DimeUhDozen
She/Her- 6,146
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Yes, you read that title right. We're here to set the record straight and praise our eternal tormenters, the Warner Brothers... and their Warner Sister Dot.
Cosmology:
Low 2-C Universe
Firstly, let's talk about the universe. Or rather, let's let Yakko sing about it.
"And still the universe extends to a place that never ends which is maybe just inside a little jar!"
A pretty blatant statement that the Animaniacs universe is infinite. The hypothetical "jar" thing is just a maybe, a theory. So we won't be going over the implications of that. Though... something pretty similar is going to come up later.
With the introduction of a space-time continuum in this next section, it can be concurred that this verse would qualify for Low 2-C.
2-B Multiverse
And now, it's time to visit our favorite evil mice, Pinky and The Brain for some more cosmic updates. In the Pinky and The Brain episode, Season 2 Episode 10: Brain of The Future, the episode centers around time travel with P&TB encountering an alternate version of themselves from the future. They manage to get home though and all is well and good until the ending, where the lab is overrun with alternate timeline versions of Pinky and Brain. What does this mean exactly? It means there are a lot of alternate timelines/universes in this cosmology. I counted around 166 Pinky's in this scene. But that's not even the half of it. In the episode Mouse Madness of S2E9's Animaniacs (2020), Brain makes a Temporal Inverter which allows him to go back in time and predict the winning team of a basketball game and profit off of it. However, he does this many times, and it begins to do some wonky stuff to reality. Smart Pinky states that his device is disrupting the fabric of reality and creating new timelines. He does this a total of 13 times throughout the episode, bringing us to 199 universes. But let's put the cherry on top and talk about the Freakazoid episode "Freakazoid is History" S1E21, in which by preventing Pearl Harbor from happening, Freakazoid creates an alternate timeline in which Brain takes over the world. 200 universes. Okay. Big whoop. But we've established that in the Animaniacs multiverse, turning back time and making changes creates branching parallel timelines, right? In the two-parter episode Groundmouse Day and Groundmouse Day Again, Brain experiences a time loop in which he experiences the same day for 80 years. At the end of the episode, we learn this was all thanks to Pinky unknowingly using Brain's prototype time machine as a white noise machine before he goes to bed. There is one alternate timeline per loop. There are 29,220 days in 80 years. Ergo, adding that to our grand total, we come out to 29,420 universes in the Animaniacs multiverse.
Low 1-C Higher Plane
Now, it's time to get into the plane existing above it. The Animation Team's realm. At first, you might think it's just a joke. Fourth wall break. Popeye. Yadda-yadda-yadda. But this is a bit different for the reason that it is consistent. In the episode "Here Comes Treble", S1E9 of Animaniacs (2020), something is established. The Animaniacs are all inside of a cartoon's plot, but once they sass the Conductor of the cartoon's score by breaking the fourth wall, they find that he has total control over the reality and the plot of the cartoon by playing music. Eventually, they build up a resistance to it and phase out of the cartoon into the real world where the orchestra is. Yakko gets an idea and takes all of the Warner duplicates the Conductor created to wreak havoc across the orchestra. They eventually launch him into the cartoon and have their revenge by using the same plot manipulation on him as well, forcing him to act in the role of a hillbilly. This is alright but nothing concrete. However, it gets better.
In the episode "Yakko Amakko" S2E7 of Animaniacs (2020), the Duck Amuck cartoon is parodied in which an animator screws around with Daffy (revealed to be Bugs at the end). But there is a twist. In the end, Yakko tricks the animator and grabs ahold of their stylus (which is only supposed to be tracing the screen), yanking them into the cartoon with him. After some compromise, they become friends and he makes a deal for them to use their plot power on his nemeses to have some fun and he is shown outside of his cartoon in this realm eating ice cream with The Animator. Now, what control does this Animator have over the Animaniacs reality? A lot. The cartoon is treated as a mere file that can be warped, duplicated, closed, and reduced to void. Notice how it's only Yakko and the other characters like Dr. Scratchansniff, the olympian guy, and the CEO cannot notice the changes as Yakko does. Only the CEO makes a snide fourth wall remark, but otherwise, she is incapable of stopping it. Yakko is supposed to be inferior to it. And yet, not only is he able to react to the Animator's movements but act quick enough to yank them in. As for how he phases in and out of 3-D and 5-D reality consistently, some Dimensional Manipulation is at play here, which isn't even an outlier, as all cartoons upon conception are capable of this, as they spring into 3-D reality from a 2-D paper structure to become "real".
Lastly, in one of the show's last segments in the final episode S3E10, "The Stickening", Dot creates a vortex that sucks in the entire universe and is even shown to affect the same Animator from Yakko Amakko from her real life plane of existence, proving that across all 3 seasons of the show, this is a consistent thing that happens.
It would also be safe to say that The Animator and The Conductor share the same plane of existence due to being staff members of the show.
Connected Shows
There are two other shows that share a universe with Animaniacs, the first being Tiny Toon Adventures. The characters make frequent appearances on the show, especially Elmyra who gets an entire episode to mess with the Warners. But what really makes this concrete is Pinky, Elmyra, And The Brain, which is a spin-off of a spin-off. Pinky and The Brain is obviously a connected segment of Animaniacs that spun off into it's own show and in this spin-off, Elmyra, Pinky and The Brain are living together.
Next is Freakazoid. Freakazoid shows up on Animaniacs a fair amount of times. And the Warners do vice versa. Freakazoid, Wakko and The Brain even show up and have an argument together one time. And The Brain takes over the world in the above mentioned Freakazoid timeline. Given the meta nature of the connected web of series, it's hard to write this off as a gag or crossover status. The existence of Tiny Toons explains and recontextualizes a lot of what we know about Toons and how they function, which is something I'll be explaining in the future.
Update: There are also repeated instances of showing that the original Looney Tunes shorts are a part of this universe. It can be inferred that these shorts and only these shorts are a part of this continuity.
In Conclusion
We have our hierarchy, now it's time to add it up in scaling. The Animaniacs crew should all have a starting base of High 3-A for surviving Dot's explosion of the universe. Despite the universe being Low 2-C, there was no indication that the time-space continuum was destroyed, just the universe. Dot obviously survives it as shown in the clip, the Warners show up fine in the next segment of the show, and WoG states that nothing can kill the cast of Animaniacs, meaning they survived the universe explosion too. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot should have Low 1-C through Dimensional Manipulation. I think that's it. MUAH! Goodnight, everybody.
Agree: Anomalous_N_I_W_D_E, Tonygamerman, Oliver_de_jesus, The_2nd_Existential_Seed, The_Almighty_Wholesome, Psychomaster35, Fireld, Da3ggman, Christian_Higdon, GoCommitDi, TheMassivlyUnkn0wn, Starter_Pack [Undecided on Looney Tunes connection], Antvasima (13)
Disagree:
Neutral: Propellus (Leaning towards agree) (1)
Cosmology:
Low 2-C Universe
Firstly, let's talk about the universe. Or rather, let's let Yakko sing about it.
"And still the universe extends to a place that never ends which is maybe just inside a little jar!"
A pretty blatant statement that the Animaniacs universe is infinite. The hypothetical "jar" thing is just a maybe, a theory. So we won't be going over the implications of that. Though... something pretty similar is going to come up later.
With the introduction of a space-time continuum in this next section, it can be concurred that this verse would qualify for Low 2-C.
2-B Multiverse
And now, it's time to visit our favorite evil mice, Pinky and The Brain for some more cosmic updates. In the Pinky and The Brain episode, Season 2 Episode 10: Brain of The Future, the episode centers around time travel with P&TB encountering an alternate version of themselves from the future. They manage to get home though and all is well and good until the ending, where the lab is overrun with alternate timeline versions of Pinky and Brain. What does this mean exactly? It means there are a lot of alternate timelines/universes in this cosmology. I counted around 166 Pinky's in this scene. But that's not even the half of it. In the episode Mouse Madness of S2E9's Animaniacs (2020), Brain makes a Temporal Inverter which allows him to go back in time and predict the winning team of a basketball game and profit off of it. However, he does this many times, and it begins to do some wonky stuff to reality. Smart Pinky states that his device is disrupting the fabric of reality and creating new timelines. He does this a total of 13 times throughout the episode, bringing us to 199 universes. But let's put the cherry on top and talk about the Freakazoid episode "Freakazoid is History" S1E21, in which by preventing Pearl Harbor from happening, Freakazoid creates an alternate timeline in which Brain takes over the world. 200 universes. Okay. Big whoop. But we've established that in the Animaniacs multiverse, turning back time and making changes creates branching parallel timelines, right? In the two-parter episode Groundmouse Day and Groundmouse Day Again, Brain experiences a time loop in which he experiences the same day for 80 years. At the end of the episode, we learn this was all thanks to Pinky unknowingly using Brain's prototype time machine as a white noise machine before he goes to bed. There is one alternate timeline per loop. There are 29,220 days in 80 years. Ergo, adding that to our grand total, we come out to 29,420 universes in the Animaniacs multiverse.
Low 1-C Higher Plane
Now, it's time to get into the plane existing above it. The Animation Team's realm. At first, you might think it's just a joke. Fourth wall break. Popeye. Yadda-yadda-yadda. But this is a bit different for the reason that it is consistent. In the episode "Here Comes Treble", S1E9 of Animaniacs (2020), something is established. The Animaniacs are all inside of a cartoon's plot, but once they sass the Conductor of the cartoon's score by breaking the fourth wall, they find that he has total control over the reality and the plot of the cartoon by playing music. Eventually, they build up a resistance to it and phase out of the cartoon into the real world where the orchestra is. Yakko gets an idea and takes all of the Warner duplicates the Conductor created to wreak havoc across the orchestra. They eventually launch him into the cartoon and have their revenge by using the same plot manipulation on him as well, forcing him to act in the role of a hillbilly. This is alright but nothing concrete. However, it gets better.
In the episode "Yakko Amakko" S2E7 of Animaniacs (2020), the Duck Amuck cartoon is parodied in which an animator screws around with Daffy (revealed to be Bugs at the end). But there is a twist. In the end, Yakko tricks the animator and grabs ahold of their stylus (which is only supposed to be tracing the screen), yanking them into the cartoon with him. After some compromise, they become friends and he makes a deal for them to use their plot power on his nemeses to have some fun and he is shown outside of his cartoon in this realm eating ice cream with The Animator. Now, what control does this Animator have over the Animaniacs reality? A lot. The cartoon is treated as a mere file that can be warped, duplicated, closed, and reduced to void. Notice how it's only Yakko and the other characters like Dr. Scratchansniff, the olympian guy, and the CEO cannot notice the changes as Yakko does. Only the CEO makes a snide fourth wall remark, but otherwise, she is incapable of stopping it. Yakko is supposed to be inferior to it. And yet, not only is he able to react to the Animator's movements but act quick enough to yank them in. As for how he phases in and out of 3-D and 5-D reality consistently, some Dimensional Manipulation is at play here, which isn't even an outlier, as all cartoons upon conception are capable of this, as they spring into 3-D reality from a 2-D paper structure to become "real".
Lastly, in one of the show's last segments in the final episode S3E10, "The Stickening", Dot creates a vortex that sucks in the entire universe and is even shown to affect the same Animator from Yakko Amakko from her real life plane of existence, proving that across all 3 seasons of the show, this is a consistent thing that happens.
It would also be safe to say that The Animator and The Conductor share the same plane of existence due to being staff members of the show.
Connected Shows
There are two other shows that share a universe with Animaniacs, the first being Tiny Toon Adventures. The characters make frequent appearances on the show, especially Elmyra who gets an entire episode to mess with the Warners. But what really makes this concrete is Pinky, Elmyra, And The Brain, which is a spin-off of a spin-off. Pinky and The Brain is obviously a connected segment of Animaniacs that spun off into it's own show and in this spin-off, Elmyra, Pinky and The Brain are living together.
Next is Freakazoid. Freakazoid shows up on Animaniacs a fair amount of times. And the Warners do vice versa. Freakazoid, Wakko and The Brain even show up and have an argument together one time. And The Brain takes over the world in the above mentioned Freakazoid timeline. Given the meta nature of the connected web of series, it's hard to write this off as a gag or crossover status. The existence of Tiny Toons explains and recontextualizes a lot of what we know about Toons and how they function, which is something I'll be explaining in the future.
Update: There are also repeated instances of showing that the original Looney Tunes shorts are a part of this universe. It can be inferred that these shorts and only these shorts are a part of this continuity.
- Ex: What's Opera Doc, Porky In Wackyland and Duck Amuck get mentioned (twice) and characters from Chuck Jones shorts appear frequently. A prop from Duck Dodgers (1953) is used by the Tiny Toons characters in one episode. Hot Cross Bunny appears as one of cartoons that Bugs himself said was a part of his past. Same goes for Knighty Knight Bugs. This cartoon was used as a plotpoint in the episode "Who Bopped Bugs Bunny" of Tiny Toon Adventures, with Robin Hood Daffy mentioned in the same plot.
In Conclusion
We have our hierarchy, now it's time to add it up in scaling. The Animaniacs crew should all have a starting base of High 3-A for surviving Dot's explosion of the universe. Despite the universe being Low 2-C, there was no indication that the time-space continuum was destroyed, just the universe. Dot obviously survives it as shown in the clip, the Warners show up fine in the next segment of the show, and WoG states that nothing can kill the cast of Animaniacs, meaning they survived the universe explosion too. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot should have Low 1-C through Dimensional Manipulation. I think that's it. MUAH! Goodnight, everybody.
Agree: Anomalous_N_I_W_D_E, Tonygamerman, Oliver_de_jesus, The_2nd_Existential_Seed, The_Almighty_Wholesome, Psychomaster35, Fireld, Da3ggman, Christian_Higdon, GoCommitDi, TheMassivlyUnkn0wn, Starter_Pack [Undecided on Looney Tunes connection], Antvasima (13)
Disagree:
Neutral: Propellus (Leaning towards agree) (1)
Last edited:
Yes.
