- [Narrator] This video is brought to you by Keeps.
(upbeat music)
- Hey Wisecrack, Michael here.
Today we're looking at the cartoon that dares
to combine deli meat with business casual wear.
♪ And bologna in our slacks ♪
- [Michael] Steven Spielberg's Animaniacs.
Sure it's a cartoon you may or may not remember
for it's hand puns.
- No, no, no, fingerprints.
- I don't think so.
- Wait, does that mean was I think it means?
Animaniacs has one particular object of derision
that's worth digging into, Hollywood.
And how it works or often doesn't.
As it turns out this kid show has a lot to teach us
about the dysfunction behind your favorite
cartoons, shows, and movies in both
the original series and the 2020 reboot.
So how does a show with more mallets than a hammer factory
dissect the complicated social and economic systems
behind our entertainment?
(loud thud)
♪ We smashed outback Buddy. ♪
- [Michael] Let's find out in this
Wisecrack edition on Animaniacs.
Spoilers ahead for 90's entertainment news
and election results.
♪ While Bill Clinton plays the sax ♪
- And before we continue, I wanna give a shout-out
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Now back to the show.
First the only real background you need.
Animaniacs is loosely framed around the adventures of-
♪ The Warner brothers ♪
♪ And the Warner sister Dot ♪
- [Michael] These three scamps Yakko, Wakko, and Dot
periodically escape their prison
in the Warner Brothers water tower
to reek havoc on the studio back lot and well that's it.
♪ Those are the facts ♪
- Like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show,
30 Rock, and Bojack Horseman,
Animaniacs follows in a long Hollywood tradition
of TV shows that are about making TV shows.
Fittingly the show gets a lot of its laughs
by pulling back the curtain on Hollywood.
Making fun of the gap between the beautiful end products
that viewers get to enjoy,
and the painstaking, frustrating, even corrupt process
that makes them happen.
In other words, Animaniacs tries to make us laugh
by giving us exaggerated cartoonified glimpses
into how Hollywood really works.
- Can you read my screenplay?
It's super original.
It's about a screenwriter in Los Angeles who-
(car screech)
- At its most basic level this approach takes the form
of jokes about the daily grind of film production.
In the original run sketch, Cutie and the Beast,
for example, we sit with Yakko, Wakko, and Dot
as they endure multiple exhausting retakes
of the opening scene of their Beauty and the Beast parody.
- [Director] Cut.
- [Michael] The Warner's quickly lose their patience
and start snipping at each other.
- Thanks for your support Mr. P-Pop Into the Mic.
- [Michael] Eventually Dot,
publicly built as the cute or sweet one,
gets completely fed up and takes it out
on everyone in earshot.
(Dot yells)
(expletive bleeps)
- That's my cute little sister who said that.
- Even more navel-gazey is the Animaniacs parody
of Orson Welles infamous frozen peas meltdown.
In which the famous actor took particular offense
to the ad copy he was reading.
Here's the Animaniacs version.
- That's just idiotic if you'll forgive my saying so.
That's just stupid.
In July, impossible, meaningless.
- [Michael] It of course changes the part
where Orson Welles says-
- [Orson] Get me a jury and show me how you can say
in July and I'll go down on you.
- Get me a jury and show me how you can say
in July and I'll make cheese for you.
- In segments like these Animaniacs uses humor
to argue that the entertainment industry
is a lot less polished and a lot more human
than it sometimes pretends to be.
According to scholar John T. Caldwell,
this is a crucial fact to bear in mind
when analyzing how the industry behaves.
In his article,
Para-Industry: Researching Hollywood's Blackwaters,
Caldwell cautions his fellow scholars not to ignore
the human element while analyzing
how and why Hollywood works.
Meltdowns and all.
The entertainment industry he argues,
is just as affected by societal issues
as the broader culture it makes content for.
The entertainment industry does
what any other large group does.
Form communities, practice reputation control,
and take part in certain approved ritualistic behaviors.
Some of the most Google worthy jokes in Animaniacs
revolve around Hollywood's socio-political communities.
That is the friendships and petty rivalries
that form between actors, producers, directors, et cetera,
and play a huge under acknowledged role
in the way that movies and TV shows get produced.
In the shows original run this dynamic is shown
in mockumentary segments in which representatives
of old Hollywood are interviewed about their interactions
with the Warner's throughout the 20th century.
These interviews reveal a community
in which the category of friend, frenemy, and coworker
are all mixed up with each other.
See for instance, the long running feud
between Yakko Warner and comedian Milton Berle.
- Berle and Yakko were always going at it.
Yakko was always with the anvils on Berle's head.
We'd hear a noise, we'd look,
and there was Berle with an anvil on his head.
- The show also pokes fun at what Caldwell describes as the
industries internalized imperative that everyone
must constantly market his or her brand
through a combination of calculated workplace behavior
and effective online networking a reputation management.
Within the Animaniacs universe a person's reputation
is so important that they are justified
in doing almost anything to protect it.
Up to and including dropping a bomb on a critic's house.
In this episode Slappy and Skippy Squirrel
torture Siskel and Ebert stain-ins,
Hiskel and Eggbert until they publicly retract
a negative review.
- Now here's today's lesson Skippy.
If you wanna go on national TV and shred someone's career
to pieces you have the right.
(loud slam)
- Right.
- But when you do that remember,
don't go listing your home address in the phone book.
- [Michael] While these jokes made at Hollywood's expense
are mostly pretty lighthearted,
the show can sometimes get downright cynical
in its approach to the industry.
This becomes particularly clear in its commentary
on the economics of entertainment.
♪ Michael Ovitz in talks with 20th Fox ♪
♪ Means he wants another 93 mil' ♪
- And how our favorite movies and TV shows
are inextricably tied up with the flow of money and power.
Animaniacs talks about this a lot.
In a show that's supposedly written for kids,
there's a near constant discussion of legal documents,
music licensing, and other industry topics
children wouldn't know the first thing about.
Contracts, for instance, are more than a passing mention
in the shows opening theme song.
In both the original series-
♪ We pay or play contracts ♪
- And the 2020 reboot.
♪ You should see our new contracts ♪
- [Michael] The topic of contract negotiations also plays
a recurring role throughout both iterations of the series.
- Wait a second.
- We got a contract.
- What our agent said-
(overlapping yelling)
- [Michael] With management and talent arguing viciously
about who should get paid how much for what kind of work.
- The agent these kids got for themselves was tough.
A real grinder.
(Irving LaBoo clucks)
- [Michael] And in one of the Warner's
early adventures to the middle ages,
side characters lament the fact that they
can't sing songs from Camelot without paying for the rights.
♪ But we can't sing the movie score ♪
♪ Or else they'll make us pay ♪
- [Michael] This preoccupation with money and entertainment
carries over into the 2020 reboot.
The first episode of which ends
with the Warner's accepting a giant check moments after
singing a song that trashes Hollywood's lack
of originality and constant recycling of old ideas.
♪ For a guaranteed ratings smash ♪
♪ Dig it up out of the trash ♪
- Again and again, the show implies that money,
not artistic or cultural merit,
is the main driver of what gets made in Hollywood.
And while this take on the industry
might feel a little jaded, especially for a kid show,
at least one scholar would agree with it.
In his book, Communication and Capitalism,
sociologist Christian Fuchs argues that
within the context of our capitalist society
the purpose of the entertainment industry
is to produce attention.
That is, your attention.
Which can then be packaged up and sold
to advertisers and other buyers who will pay good money
to monopolize your eyes and ears for 30 seconds at a time.
From this bleak point of view the entertainment industry
looks less like a collection of artists
trying to make beautiful moving films,
and more like an assembly line of factory workers
laboring to transform your time into marketable attention.
And as in many factories working conditions
are less than ideal.
Fuchs contends that the communication workers of the world
are united by the fact that they all produce for
and are exploited by global communications corporations.
Put another way, nearly everyone
in the entertainment industry
is being squeezed by the person
above them to produce as much as possible
in return for payment that doesn't nearly cover the value
of what they've made and sacrificed.
This dynamic pops up again and again throughout Animaniacs.
With directors and executives leaning on creatives
to constantly come up with more and better work.
- Get to places or 10 year Gulag.
- [Michael] Even if it destroys them in the process.
The 65th anniversary special for instance,
imagines the Warner's original director as an angry boss
who belittles his employees and forces them to produce
above and beyond what could be reasonably expected.
- Stay up all night if you have to.
I want funny.
- [Michael] The pressure gets so bad that the creator
loses his mind while designing the characters.
(laughs maniacally)
- [Michael] And ultimately winds up in a mental hospital.
- Later I found out he went all funny in the head.
But I hear he's getting better.
- We're having soup today.
- In other words, according to the shows own logic,
the Warner's and by implication
many of our favorite cartoon icons are a direct result
of the industries exploitation of an animator.
A worker, who in this case was driven
to insanity by overexertion.
With regards to worker exploitation,
little has changed between the series original run
and the reboot.
The new fictionalized Warner Brothers studio CEO
is just as willing to exploit
her workers as were her predecessors.
- I don't care that your girlfriends new nose
fell into a subway toilet.
We need that rewrite by the end of the day.
- The reboot also uses the Animaniacs formula
to offer funny new critiques
of more recent industry developments.
In particular it has some interesting things to say
about the way the production and advertising
have evolved since the show originally aired.
In brief it satirizes the ways in which
content development is increasingly driven,
not by the decisions of individual artists and executives,
but by a reliance on data collected
from perspective audience members.
Animaniacs seems to be suggesting that
in a weird, slightly creepy way,
the perspective audience of a given piece of film
has become an unknowing participant in the creative process.
Driving decisions about what gets made and how.
Our friend Fuchs would agree and goes so far as to argue
that audience members themselves have become unpaid workers
in an overarching economic structure that includes
the entertainment industry,
the advertising marketing industry,
and social media platforms.
As he puts it, audience members are audience workers
creating attention as a commodity,
while users of ad-finance internet platforms
are digital workers creating attention, data, meta-data,
and social relations as a commodity.
To put that in the simplest possible terms,
without necessarily signing up for it,
you become a worker in the worldwide process
of attention production.
And you're on the job anytime you engage with content.
Watching it, liking it, sharing it,
talking about it, and so on.
If you're like much of the internet connected world
you may spend hours in a given week consuming
and evaluating videos, music, podcasts, et cetera.
In effect producing highly valuable information
and content for which you never see a dime.
But that's a video for another day.
The Animaniacs reboot calls out
this new metrics obsessed media landscape directly
in its theme song.
♪ A brand new cast who tested well ♪
♪ In focus group research ♪
- [Michael] What's more, in a funny musical number
in which the Warner's try to predict
what will happen between the reboots 2018 production
and its 2020 release,
the siblings acknowledge that their show
will succeed or fail based on how quickly they can
make themselves relevant to whatever's being talked about
at the moment.
♪ Our ratings depend on knowing the trends ♪
- But the reboots most direct response
to the quirky slash terrifying implications of new media
comes in a Pinky and the Brain sketch, Of Mice and Memes.
In it we learn that way back in the 90's
the Brain created the got-dang internet
specifically for the purpose of brainwashing
and controlling the entire planet.
Here in 2020, he quickly gathers that the most effective way
to use this global communications tool is to gather
as much attention from internet users as possible.
- [Brain] With their undivided attention they are
the perfect unsuspecting pawns for my master plan.
- [Michael] But of course like any self-aware,
meta-happy show, Animaniacs eventually has to offer
some assessment of its own role in the massive,
complicated system that is
the global entertainment industry.
- We know we're selling out, so it's cool.
- At least they're honest.
What do you think Wisecrack?
Is the Animaniacs take on the entertainment industry
too pessimistic?
Not pessimistic enough?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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As always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat music)