Oh, you're Wakko all right

One of the joys of parenting is sharing the things you loved as a kid with your own kids. Now that everything is on DVD, it's easy to share my childhood cartoons with my children. Looking back on them, I realize most of them were garbage (the new Transformer movies helped me realize just how vacuous that series was). In my quest to select a higher class of cartoon, I stumbled upon Animaniacs. I remember enjoying that show as a child, and I remember that it was pretty smart for a kid's show. So I picked up the first season on DVD to see what the kids think.



The problem that I now realize is I enjoyed Animaniacs when I was, oh, 13-years-old, not 3-years-old like the boys. Most of the show's dialog goes right over the kids' head, so never mind the smartness factor of the show. They do enjoy it, though, they just enjoy different things than I did. Mostly they enjoy the slapstick nature of the show. That, and saying "hello, nurse." They also enjoy the fact that there are three Animaniacs, just like there are three of them. They even identify with individual Animaniacs. Abbie is Dot. Tory is Yakko. Ian is Wakko. It works out well. There's also a lot of music, which the kids enjoy. Sometimes the songs are quasi-educational, so maybe they're learning something from the show.