Netflix recently added Animaniacs to its streaming options. This delighted me, and I sat down to introduce my kid to it. I was hopeful. He’d loved Freakazoid! But no—I’m not sure he got a full episode in before demanding to watch Special Agent Oso instead.
I hate Special Agent Oso. I feel slightly guilty launching into this tirade now, because the eponymous character is voiced by Sean Astin, who just lost his mom, but this has been building for weeks now. And one of the things that’s been rubbing at me pretty much since my son discovered the show (by pointing at a picture on Netflix and saying, “Bear?”) was kind of crystallized by one of the segments of Animaniacs that I’ve watched. The Warners are at a Big Hollywood Party, and Everyone Who Is Anyone Circa 1993 is there. It’s . . . dated, which is not a word I use often.
Oh, no more so than the similar cartoons from both Warner Bros. and Disney back in the ’30s, to be sure, but there it is. And Goodfeathers is another one-joke concept that got dragged out for a very long time, not unlike the interminable series of James Bond puns that make up the episode titles on Oso. (Which are sometimes weirdly sexual, given that it’s a children’s show, but after all, they’re working with James Bond movie titles, here. And, yes, they’ve played on Octopussy at least once.) Then again, I don’t really like Goodfeathers, and those cartoons from the ’30s were never really my thing.
I would also rather watch the animation style on Animaniacs. The animation on Oso frankly looks like it’s of the quality of the terrible YouTube videos my son watches when I let him. Graham, in fact, is incapable of having a conversation about the animation quality without intoning that Oso has dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes. He’s not wrong. It’s the hair texture on the humans that bothers me most, but none of the animation is any good. It’s a Disney show, so there’s obviously money behind it, but it’s just cheap-looking. It’s not as though Animaniacs looked expensive, but it didn’t look animated by the lowest bidder. Who was, possibly, someone’s twelve-year-old with a fancy computer.
Even though it was explicit that no one knew what the Warners actually were, there was still something cuddly about them visually. (Personalities, perhaps not so much!) I talked to another parent about this show, and the thing we agreed on is that “Paw Pilot” (Meghan Strange) is kind of terrifying. I may have suggested that she looks like she wants to eat your face. Oso is supposed to be a stuffed bear, but he looks like the decorative kind, the kind that you can’t actually play with because it’s hard and stiff inside.
No, the Warners aren’t role models, and Oso is supposed to be. And maybe he’s different if you’re very young. But my Gods, he’s stupid. It’s really irritating to me. He’ll ask the kids to go on missions with him, and sometimes he’ll ask them basic things like “Which way is left?” or “What shoes should I wear?” However, he’ll forget instructions and just blunder through. He doesn’t stop to ask; he never seems to realize that people would repeat instructions.
Oh, and let’s not forget that the kids don’t ask for help, either. They are seen expressing inability to do something by the worldwide network of ladybug-shaped spy drones that are apparently watching children all over the world at all times. They see kids blithely asserting ability to do something to an adult then not knowing how to do it, and they dispatch Oso to warp through time and space and get there from possibly the Moon in order to help a kid snap herself into her booster seat in the car. Not to mention that Paw Pilot, when she’s counting down how many seconds are left, appears to have access to seconds as much as five times longer as they are in this reality. Seriously. I’ve counted.
I may be touchy about this. I have seen a lot of this show, and I’d rather be watching Animaniacs.