Beginning in 1993, across five seasons on Fox and then the WB, Animaniacs was a staple in the lives of many millennial kids and teens, and featured the sort of double-edged humor that made it a delight for people well outside the demo. To the Warners, Ruegger and fellow Tiny Toons vets like Sherri Stoner, Peter Hastings, and Deanna Oliver added a host of characters who were similarly strange and appealing: Pinky and the Brain, a mismatched pair of lab mice who spent every night trying and failing to take over the world cranky old cartoon star Slappy Squirrel and her adorable young nephew Skippy the Goodfeathers, a trio of combative pigeons modeled on the three male leads of Goodfellas and many more. No matter where they went, Ruegger says, the ethos was the same: “Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are telling adults who are jerks that they shouldn’t be jerks.” They wreaked havoc throughout time and space, running afoul of everyone from Michaelangelo to Beethoven and Albert Einstein.
The Warners were figures of pure chaos in the vein of the Marx Brothers, with Yakko the verbally relentless Groucho figure, Wakko as a prop-wielding Harpo (who happened to talk like Ringo Starr), and Dot as a girl who had learned to weaponize her own cuteness.
That “new stuff” became Animaniacs, which didn’t feature a single vintage Looney Tunes regular, but was gloriously true to the anarchic spirit of “Duck Amuck” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” Following boss Steven Spielberg’s mandate for the series to offer “a marquee name,” Ruegger took inspiration from the name of their studio itself, and dreamed up the Warner brothers, a pair of vaguely puppy-ish creatures named Yakko and Wakko, plus their sister Dot. “We’ve had it up to here with Tiny Toons,” Ruegger says he replied. The animation vet had created the Tiny Toons - kids inspired by the original Looney Tunes characters, now learning comedy from Bugs Bunny and friends - but was already burnt out on them when he was asked if he could build a new show around Plucky Duck or one of Babs and Buster Bunny’s other classmates. Tom Ruegger wanted no part of a Tiny Toon Adventures spin-off.
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