Animaniacs Season 4 (1996-1997)

[Cartoonzrule]

To me, this season is Animaniacs's "dark age", along with Freakazoid getting cancelled. Since the previous season get more adult audiences than children audiences, the originally planned 20 episode season was sliced down to 8 episodes! I haven't seen most of these yet, but after seeing a few of them, I have mixed feelings about this season. The animation of the show at this point looks cheap (I guess the WB execs. cut the budget down because of the demographic issue with the previous season). The low budget shows a lot, escpecially on Cutie and the Beast (which was TMS' first full Animaniacs episode since season 1). From that episode, I do enjoy the "Be a Pest" song. One of Jamie J. Weinman's blogs points out the "rut" that the writers were in and that a majority of the episodes were movie parodies(There were two Disney parody episodes in a row).
http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2004/06/...cs-part-2.html

Episodes:
83. One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock*
84. Cutie and the Beast/Boo Happens/Noel
85. Jokahontas/Boids in the Hood/Mighty Wakko at Bat
86. A Very Very Very Special Show/Night of the Living Buttons/Soda Jerk
87. From Burbank With Love/Anchors-A Warners/When Your Traveling to Nantucket
88. Papers for Pappa/Amazing Gladiators/Pinky and the Ralph
89. Ten Short Films About Wakko/Ni Time forLove/The Boo Network
90. Pitter Patter of Little Feet/Mindy in Wonderland/Ralph's Wedding

* I heard that the ending credits to this was animated by TMS. Can someone (SpeedyBoris perhaps) upload an image of this or a video clip?

These were the only images I could find. I'll have more photos when I make a thread about season 5: the final season (coming soon).





"Be a Pest, Be a Pest, Be a PEEEEEST!"

[Classic Speedy]

I haven't seen very many of these, but this season wins just for "A Very Very Very Special Show", which is TTA's "Elephant Issues" done right.

Also, the "When You're Traveling" song is pretty catchy, and "Jokahontas", despite the more conservative Akom animation, had some vicious swipes at Disney.

I also agree about "Cutie and the Beast". The animation was a big step below what TMS was capable of. And it was way too talky at points, which basically wastes their talents.

[Fifi Fanatic]

Well, I did like seeing Taz as the beast in "Cutie and the Beast", and this season has my favorite Buttons and Mindy segment, "Night of the Living Buttons".... Combine that with "A Very Very Very Special Show" and that makes #86 the best from this season.

I do have mixed feelings whenever they make fun of preachy episodes. It's very funny but there's that little voice in my head saying: "Guys, you yourselves are guilty of subjecting us to episodes exactly like this!"

[Peter Paltridge]

You forgot episode 90, "Ten Short Films about Wakko Warner / No Time For Love".

We're lucky we got a season 5, because season 4 is just the K-Mart of A! seasons.....ugly, tacky, badly designed, and devoid of joy. At least it was only eight episodes....it could have been 20.

The few bright spots: even though bad animation and bad staging make it rather mototonous, "A Very Very Very Special Show" is a good and overdue roast of preachy cartoons -- some of which Tiny Toons and even Animaniacs themselves were guilty of.

I appear to be the only one who admired "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock." I thought it was a pretty bold and daring cartoon to make considering how Slappy stuff usually went. Much later on, I found out it was a pilot for a Slappy show -- and in THAT context, it's bad, because if that's what they were making, they had to show the potential of such an idea as well as they could. It wasn't the time to write a sad story about Slappy succumbing to senility.

Because of the Slappy pilot, they couldn't use her anywhere else in the season, so Season 4 had more Hippos than any other. There was a better attempt to make them somewhat funny, though. Flavio in a string of bodybuilding spoofs DOES work.

And "Ralph's Wedding" doesn't make any SENSE.

[Strong Suck]

Neither did Pinky and the Ralph, or for that matter, Boids in the Hood. I never saw the whole thing, so I could never get it, anyway.

[Blackstar]

"Boids in the Hood" was just a short about the Goodfeathers trying to get Ralph in trouble by pooping on Mr. Plotz's car to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkeries". There's nothing to get, really.

[Jaime_Weinman]

As you may know, this season had a big cut in the episode order: the WB originally ordered 18, then cut it to 8. It was clearly theI remember liking this batch of episodes better at first than I did in retrospect (at one point I predicted that this would be a "great season" and I was proved very wrong). I don't know from the behind-the-scenes stuff, though the script and animation problems might have had something to do with the fact that producer Peter Hastings was having troubles with the WB over the prime-time Pinky and the Brain among other things; he produced all these episodes, but he had left Warner Brothers for Disney by the time they aired. Some of the Pinky and the Brain episodes produced around the same time have some of the same problems these A! episodes do, though not to the same degree.

There were some cartoons in this batch that weren't bad ideas but suffer in the execution. "Boids in the Hood" makes no sense because, according to the writer of the cartoon the WB censors wouldn't allow them to show the Goodfeathers pooping on Plotz's car, so it was never clear what was going on. And the one-shot about the cuckoo clock, which is kind of cute, has screwed-up timing -- from animation or editing, I don't know -- that kills the jokes and keeps the story from making sense.

The biggest problem with the season overall is that it doesn't really have stories for these characters, it just plunks them down in whatever familiar movie story they can act out. One of the few "story" cartoons in this season is "Anchors A-Warners" and the writer screwed it up by making the Warners complete a-holes. (Which is easy to do; they're tough characters to write for because if they're not handled right, they are a-holes.) I also like the "Soda Jerk" cartoon because even though it's just a rehash of "Hiccup," it at least has a story and actual gags, instead of one-liners and movie references.

I think they'd lost sight of the point that a short cartoon, even a short Animaniacs cartoon, works best when you have a strong central premise (Wakko has to go to the bathroom; Brain becomes a country singer) and strong gags that come from that premise. But in "Cutie and the Beast" nothing really happens until they meet Taz as the prince, whereas in their best cartoons, they meet Dracula/Death whoever at the beginning and torment him for the rest of the cartoon.

The best cartoon (at least in terms of script) produced for this batch was "Back In Style," but it was held over until season 5 (though clips from it appeared in the Season 4 promos).

One interesting thing about this season is that, perhaps because they were short on writers and didn't have the budget to hire many new writers, they gave the animation staff more script assignments: several cartoons including "Boo Happens," "Boids On the Hood," "Soda Jerk" and that Brain/Hippos crossover (which wasn't bad) were written by animators on the show, and one of the few new staff writers, Nick DuBois (of "Anchors a-Warners" infamy), was a former background man on the show.

[Peter Paltridge]

The best cartoon (at least in terms of script) produced for this batch was "Back In Style," but it was held over until season 5 (though clips from it appeared in the Season 4 promos).

I assumed it was held over because they needed massive retakes. And I guessed the most likely reason was because the original designs skewed too close to the copyrighted material they were targeting. But I've since heard the reason was because the limited animation kept coming back too GOOD.

Given that this episode premiered on a Tuesday afternoon, I suspected the lawyers were still skittish about it being noticed and sued about.

So the censors ruin "Boids on the Hood," and within the same season on a different show, Snowball took a big bite out of a piece of dung. What gives? By the way, there was eventually visual bird poop in WB programs, but DISNEY allowed it first, which is nuts.

[dth1971]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock with Slappy Squirrel is a great Animaniacs Season 4 episode - "Toot toot, here come the shrimp boats on the next Donahue!"

[DarthGonzo]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock with Slappy Squirrel is a great Animaniacs Season 4 episode - "Toot toot, here come the shrimp boats on the next Donahue!"

If you say so. I thought it was a gigantic misfire.

[Kazuya Prower]

I believe I've only seen the first half of this season growing up. Like I said in the season 3 thread, I haven't seen much of the WB-era episodes. I will admit that "Cutie and the Beast" and "Jokahontas" were a bit funny, though.

[Silverstar]

Originally Posted by dth1971
One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock with Slappy Squirrel is a great Animaniacs Season 4 episode - "Toot toot, here come the shrimp boats on the next Donahue!"

If you say so. I thought it was a gigantic misfire.

Same here. I didn't enjoy "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" at all, and the episode was a lousy choice for a Slappy Squirrel show pilot. Pathos, thy name ain't Slappy.

[Old Guy]

a lousy choice for a Slappy Squirrel show pilot.

Was that the episode that was only Slappy and there was a part that was kinda serious and sad with Skippy being alone in the house crying or something like that?

[Silverstar]

Was that the episode that was only Slappy and there was a part that was kinda serious and sad with Skippy being alone in the house crying or something like that?

Yeah, that was the one. I only found out recently (here, to be exact) that the episode was in fact a pilot for Slappy Squirrel spinoff series. (Hence why there were no other Slappy shorts that season.) And the producers decided to go with a maudlin story with hardly any laughs in which Slappy was completely out-of-character.

Good job, guys.

[TwoToneDearly]

If I recall right the same ep they parodied Pocahontas didn't they also parody the Rugrats intro?

[Tom Ruegger]

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" may have been many things...but it was never a pilot for a Slappy Squirrel series.

Also, it WAS never a big fan favorite.

It WAS...the only full half hour Slappy story. And that may be where the whole "pilot" rumor began. But a series pilot, even a backdoor series pilot, is often developed with and paid for by a network. This was not the case with this Slappy episode.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" was an attempt to do a longer story with Slappy and Skippy. It was pretty ambitious and it tried to tackle some octogenarian issues that it probably should have avoided. And it probably could have been funnier.

But it worked very well on one level: the episode did successfully show the caring relationship shared by Skippy and Aunt Slappy. And that WAS one of the episode's goals.

[Jonny Mack]

I remember doing the board for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" and being amazed the whole time I was boarding it. As far as I could see, it was a statement about the interference by the education system in family life, where social services are called in to make judgments about the viability of a family. That's an amazingly rich discussion ... full of deep socio-political implications! In an earlier Slappy cartoon ("Bully for Skippy") they had taken a nice jab at the government meddling with TV childrens programming - it made its point and moved on with the cartoon. But in this one, you couldn't move on - this deep & tragic subject was the whole cartoon!

I remember jokingly writing on the title page when I submitted it: "A Very Special Slappy Squirrel Cartoon: One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" ... and I think (I may be mistaken) they actually incorporated that into the beginning of the actual cartoon.

[Old Guy]

But it worked very well on one level: the episode did successfully show the caring relationship shared by Skippy and Aunt Slappy. And that WAS one of the episode's goals.

I remember doing the board for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" and being amazed the whole time I was boarding it. As far as I could see, it was a statement about the interference by the education system in family life, where social services are called in to make judgments about the viability of a family. That's an amazingly rich discussion ... full of deep socio-political implications! In an earlier Slappy cartoon ("Bully for Skippy") they had taken a nice jab at the government meddling with TV childrens programming - it made its point and moved on with the cartoon. But in this one, you couldn't move on - this deep & tragic subject was the whole cartoon!

I remember jokingly writing on the title page when I submitted it: "A Very Special Slappy Squirrel Cartoon: One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" ... and I think (I may be mistaken) they actually incorporated that into the beginning of the actual cartoon.

I need to re-watch the episode, but I remember enjoying it a lot. Then again, I always enjoyed the more serious episodes. The episode that always pops into my mind first is the one with the golden wrapping paper. Another one that I always think about was the Rita and Runt episode that takes place in Nazi-Occupied Poland. Didn't that one air around the same time as the release of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List? Was that intentional? Did Spielberg, knowing that kids were to young for the movie, want to give them a history lesson of sorts?

[Tom Ruegger]

Nick Hollander played a key role in the writing of all of these.

"Gift of Gold," about the wrapping paper, was one of Steven's favorite episodes, and Steven actually initiated the concept for the cartoon, then Nick ran with it.

Nick and I worked on "Putting on the Blitz" together. I have long been a fan of action-packed WW2 movies, and after getting "Where Rodents Dare" (a take-off on "Where Eagles Dare") underway, I wanted to do a WW2 half hour. "Putting on the Blitz" was to be a companion piece with the P&B cartoon, but the timing and scheduling didn't work out. Deanna Oliver pitched in with Nick on the song-writing for "Blitz."

I'm pretty sure our work on "Putting on the Blitz" had no conscious connection to "Schindler's List." I know the end train scene in "Blitz" was a reference to "Von Ryan's Express."

I did feel that the red noses on Yakko, Wakko and Dot in their black & white footage -- various sequences over the course of the series -- may have had a small subliminal impact on Steven when he went with the girl in the red coat in "Schindler." Of course, this is highly presumptuous on my part...and unsubstantiated.

Steven, being the famous multi-tasker that he is, did regularly review our storyboards and occasionally looked at episode rough-cuts while on the set of "Schindlers List" in Poland.

[Old Guy]

When you worked on episodes like Putting on the Blitz, which dealt with serious subject matters, what type of notes did you get from the network? I assume that FOX gave you and your staff a lot of freedom. Batman: The Animated Series, for example, got away with a lot. How often did FOX or the WB network get in the way? Or were they afraid to upset Steven Spielberg and simply left you guys alone.