Ladies and gentlemen after so many years of the air the Warner brothers and the Warner sister are finally back with new episodes. However they didn't come alone as they also brought with them Pinky & The Brain as well as a whole bunch of characters from the classic Animaniacs and so you can bet that I was not only excited as all hell for this show but I was also going to cover this show when it first came out and so here are my first impressions of the 2020 revival of "Animaniacs" enjoy.
The basic set up of the show is the exact same only with the first and last segments dealing with the Warner siblings adjusting to live in the modern day and Pink & The Brain come close to taking over the world when The Brain creates a meme in which the sole focus is to help The Brain take over the world. I fully admit I had no idea what to expect from this show plot wise but i'm glad that they kept the same verity show format and out of the basically two stories that this episodes presents us with I liked the Warner siblings plot more just because to e that was the more funny storyline but that's just what I think tho.
Reprising their roles are Rob Paulsen as Yakko Warner , Pinky and Gennaro , Jess Harnell as Wakko Warner and Co-Host , Tress MacNeille as Dot Warner , Alarm and Host , Frank Welker as Ralph The Guard , Clunko and Teamster #1 and Maurice LaMarche as The Brain and Ian Malcolm. Joining them for this series are Stephanie Escajeda as Nora Rita Norita , Keith Ferguson as Dr. Grant , Jake Green as Fred Bagel and P.A , Brendan Hunt as Seth Meyers , Andy Milder as Steven Spielberg and Teamster #2 and Abby Trott as Dr. Sattler.
Just the fact that they managed to get back nearly all of the original cast and had them reprise their original cast makes this show worth watching. However as for my thoughts on the acting it was honestly as great as I expected it to be i'm not going to lie I went into this first episode with high expectations about pretty much everything and that includes the acting and so it's great to see that the old cast haven't missed a step when it comes to playing these characters and the new cast do a good job as well.
Doing the animation for each of the segments in this episode are Giant Ant , Snipple Animation and Titmouse. The original Animaniacs always had top notch animation and so when this show was first announced I like I assume many others was nervous that this revival wouldn't live up to the quality f the animation that the original show had , well I can safely say that this show at least from this first episode has some really good animation with all of the characters having alot of nice fluid movements and the song sequences really coming to life due to how good the animation is in those sequences or at least I think so anyways.
This show does introduce 3D CGI animation to the franchise with the intro for Pinky & The Brain being done entirely in 3D CGI. Honestly that's one of the very few gripes that I have with this episode just because the CGI doesn't look that good in my opinion and there was honesty nothing wrong with the 2D animated intro from either the original Animaniacs or the original Pinky & The Brain but at least they still kept the original Pinky & The Brain theme song.
Speaking of Pinky & The Brain I honestly found there return cartoon to be the worst part of the episode not to say that there segment is bad because it's really good. However how they explain what the duo have been up to for over twenty years just didn't sit well with me personally and it goes against there whole idea of trying to take over the world every single night but on the plus side it does de-canonise Pinky , Elmyra & The Brain.
Not only did they bring back the cast from the original show and executive producer Steven Spielberg but they also brought back original song writers Julie and Steven Bernstein. I have to say that I liked the two songs that they have in this episode since they both have that Animaniacs charm to them as well as being catchy as all hell sadly tho neither of the two songs in this episode are a list song but they do a good job of ripping Hollywood a new one since all they do in both songs is sing about how Hollywood is running out of ideas and are just making reboots / reimaginings of various old TV show and movies which I thought was funny.
Incase you need another reason to watch this revival they also brought back the original theme song but with new lyrics. While I love he original theme song and i'm glad that they brought back i'm not a fan of some of the new lyrics which to me just scream of being woke hell there's even a whole part of the song which is just dedicated to proving how woke they are which could be a jab at people who complain that something isn't woke enough but to me it just seemed out of place as did the fact that they go out of the way to say that Dot uses her wit which if you've seen the original show wasn't true at all Dot's whole thing was that she's cute one and would often use her cuteness to get the better of people and so i feel that they should have kept the lyric saying that Dot is cute.
This episode like the original series episodes is a full twenty four minuets and thirty five seconds long and even tho there are a few segments in this episode i'm so glad that they didn't do what most modern cartoons do these days. Which is to make each episode eleven minuets long just because that would harm the show in the longer run since you can't tell a great story in eleven minuets since you have so much to set up anyway and so having this show be alot closer to twenty five minuets is a good thing because it means that we get to spend more time with these likeable characters.
Now then boys and girls this is a comedy and Animaniacs is known for it's jokes which means I have to talk about the jokes in this episode. Honestly the jokes are where this episode shines brightest in my opinion because my god is this episode I honestly lost count at how many times I laughed out loud during this because all of the jokes landed and landed hard that's how good the jokes are in this episode or at least I think the jokes in this episode are really funny anyways.
Overall from this episode and this episode alone it looks like the Animaniacs reboot is going to be one of the few actually good reboots out there. This episode honestly has so little going against it in my opinion and trust me I looked for anything that I could find that was a bad thing in the episode because all i was finding was alot of good but the only ones that i've found are the ones that i've mentioned in this post and since this is only my first impressions of the new show I won't give this show or this episode a rating.
All of the images that I used in this review I got from either the official Animaniacs fandom wiki page or Google Images. In what is sadly becoming more of a trend as of late I honestly have no idea which website would be best to use for images since both have images that are both very high in quality and pretty low in quality but I will say that Google Images does have more of a verity of images tho were as the official Animaniacs fandom wiki page only has a small handful of images at the absolute most and so I say use whichever website you want to use.