sister Dot. Yakko beefed with Milton Berle Dot and Fanny Brice were besties. In a Season 1 sketch called “Testimonials,” old interview footage and graying reels added dimension to the trio’s mythology, placing the Warners in the silent times of vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies.

These alleged relics of the Hollywood studio system personified a shuffling, vintage humor, like three put-to-pasture elders squeezed back into fighting shape. Along with their appearance, the time warp of the siblings’ fictive origins was integral to the show’s charm. Their silhouettes, vaguely animal, hailed from a time before the Mickey Mouse empire, when plushly drawn figures such as Bosko and Felix the Cat still danced onscreen as blacked-up fools. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot were essentially fugitives, out-of-place and reluctant Warner Bros. Thus was born “Animaniacs,” a show about three cartoon characters stuck in showbiz, which went off the air more than twenty years ago and, after finding new popularity on Netflix, was recently rebooted for Hulu.

When it was clear that their buffoonery far exceeded their usefulness as talent, the Warners were seized and entombed within the studio’s iconic tower for a sentence of, presumably, forever-or at least till the nineties, when they made their escape. They boingy-boingy-boingy-ed throughout their namesake studio, harassing employees, and worse, executives the footage they produced was no better than a waste. No sooner were the characters christened, with a daub of siren red on each nose, than their reign of holy hell began. The Warner brothers and their sister Dot, the “Animaniacs” origin story goes, were cartooned to life in a squat shack on a Burbank lot in the days of golden-age Hollywood.

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