“It Spoiled Us”: The Mad Minds Behind ‘Tiny Toon Adventures’ and ‘Animaniacs’

Television animation was at its absolute worst in the decade before Ruegger’s shows premiered. In the ’80s, Saturday morning schedules were crammed with glorified toy commercials (G.I. Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe), often with preachy prosocial messaging shoehorned in.

From the beginning, Ruegger swore Tiny Toon Adventures would be different. “I said, ‘Let’s really make this the way it needs to be made. Let’s give each cartoon some love and care.’”

Premiering in 1990, Tiny Toons revived the great lost tradition of animation at Warner Bros. A youthful refresh of the old Looney Tunes shorts, it was exuberantly funny, pop culture savvy, occasionally meta, and populated with cute, colorful, well-designed characters. After the resounding success of Tiny Toon, however, Spielberg put Ruegger in charge of coming up with something entirely new.

Ruegger found his inspiration while wandering the Warner Bros. Studios lot. A 133-foot, 100,000-gallon water tower had stood on the studio grounds since 1927, an emergency water supply in case of fire. Emblazoned with the Warner Bros. shield logo, it was a familiar icon of the studio—a utilitarian riposte to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Ruegger had the brain wave to make “the Warner Brothers” (and their Warner sister) his stars. Loosely inspired by old-school characters like Felix the Cat and Warner Bros.’ own Bosko and Foxy, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot were characters of indeterminate species with rubber-hose limbs and no respect for the earthly laws of physics. They were toons, in other words, reveling in their tooniness.

Animaniacs would also be a variety show. Ruegger and his team pitched an ensemble cast of supporting characters to Spielberg at his home, on a Saturday morning, over milk and cookies: Pinky and the Brain, would-be world-dominating lab mice; a trio of mobbed-up Italian American pigeons; Slappy Squirrel, an aged cartoon star; and more. Characters that didn’t make the cut included a kleptomaniac kangaroo, a beaver who said “dam!” a lot, and a rhyming raccoon duo named Nipsey and Russell. (Later, the team realized that the best time to run Animaniacs ideas by Spielberg was when his son Max, from his marriage to first wife Amy Irving, was staying with him.)

With Spielberg’s enthusiastic support, no expense was spared to make Animaniacs as good as it could possibly be. There was wall-to-wall music from a 25-to-40-piece orchestra, with composer Richard Stone performing on the same piano used by Looney Tunes maestro Carl Stalling. There was gorgeous artwork of crisply drawn characters, some of it from the Japanese animation studio behind the Akira anime. There was powerhouse vocal talent, firing on all cylinders and all recording in the same room.

Most of all, though, there were the gags.

Ruegger assembled a crack team of writers, many hailing from Los Angeles’s live-comedy scene. Sherri Stoner, Peter Hastings, and Deanna Oliver performed with the Groundlings; Paul Rugg and John McCann at the ACME Comedy Theatre. (After giving improv lessons to animators at Disney, Stoner had also served as the animation reference model for Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Belle in Beauty and the Beast.)