After years of speculation, the new Animaniacs is finally upon us! How does it hold up?
Right now, I'm not in the best position to comment, since I don't have Hulu and I haven't yet been able to experience any episodes in their entirety. I've watched a number of clips here and there, and what I have seen has made me laugh, so it's passed the first test. From the outset, though, I do have a cluster of lingering reservations. Firstly, the Jurassic Park parody, which was used as one of the early trailers, is by and far the best new skit I've seen so far, so I do have this ominous feeling they may have already used up their best material in the promos. Secondly, is it just me or are there a lot of incredibly grotesque-looking human characters in this revival? Thirdly, there's been good news and bad news on the matter of the peripheral cast. The good news is that I was (somewhat) wrong in my prediction that Charlton Woodchucks would never return, because he was indeed featured (and mentioned by name) in a segment that incorporated most of the supporting characters from the show's previous incarnations. As one of Charlton's few allies, I was positively ecstatic to have been thrown a bone, even if did come at the expense of one of my other favourite Animaniacs characters (Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you?). But then, I was simultaneously dampened by the understanding that this was indeed the only bone that any of those peripheral characters would be getting from this entire revival. All that speculation about which segments would get a new lease of life in the modern age turned out to be totally moot, because none of them have returned besides the two we'd known about from the very start. Talk about your anti-climax.
Glancing at the list of episodes, it looks as though the revival follows a format more akin to Garfield and Friends than to its predecessor. You can enter into each episode pretty much always knowing what you'll be getting - a couple of segments involving the main characters, with the supporting act sandwiched in between. There are a handful of segments involving brand new characters, but these definitely seem to be getting the cold shoulder compared to the two headlining shorts. Now, there were rumors circulating earlier this year that this would be the case, so I have had a few months to steel myself for this reality. It didn't really hit home for me, however, until I watched the new intro. I think anybody familiar with the original will wince at the sheer volume of dead space they have to fill where most of the supporting cast would have been name-checked - to extent that it makes little sense retaining the Pinky and The Brain stanza, since all it does is awkwardly punctuate a musical sequence that would otherwise be hogged entirely by the Warners. Watching the introduction to 2020 Animaniacs is a weirdly depressing experience, like revisiting the site of a once bustling, lively shopping district to find most of the venues boarded up and out of business. Having Yakko, Wakko and Dot loudly assert that they did meta first barely disguises the unhappy fact that they don't have a whole lot of friends left. (And seriously, why not take the opportunity to introduce some of the new characters instead of just vaguely alluding to them? Or are they just reluctant to commit to those segments in case they don't take?)
I suppose what bothers me about this all-out cast purge is the probable rationale behind it. I suspect the reason why the original supporting cast did not come back, in the majority of cases, is not because it was unviable to revive them, but because the characters weren't considered important or iconic enough to be worth the effort. And that's a real shame. I appreciate that it might have been harder to bring back characters tied to a specific voice actor, like Sherri Stoner or Bernadette Peters (although I'm unclear if they were even asked), but what about the non-vocal characters like Chicken Boo, Mr Skullhead and the Mime? Those guys could run forever! It is on behalf of the characters from the shorter, more random pieces, such as "Chicken Boo", "Good Idea, Bad Idea" and "Mime Time", that I take particular umbrage, as the assumption that they were insignificant to the Animaniacs formula strikes me as completely wrong. They weren't expendable extras - no, they were the very heart and soul of Animaniacs! I love the Warners and Pinky and The Brain as much as the next person, but it was in these perfectly compressed, wonderfully inexplicable bursts of insanity that the Animaniacs star shone at its brightest. The little bits and pieces in between the longer segments were what really gave the series its unique character - I can't think of any other cartoon from the same era where you might have encountered anything as ingeniously simple, yet gloriously strange as "Good Idea, Bad Idea".
Or indeed Randy Beaman, who is one of the great unsung champions of the original series. The twist in his case being that we never met Randy first-hand; instead, we heard stories about his bizarre and sometimes disturbing life from a small child whose own connection to Randy was never explained. The child's official name was Colin (after his voice actor, Colin Wells, who was the son of series producer Deanne Oliver), though I'm not sure if he was ever explicitly identified as such in the series itself (in the "Big Wrap Party" musical sequence Yakko refers to him as "The Randy Beaman Kid"). The Randy Beaman skits all followed the same basic formula - Colin would emerge from his house, talk directly to the camera about Randy's latest misadventure, sign off with his signature line, "'kay, bye", and run back into the house. Often, they would spice the routine up by giving Colin alternate attire or a prop to fiddle with, but onscreen action was typically fairly minimal. The offbeat appeal of the series lay in the juxtaposition of the mundaneness of the immediate surroundings with the way-out nature of the stories being told, which ranged from the quirky to the macabre. On rare occasions, they had the ring of plausibility - one of the most notorious skits involved Randy's traumatic bathtub experience, which I suspect actually has happened to a number of kids who were forced to bathe with their siblings (in this instance, the humor derives from what's merely implicit in the final line, "And now Randy Beaman gets to take showers by himself"). Wells' delivery was fun and natural - I'm not sure if there was any improvisation on his part, but he always sounded entirely convincing as a kid who related tall tales with a mix of morbid fascination and artless bewilderment, as though he only half-understood the implications of what he was saying. A number of Colin's stories are straight-up re-tellings of classic urban legends - amid the assorted misfortunes suffered by Randy Beaman and his family are familiar (and highly suspect) warnings about the dangers of mixing pop rocks and soda and of lingering too long in tanning salons (those are dangerous, although not for the reason legend insists). And then we have the time that Randy Beaman and his father got to live out the most classic urban legend of them all - that of the disappearing hitch-hiker. In one skit set in the dead of winter, Colin emerges from his house clad in a thick parka to tell us about Randy's encounter with a mysterious woman while on a road trip in Kansas:
"Okay, so what happened is, one time Randy Beaman went on a trip with his dad and they picked up this lady who wanted a ride home - and this was in Kansas - and she sat in the backseat and when they got where she wanted to go, they turned around and she was gone. Randy Beaman's dad talked to the man who lived there and told him what the lady looked like, and the man said, "Oh, that's my wife, but she died four years ago." Spooky, huh? Okay, bye."
Just to make things doubly unsettling, the skit offers a break from routine by having Colin actually not make it back into the house on this occasion. Instead, he topples over into the snow and doesn't get back up again (presumably because his movements are restricted by the parka). Spooky, huh? Isn't that the perfect visual representation of the anxieties expressed in his story?
Well, hear me out. The legend of the phantom hitch-hiker is easily one of the most familiar and enduring in modern folklore, so odds are you'd already heard some variation on this story by the time you were Colin's age. You know how it always goes - unsuspecting motorist picks up an innocuous-looking character by the side of the road and takes her for a bit of a ride, only to discover that Betsy's been dead for ten years! Jan Harold Brunvand, the granddaddy of urban legend analysis, covered the legend extensively in a chapter of his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitch-Hiker: Urban Legends and Their Meanings, and at least one book has been dedicated exclusively to the subject, The Evidence For Phantom Hitch-Hikers by Michael Gross, published in 1984. The story dates back to at least the late 19th century, and has been told so many times that the details of the journey inevitably vary. In some versions, the hitch-hiker is completely, eerily mute, while in others they reward the driver by sharing a prophesy (depending on when the incident has said to have occurred, the hitch-hiker has predicted everything from World War II to the second coming of Jesus). Sometimes, the hitch-hiker mysteriously vanishes midway through the journey; on other occasions, they make it all the way to the specified destination and depart in a conventional fashion, but had borrowed some item of clothing from the driver they'd neglected to return, prompting the driver to follow them and ultimately locate their clothing beside a tombstone bearing the name of their erstwhile companion. What does tend to remain quite consistent across re-tellings is the genders of the parties involved - in the majority of cases, the hitch-hiker is female, while the motorist is typically male (although of course you will find variations there too). Some perceive possible sexual undertones within the legend, including Cecil de Vada of Fate Magazine, who is quoted in Gross's book as speculating: "I suppose there is no man, celibate or married, who hasn't imagined himself driving on a lonely road at night and being hailed by a glorious femme, even if she is only a wraith." (p. 136) Maybe, although I suspect that this is at least partially down to conventional wisdom that a lone female out in the middle of nowhere is more likely to be regarded with sympathy, as odds are she'll be perceived as vulnerable instead of potentially dangerous - the reverse scenario, in which a female motorist picks up a male stranger, occurs far less often, presumably because it has too much of a yikes factor from the outset to be especially appetising.
In many accounts, the hitch-hiker is revealed to have been killed in a road accident that occurred on the exact spot that the motorist picked them up (just to make things additionally spooky, the night in question is often specified to be the anniversary of said accident) - the implication being that the hitch-hiker is attempting, in death, to complete the journey that was tragically truncated in life. And although the hitch-hiker in such accounts is rarely dangerous or malevolent per se, they are nevertheless a deeply sinister figure, for a couple of reasons that I suspect ultimately converge into one. As with many ghost stories, the appeal, in part, tends to boil down to a fascination with our own mortality, and the phantom hitch-hiker's uncanny ability to pass themselves off as a living human offers an eerie illustration of the thin line between life and death. Secondly, I think Gross is on the right track when he attributes the prevalence of the legend to "a sense of adventure: a timeless adventure, a Romance of the Open Road" (p.137), although adventure of course goes hand-in-hand with trepidation. It is in the phantom hitch-hiker that we find a personification of the uneasy gulf that lies between one patch of civilisation and another, the uncertainty as to what lies ahead whenever we venture out from a place of (presumed) safety and take our chances in less chartered territory. The phantom hitch-hiker poses no direct threat, but they represent a possible outcome that is terrifying to the wary traveller having to journey through the middle of nowhere to get to somewhere - the possibility that they, too, might not make it back to civilisation. The hitch-hiker is a prevalent figure in horror lore because they embody the unknown, unpredictable nature of the world beyond our comfort zone - we cannot be sure quite who we're picking up and allowing to ride along with us - although in the specific case of the phantom hitch-hiker, I would argue that a kind of implicit kinship exists between the hiker and the motorist. The motorist has entered into the dark in-between and discovered that they now occupy a middle ground with the phantom, a transitional state in which both figures have left one world behind them and await reaffirmation on the other side. The lines between the living and the dead are blurred until the motorist returns to the safety of civilisation, at which point their travelling companion can no longer follow them. For the motorist, this state of dark uncertainty has been only temporary, but their brush with the phantom is a chilling reminder that this outcome was never guaranteed - and that, in making the return journey (or heading out again), they'll be forced to cross through much the same void.
Hence, the significance of Colin not making it back inside the house in the end. As we fade out, he's still down for the count, stranded in the icy in-between of his snow-covered yard. A troubling upset to the established routine that reinforces the story's underlying anxieties that on any given day, things can go unexpectedly wrong.
Of course, in Colin's version of the story it's never actually specified that the hitch-hiker died en route to her intended destination. The humor in Colin's re-telling comes from two key elements - firstly, the abrupt manner in which he punctuates his story in order to specify that the alleged incident occurred in Kansas, as though this somehow accounts for everything (lots of wide open spaces, I suppose), and secondly, the nonchalant reaction of the husband (at least as Colin represents it) to news that his deceased wife has rubbed shoulders with a couple of passers-through, suggesting that he's quite familiar with, or at least unfazed by her spectral eccentricities. The Randy Beaman skits are as much about the foibles of oral tradition as the stories themselves.
The really spooky thing about Randy Beaman, though? I don't think he really exists. He too, is another phantom, albeit one that serves a very different kind of function - that of the all-purpose protagonist to whom all this crazy shit has to happen. The prevailing mark of the urban legend is that they seldom, if ever, are reported to have happened to the individual narrating them, or even to someone whom the narrator personally knows. It always happened to your neighbour's aunt's hairdresser's dog groomer's cousin - or, in short, "a friend of a friend". Someone to whom there does seem to be some semblance of connection to the person telling the tale, but from whom a comfortable enough distance is imposed as to make it impractical for the narrator to have to verify. Protagonists who apparently touch life at enough points for multiple narrators to easily trace a connection, yet with whom nobody ever seems to have any direct relationship. It's not too hard to draw parallels between such protagonists and those aforementioned phantom hitch-hikers - no real fixed and solid identity, and trapped in a loop, constantly reliving the same traumatic experience over and over, in public consciousness, so long as their story suits the morbid fascinations of the age. For his part, Colin never claims any personal connection to Randy Beaman, raising the question as to whether one exists at all. Has Colin so much as met the guy, or is he simply regurgitating stories that have been fed to him by other kids? It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that Randy is a sort of mythical figure who exists only in school yard folklore. More bizarrely, it seems that Wakko Warner also possesses a knowledge of Randy and the kind of macabre scrapes that he and his family are reputed to get into - in one of the longer segments, "Ups and Downs", Wakko cites a Randy Beaman story in order to illustrate the potentially gruesome outcomes of taking the elevator instead of the stairs. That does seem to be Randy's lot in life (whether the life is actually real or not) - to provide cautionary examples, as is typically the case of those elusive protagonists of urban legends. The Randy Beaman stories strike such an uncomfortable nerve because they are, at heart, warnings that speak to our deepest, darkest fears - fear of the road less travelled, fear of the abuses we may inadvertently inflict on our body via modern luxuries like pop rocks and tanning salons, fear of having to share the spaces in which we supposedly practice personal hygiene with those who don't. He is merely an empty vessel onto which we are free to project whatever macabre thought takes our fancy.
Getting back to the newer Animaniacs, once again I have to acknowledge that my own first-hand experience there is extremely limited, and that perhaps my view will soften when I get to view the episodes in their entirety. Maybe I'll get over my disappointment about the supporting characters being axed and manage to enjoy the new episodes for what they are - after all, I did just that with Freakazoid! when it made a similar move at the beginning of its second season (although that was a slightly different scenario - for one, my favourite character was a beneficiary of that particular change). I sincerely hope, though, that we haven't seen (or heard) the last of Randy Beaman. So long as morbid curiosity remains integral to the human condition, it doesn't feel like that kid's work is truly done.
(And fun fact: before Jan Harold Brunvand popularised the term "urban legend" in the early 1980s, one writer, Rodney Dale, made the compelling case that we should call them "whale tumour stories", or WTSs for short, but regrettably it did not catch on.)
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