Pinky and the Brain

From Freepedia

Pinky and the Brain are cartoon characters from the animated television series Animaniacs. Later they starred in their own cartoon show called Pinky and the Brain and even later in Pinky, Elmyra and The Brain.

The two are genetically enhanced lab mice who reside in a cage in the Acme Labs research facility. Each week sees Brain come up with a new plan for the two (led by him) to take over the world, which ultimately ends in failure. In common with many other Animaniacs shorts, many episodes are in some way a parody of something else - usually a film.

The series won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class - Animated Program in 1999.

Contents 1 The Brain 2 Pinky 3 The duo 4 The schedule 5 Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain 6 Pop culture references

The Brain

The Brain bears a resemblance to Orson Welles, particularly in his vocal characteristics (voiced by Maurice LaMarche). He is highly intelligent and develops Rube Goldbergian plans for global domination. His tail is bent like a staircase, and his head is large and wide, supposedly housing his abnormally large brain. He appears to be coldly unemotional and speaks in a deadpan manner. Nevertheless, Brain has a very subtle sense of humor, and has even fallen in love once, with Billie (voiced by Tress MacNeille), a rather dippy girl mouse with a Queens accent. Intellectually, Brain sees his inevitable rise to power as beneficial to the world rather than being greed for power.

The characteristics of the Brain would lead one to believe that he is more suited to be an antagonist rather than a protagonist, but the series tends to present him as a quixotic fellow striving for greatness against the odds, evoking sympathy from the audience and causing viewers to like him, despite his seemingly evil plans for world domination. The absurdity of a normally insignificant creature hungering for world dominance adds to the comical effect, and one senses a Napoleon complex within him, despite the gravitas of his Wellesian diction - highlighted when other characters inadvertently become as smart as or smarter than him. Unfortunately for the Brain, his schemes are inevitably doomed to failure by reason of one or more of a few common mishaps: Pinky doing something idiotic to ruin the plan, Brain gravely under/overestimating the masses' intelligence, or, simply, bad luck.

The Brain's similarity to Orson Welles was established in a famous episode entitled "Yes, Always", which was based upon a real-life outtake from one of Welles' television commercials, colloquially known as Frozen Peas, in which the actor-director ranted about the poor quality of the script. Strengthening the Welles connection was an episode in which the Brain took on the mind-clouding powers of a radio character called "The Fog"; a parody of The Shadow, a popular radio character for which Welles once provided the voice. Other episodes alluding to Welles included an episode entitled "The Third Mouse," a parody of The Third Man, in which Welles appeared, and an episode in which Brain, inspired by Welles' infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the hysteria it provoked, stages an alien invasion on television, believing that this will cause humanity to turn itself over to his rule.

Pinky

Pinky (voiced by Rob Paulsen) is another genetically modified mouse who shares the same cage at Acme Labs but is substantially less bright. He speaks with a heavy accent, possibly based on Dick Van Dyke's poor imitation cockney English or a character in a Monty Python skit (Paulsen is a fan). He frequently says nonsensical interjections like "narf", "zort","poit", and "troz" (the last of which Pinky started saying after noticing it was "'zort' in the mirror". Rob Paulsen won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program for this role in 1999.

Although Pinky is also an albino lab mouse like the Brain, he has a straighter tail, a severe overbite, and is taller than The Brain. Pinky is more open-minded than the Brain -- perhaps excessively so given that his off-and-on again girlfriend is a horse named Pharfignewton and he thinks a spool of thread is his little sister -- and is generally friendlier. His parents' intelligence mirrors his own, leading to the possibility of Pinky's lack of intelligence being genetic. Pinky sometimes lapses into fits of extreme intelligence or gains psychokinetic abilities for short periods of time. At one point Pinky had nearly taken over the world using all of his ideas which Brain had shot down earlier in the episode (a clam petting zoo, a country music station, and a law requiring the world to wear shiny pants).

"Narf" is a word borrowed from fellow WBA staffer Eddie Fitzgerald, who utters a word similar to this, possibly a bastardization of the German word "neff", roughly translated as "to annoy". Many WBA shows feature caricatures of Fitzgerald, i.e. Tiny Toon Adventures, and Pinky himself began as one.

The duo

The duo have also matched wits with Snowball, a hamster (voiced by Roddy McDowall) with similar genetic modifications and lust for power, but with less benevolent goals.

As the show's theme song directly states, "One is a genius, the other insane"; this is a simplistic, but mostly accurate, summary.

The catchphrase used at the start of almost every episode is:

PINKY: Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight?

BRAIN: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

The catchphrase is similarly repeated at the end of every episode in a slightly modified form:

BRAIN: [After his latest plan fails] Come, Pinky, we must prepare for tomorrow night.

PINKY: Why, Brain? What are we going to do tomorrow night?

BRAIN: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

There is also a running gag which is usually inserted into the episode somewhere. The Brain will ask Pinky "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" (usually concerning the Brain's latest plot) and Pinky will respond with something that is rather inappropriate and completely divorced from what the Brain is thinking about (e.g., "Uh, I think so, Brain. But this time, you wear the tutu."). (The complete list of Pinky's responses to "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" can be found here.)

The schedule

The series ran from 1995 to 1998, airing 65 episodes. When the WB Network first premiered in 1995, Pinky and the Brain was one of the first series to air on its prime-time schedule on Sunday nights–one of the few times an animated series intended for Saturday morning cartoons was scheduled for regular prime time viewing. A previous cartoon series to air in prime time was another Warner Bros. cartoon series, Batman: The Animated Series, which had aired on Sunday nights on the Fox Network in 1993. Pinky and the Brain aired in the same time slot as Batman had, opposite the continual ratings champ 60 Minutes–and, just as with Batman, the prime-time ratings for Pinky and the Brain were poor; the show was returned to Saturday mornings after one season.

Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain

In its final season, the Pinky and the Brain series became Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain, which took Pinky and the Brain out of their lab setting, and into the home of 8-year old Elmyra Duff. Elmyra was originally a character from Tiny Toon Adventures and had no previous role in the Pinky and the Brain series.

Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain was not terribly popular among hardcore aficionados, who criticized its awkward and clunky premise, and cited it as superfluous and distracting from the simplicity of the original. It is widely considered that the addition of Elmyra was an occurrence of jumping the shark. Never universally popular even in the Tiny Toon days, Elmyra was seen as a poorly-conceived addition to the well-established "two man show" humor and dialogue. She also limited the geographical/chronological ubiquity the Acme Labs and Pinky and the Brain had previously maintained.

The writers of the show may not have had a high opinion of the change, based on the lyrics to the new opening credits.

"So Pinky and the Brain

Share a new domain

It's what the network wants

Why bother to complain?"

- From the Lyrics to 'Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain'.

This was foreshadowed by the 'Pinky and the Brain and Larry' episode, where for no explained reason an additional mouse appeared in the show. The episode included altered opening credits featuring Larry, voiced by Billy West, to maintain the gag that the show had suddenly changed format. As a parody of the Scrappy-Doo method of changing a series to 'spice it up', it might indicate the writers' attitudes to the eventual change on their own show (As well as a good excuse for some Three Stooges-style hijinks).

Pop culture references

Many cartoons, going back to the days of Tex Avery and his "George and Junior" shorts, use the formula of one idiotic character and intelligent (though often only marginally) character who seems to be the leader of the duo. Other popular cartoon series using this theme include Cat Dog, Ren and Stimpy and Invader Zim. This in turn is a subset of the clasic comic trope, commonly known as the double act.

• The computer game Fallout 2 featured cameos by Pinky and the Brain.
• The professional wrestling management simulator EWR sometimes randomly featured Pinky and the Brain as rivals to your wrestling federation.They each operate seperate feds,appropiately titled World Domination Wrestling (Brain) and NARF Wrestling (Pinky)- In particular Brain always tends to hire wrestlers which are released by Federations in the Global/ National Level
• In The New Batman Adventures episode "Torch Song", Bruce Wayne asks Barbara Gordon on the phone, "What are we going to do tonight?" Barbara replies, "The same thing we do every night, Pinky." Bruce doesn't get it.
• The Family Guy character Stewie Griffin, much like the Brain, is often pitted against him in internet fanfiction.
• George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are sometimes referred to as Pinky and the Brain.
• Pinky and the Brain sing to Camptown Races by Stephen Foster in episode P3.