I admit that I haven't revisited enough of the series in my adult years to test this supposition, but is it fair to say that Tiny Toon Adventures was a freakier series than Animaniacs? It's certainly my recollection that Tiny Toon Adventures had a penchant for darker, more grotesque humor than its successor. Then again, I was a slightly younger child during Tiny Toon's run, so it could just be that it hit me at a more suggestible time. Not to mention that, the younger I was, the higher the likelihood that the numerous pop culture references would go right over my head. There were many, many episodes that confounded me, but none more confounding than "Acme Cable TV" (original air date November 11 1991), an episode built around the premise that Babs and Buster Bunny are unable to perform their usual schtick after coming down with the Taiwan flu (so called because it makes you sneeze with a Taiwanese accent), so instead we get to spend twenty-odd minutes hanging out on their couch as they flick through the delights of cable television, or in the words of Babs, "685 channels of viewer-pleasing mind-rot". Mind-rot starring themselves and their classmates, no less. Can we say VANITY?
Conceptually, "Acme Cable TV" bears a resemblance to the 1987 movie Amazon Women on The Moon, which follows a similar channel-hopping format - and, in both cases, the format is largely an excuse for unleashing a slew of micro parodies and skits that require little to no context or development (although Amazon Women has an ongoing narrative thread that it intermittently returns to, in the form of the titular film-within-a-film). Catching this episode back in the early 90s, I was not yet culturally savvy enough to appreciate the bulk of what was being referenced, and with no solid narrative grounding to focus my engagement, watching it swiftly became an exercise in all-out discombobulation, wherein I found myself at the mercy of Babs and Buster Bunny's (mercifully?) fickle attention spans. I remember being particularly frustrated when they cut away from one story just as it appeared to be getting started - I won't say which one for now, although the fact that I became invested in the scenario in question as a narrative probably speaks volumes of my naivety as a child.
One of the early skits was a faux commercial for the fictitious breakfast product "Foot Loops" - a blatant play on the cereal Fruit Loops, although that brand and its avian mascot meant nothing to me at the time. Nevertheless, even back then I was already well-versed enough in the language of television commercials to appreciate what was being lampooned - that is, the efforts of advertisers to make the banal, and sometimes just plain atrocious, look desirable, even the most ghastly kind of sugar-laden cereals (in fairness, I've never eaten Fruit Loops, but it looks absolutely revolting to me, and I can only assume the writer of this particular skit shared my sentiments). It gave me something I could latch onto, amid the chaos. I was hoping to see further spoof commercials littered throughout, but alas, there was only one other (I don't remember there being too many spoof commercials in Amazon Women on The Moon either, and one of the scant few was for a way more vile product than Foot Loops). But that second ad was so bizarre that it wound up being the episode highlight for me. Here, a dressed up Babs catches a taxi, but not without giving a sideways glance to the nonchalant Buster lingering beside the curb, who gets a mouthful of exhaust fumes when her taxi departs. Babs makes it all the way to the airport and up into the skies before a thought suddenly occurs to her, whereupon she backtracks all the way to Buster, to ask him the question that her mind cannot let be: "Are those Bungle Boy jeans you're wearing?" An impassive Buster confirms that he's not wearing anything beneath the waist at all, to which Babs responds, "That's what I thought," and her cab drives away, forcing Buster to once again chow on its exhaust.
It was another reference that was completely lost on me at the time, but the ad was spoofing a popular spot for the now-defunct brand Bugle Boy jeans (in the Tiny Toons skit, the brand has been modified to "Bungle", which means to screw something up, but is also a play on "bunny", referring to the leporine nature of the characters). Airing in the cusp between the 1980s and the 1990s (around the time that Levi's countered with the image of a young Brad Pitt being turned loose from prison in just his boxers), the scenario is actually pretty similar to that of the Tiny Toons skit, but that it takes place in an arid desert where our two participants may well be the only figments of human life within miles. A male hitch-hiker, clad in the denim of the hour, is passed by a female motorist, but she hastily backs up her vehicle to ask him the burning question: "Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans that you're wearing?" He confirms that they are, whereupon she thanks him and drives away, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere. In a more sinister variant from the same campaign, a man received a telephone from his ultramodern apartment in what looked to be a dystopian near-future, to be greeted by the voice of a female voyeur wanting to know if those were Bugle Boy jeans he had on, whereupon she promptly hung up on him. In his case he possibly dodged a bullet.
The former ad is iconic enough to have been spoofed in a variety of venues, including an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head (no prizes for guessing what variant on the pivotal line they had to offer) and the music video to the 1991 Genesis single "I Can't Dance", which was a broad piss-take on the superficial quirkiness of contemporary jeans advertising in general (more on that later). Oddly enough, though, I feel that the Tiny Toons variation actually makes better use of its strange scenario than the original. Watching those Bugle Boy jeans ads, I really am scratching my head trying to crack the underlying narrative - obviously, the implication is that his choice of pants is the only fascinating thing about him, and the sole reason he's given a second look, but she just drives off and leaves him in the dust anyway. His jeans momentarily get him attention, but he doesn't get the ride. Compare it to Brad Pitt's triumphant turnabout at the end of the aforementioned Levi's ad, and this campaign seems curiously punishing of its product's in-universe patron.
With Babs and Buster Bunny, however...well, there is slightly more of a story going on there. I've no doubt that many of the added touches are there simply to play into the cartoon absurdity of their universe, such as Babs getting her plane to turn around in-flight on her own personal whim. Nevertheless, their looser reality cuts a little deeper into the underlying humanity (as it were) of the situation. The feeling I get is that Babs' ability to reverse her trajectory so readily is not a matter of idle curiosity, but a desperate, potent defiance in wanting to move backwards to a critical moment in time when things could potentially have gone differently. Babs is already far down what should logically be passed the point of no return when she manages, by sheer force of will, to turn around and take her story back to square one, driven by an overpowering sense of regret as to what she left behind.
Unlike the aforementioned Foot Loops skit, this one doesn't advertise upfront its nature as a faux commercial, so a reasonable assumption would be that Babs is going backwards because she regrets not seizing the opportunity to strike up a conversation with the attractive young bunny who momentarily caught her eye before heading down a different direction and discarding the possibilities he potentially opened in a cloud of exhaust fumes. In actuality, she goes back to confirm that Buster isn't wearing the brand supposedly being advertised - when Buster points out that he isn't wearing pants at all, Babs states that she suspected as such and drives off, reinforcing her disregard for Buster with a second blast of exhaust. Again, an absurd outcome, but one that makes sense if viewed from the perspective of Babs' need to explore The Road Not Taken. Babs goes back, basically, to affirm that the path she had chosen was indeed the correct one, in eliminating the possibility that Buster was wearing the coveted jeans that would have marked him out as desirable company. The alternate path was indeed not worth pursuing, and Babs goes on her merry way. And that's what makes this unassuming skit so compelling to me. It plays like the perfect metaphor for very our human desire to know how things might otherwise have gone had we done things just a little differently, weighed against our intuition that we'd likely be no better off either way. That's the case for Babs, at least. Perhaps if Buster had possessed slightly better fashion prowess then he'd have avoided that mouthful of pollution the second time around.
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