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Rebooting ‘Zany to the Max’! Exec producer Wellesley Wild and co-exec producer Gabe Swarr talk about the art of recapturing the Animaniacs’ lightning in a bottle.
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or those of us who lived through the ‘90s, the popular Warner Bros. toons Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain were two of the seminal pop culture phenoms of the decade. The good news is that show, which was created by Tom Ruegger and ran for five seasons on Fox Kids and Kids’ WB From 1993 to 1998, is being revived and rebooted on Hulu this month thanks to the team at Warner Bros. Animation. Animaniacs’ original exec producer Steven Spielberg and principal voice actors Rob Paulsen (Yakko), Jess Harnell (Wakko), Tress MacNeille (Dot) and Maurice LaMarche (Brain) are also back for the revival which is also exec produced by Sam Register, and showrunner Wellesley Wild (Family Guy, Ted and Ted 2) and Gabe Swarr (Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Penguins of Madagascar, El Tigre). This time around, the show’s music is composed by Steven and Julie Bernstein, protégés of the original composer, Richard Stone. One of the revival’s biggest hat tricks is that www.animationmagazine.net
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it’s still fresh and relevant today, and the character designs and animation are remarkably faithful to the original show, while keeping up with the look and technology we expect to see in 2020. As Swarr explains, “When you see the new designs, they instantly feel familiar to the fans of the original show, but there are some big changes in how the characters are drawn. It’s kind of like the designs you remember them looking like, not so much what they
(Vancouver), Snipple (Manila) and Digital eMation, Tiger Animation and Saerom Animation (Seoul).
Not Your Typical Process Wild says Spielberg and Register wanted to take the reboot in an interesting direction since most children’s and family shows are storyboard-driven, while adult animation projects have a showrunner and a co-head of
‘I like to think of Animaniacs as the heir of the Looney Tunes. The slapstick, the self-aware comedy and the hand-drawn feeling are all part of the staying power of the show.’ — Exec producer Wellesley Wild
actually look like.” The team at Warner Bros. Animation Burbank handles all of the show’s pre- and postproduction work, while the animation production is aided by teams at Yowza! Animation (Toronto), Tonic DNA (Montreal), Titmouse
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animation, with a writers’ room. “They wanted to set the show up like an adult series, and I was tapped as the showrunner because of my background in shows such as Family Guy and the Ted movies,” recalls Wild. “Steven wanted a very thorough look into what I was going december 20
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