it's pretty interesting how marvin's defining characteristics in pop culture are the blowing up earth to see venus motivation and 'where's the kaboom' "catchphrase", both things that come from and occur only once in his very penultimate appearance of the golden age era. but in addition to that, are more associated with his initial green/red design, not the gold/green palette actually used for those final two shorts.

what Does also contain that green/red design is duck dodgers and the 24th 1/2 century, one of the two marvin shorts included in the bugs bunny/road runner compilation movie, which also named him and uses a new illustration with the "classic" palette, and I'm guessing that's what embedded those elements into newer generations' public perception and later marketing. I dunno I just think seeing what factors are picked up most by pop culture surrounding classic media is neat!!

Alien Nation 5 Slag Like Me by Barry B. Longyear 1994 Pocket Books

In 1959, journalist John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a Black man using tanning booths, medication, and make up, and travelled the American South, recording the experience for Sepia magazine. Unlike the similarly themed Soul Man...

his book Black Like Me seems to still be well regarded. I was familiar with the parodies, from Eddie Murphy in Saturday Night Live...

to Chris Morris' Brass Eye.

Even Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, gets in on the act

And the Punisher. Oof.

In Slag Like Me, a human reporter undergoes surgical treatment to look Tenctonese. He goes undercover in LA, hangs around gangsters, and exposes bigoted police. When he goes missing, LAPD and the FBI investigate, and Matthew Sikes undergoes the same procedure to flush out whoever did whatever to the reporter.

Meanwhile, George Francisco is partnered with former overseer and current FBI agent Paul Iniko to chase down leads, such as the exposed crooked cops and an angry neighbor.

I don't know if this story was based on unused season two scripts, and tie-in novels come with a lot of restrictions, so I don't want to assign blame, but everything about Slag Like Me gets it wrong.

Alien Nation is a metaphor for immigration, assimilation, and bigotry. These themes are baked into every scene of every story. I struggle to comprehend the creative mind that, after a movie, 22 television episodes, and four novels, decides "Hey, how about we make this next book about racism?" It also falls into the same trap as some X-Man stories - instead of using fictional bigotry to highlight and explore actual bigotry, it uses actual racism as a metaphor to explore the real theme, fictional racism against aliens who do not exist. And the discussions on racism and bigotry are not subtextual here, it's pure soapboxing.

One would think, given the title and cover and all, the main story would be Sikes living life as a newcomer. You would be wrong. A decent amount of page space is budgeted to him preparing, but he's barely out in public in disguise and can't manage to stay in character for more than two minutes. His first undercover act is to make an appointment with a Tenctonese gang leader, to whom he instantly announces that he is a human cop.

Very quickly they're pulled over and beaten up by the police. Matt is taken to the hospital and has amnesia, so I was hoping we'd have a bit where he would think he was Tenctonese for a while, but nope, he gets his memory back almost right away and promptly tells everyone he is a human cop. Sikes is not very good at going undercover.

At no time did the foundational premise of the book, Sikes going undercover as a Newcomer, have any affect on the plot or themes, other than to discover that LA cops would be as mean to Newcomers as they are to everyone else, which Sikes already knows.

The mystery plot is equally disappointing. Various conspiracies are hinted out before it's revealed to be characters who are named in passing once, and they did it for dumb reasons. Some mysteries have non-sequitur endings that reflect the chaotic nature of real crime, other times it reads like the author didn't feel like wrapping everything up and just picked a killer at random. This felt like the latter.

As with the last book, Sikes and Francisco are split up through most of the story, denying the buddy cop element, and is replace by Francisco and Iniko. We get kind of a Bugs/Daffy, Mickey/Donald deal where Francisco goes from being the rational half of the duo to being the irrational one. Pretty much all the soap opera elements, such as Francisco's home life, are neglected. We do get a little bit more of Dobbs, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs' character, which was nice.

Paperback from Amazon

A Ponderous Rewatch: Prologue

You know, I didn’t think this would happen. I didn’t go into bingeing the 2020 renewal of Animaniacs with the thought “I’m going to watch this and then go and watch the original Pinky and the Brain shorts and spin-off show and do a rewatch and loose analysis on the whole franchise with special attention on queer subtext and themes”. What I initially set out to do was simply watch the renewal and see if it lived up to the show I watched pretty regularly as a kid in the 90s…or at least what I remembered of it through the haze of decades worth of time.

Pinky and the Brain was my favorite set-up on Animaniacs back in the day. Back then I probably wouldn’t even have been able to tell you why beyond “I think it’s funny and the characters are fun to watch as they screw up trying to take over the world”. Other segments were funny to me back in the day, too. Slappy the squirrel was great in that she was basically just like the classic, near-timeless Looney Toons a la Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but as an old lady toon who’s seen it all and tries to relate to the changing world while proving that the ol’ slapstick ways still work. The Goodfeathers were entertaining despite the fact that I was a literal child and didn’t even know that it was a big ol’ spoof of Goodfellas. Hell, I’ve still never seen Goodfellas, but three pigeons trying to carry themselves like macho tough guy mafia folks while being goddamn pigeons is still funny with or without that context. And as for the Warner siblings themselves? Their skits were pretty consistently great as well. Lots of that Bugs Bunny-like energy of putting terrible folks in their place when they annoy you while coupling it with the dynamic of three child siblings who are very, very active and much too clever for the average person. It was fun!

But as I watched the 2020 reboot with its stripped-down cast now largely consisting of just the Warner siblings and Pinky and the Brain segments for the season (And I’ll be honest, some of the segments from the 90s like Katie Kaboom, Buttons and Mindy, and the Hip-Hippos are ones I’ll be happy to never have return because they were godawful even back then), it brought into focus the strength of those segments compared to most of the others from the old 90s line-up: The strong dynamic and chemistry of the relationships between the main characters of those skits. The Warner siblings are a trio of kids who, despite being truly cut from the same wacky cloth as the most beloved of Looney Toon characters, also very much tap into a very realistic depiction of sibling relationships. Sure, they get on each other’s nerves sometimes. Sure, sometimes they have disagreements on how they view a certain situation. At the end of the day, however, they care about each other more than anything else and work in such perfect sync despite differences in who they are individually.  Sure, Yakko is a talkative theater kid jackass who sasses back at the drop of a dime. Sure, Wakko is kinda quiet and spaced-out and he has the appetite of a garbage disposal. Sure, Dot is adorable and witty and loudly and proudly feminist with an oddly feral streak. But if any one of them is inconvenienced or picked on or threatened in any way by someone, even if that someone is a powerful celebrity of some sort? You bet your ass the other two will immediately back their sibling up and make their tormentor’s life a living hell for the next however long the skit lasts. They’re little gremlin children who love one another, and have a surprisingly tragic backstory that actually speaks to a lot of fans on several levels.

But, okay, the bond between the Warner siblings is great and fun. What about Pinky and the Brain? What makes their dynamic stand out?

Folks, that’s where things get a little more…interesting. To me, at least.

So, watching the beginning of the 2020 reboot got me to slowly remember the parts I loved about the Pinky and the Brain skits from Animaniacs…were actually from their spin-off show. And the things I remembered most clearly from the spin-off were the more heartwarming moments that showed how much they cared about and loved one another, despite Brain being exhausted by Pinky’s dimwitted antics at times. And for a supposedly continuity-light cartoon show, there was a surprising amount of consistency to the main duo and their motivations. There was even a handful of reoccurring side characters the audience was expected to recognize from past episodes, as well, which is a bit strange to have for a show that initially seemed to aim to be strictly episodic. I remembered the odd amount of depth there was to the series. Nothing groundbreaking, mind you, but definitely something more than the average comedy cartoon.

So after watching the first few episodes of the reboot, I took to Tumblr to see if anyone remembered the old 90s show and to see how they were reacting to the new one. In doing so, I came across this post:

“i love that ppl make jokes abt a pinky and the brain version of the destiel confession because that. already happened....... the only difference is that brain pulls pinky out of superhell instead of dying on a barn nail”

Now, look, I’ve never watched Supernatural and only know it through Tumblr cultural osmosis, and at the time we were all riding off the high of the madness that was the finale of that show and the fallout from it. But ANYWAY…

This piqued my interest because 1. I didn’t remember watching an episode of Pinky and the Brain where anything like that happened, and 2. I was already picking up strong gay vibes from the reboot only a few episodes in. So, basically, I just had to hunt down this episode to sate my curiosity and see for myself if there was subtext in this 90s cartoon that I hadn’t quite picked up on as a kid.

I found the episode and started watching it. “Wow,” I said to myself, “this is a lot gayer than I remember…” And after finishing the episode, memories came flooding back to me:

That time the Brain fell for a girl mouse that was looked and acted lot like Pinky.

All those moments where Pinky would wear drag to disguise himself as Brain’s significant other in one way or another to further their plans for that episode, and how I could never remember it being ridiculed.

That one time they accidentally had a child together via a science mishap.

The ending of the Christmas special!...

And as I sat there, dumbstruck and searching Tumblr’s tags to see how far this particular rabbit hole (mouse hole?) went, everything finally clicked in my little bisexual mind.

This was one of the big reasons as to why I loved the Pinky and the Brain skits so much above all the others on Animaniacs all those years ago when I was a kid. It was the same sort of thing that subconsciously drew me to many of the cartoons and anime and media in general I loved as a child, back before I had the proper knowledge and self-awareness to know or express it.

Looking back on my life, I’d always gravitated to and resonated the most with stories and media with queer content in text or subtext. And sure, this cartoon was/is no Sailor Moon or Revolutionary Girl Utena with explorations of gender roles and queerness. It’s no Steven Universe or She-Ra with out and proud queer characters. It’s no The Little Mermaid or The Happy Prince where the stories were made by queer authors and subtextually about queer experience.

However…

However…!

I was surprised to find how deep the gay subtext went with Pinky and the Brain. Hell, I still am. This little Warner Brothers, Looney Toons-pedigree, continuity-light show about two lab mice trying to take over the world in bizarre, hilarious ways has such a weirdly continuous, heartfelt, touching, engaging, and sometimes outrageously raunchy queer undercurrent to it. All done in the 90s! It’s kind of baffling.

This is not to say that the creators and writers of the shows deliberately set out to do this. I don’t believe that anyone involved sat down and said to themselves “I’m going to make this so fucking gay!”. Sure, the voice actors of both Pinky and the Brain have said that they played the dynamic with “the energy of an old gay couple” and they’ve said plenty of suggestive or outright not safe for work things in the character’s voices in interviews and at convention panels. I firmly believe that they’re just having fun as the characters, just as much as I believe the writers were probably just having fun and putting in the gay subtext and suggestive lines as a kind of long running joke and seeing how far they could take it.

(By the time of the Pinky and the Brain comics, however, I’m not so sure. Some of the stuff they got away with in those issues is…amazing, to say the least.)

Regardless of actual intent, I think the writers of Pinky and the Brain (both old and new), have accidentally created a sort of subtextual, yet pretty powerful love story. And you know what? I want to rewatch this story for myself and write down my thoughts as I go along. I tried something similar quite a while back with Droids, and while I kind of ran out of steam as my life got busier and never finished, I have time now for something like this.

I should also say that I’m not out here to, like, convert anyone into shipping cartoon mice together. I imagine most people see Pinky and the Brain as nothing other than very close friends, and that’s a completely valid viewpoint to have. I doubt there will ever be some sort of canonization of a gay relationship between the two, as I imagine most of the writers on the new show (and hell, on the old one) are heterosexual themselves and would view such an idea as “ruining the comedy and the dynamic of the characters” or something similar. I’ve been in the fandom game long enough to know better than to hope and expect any media to sincerely tackle queer relationships in stories that only have the subtext there, especially in comedies.

I guess I’m doing this more to explore something I loved as a child and to see if I can find just as much if not more enjoyment from it as an adult, albeit maybe for different reasons. Hell, it’s also an opportunity to peek into a kind of time capsule from the 90s regarding how far queer subtext could be pushed back then, even when heavily couched in comedy. This is just a little project I wanna do for fun in my spare time. And hey, maybe a few of you out there will have some fun reading it too, who knows?

Either way, see you sometime soon in the new year.