'Toon Reviews 14: Animaniacs Vol 1 Part 22: Guardin' the Garden/Plane Pals

Episode 22

Guardin’ the Garden

Although this is another basic Slappy Squirrel cartoon mainly featuring different ways for her to blow up any opposing force, what we see stands out from the others for the background of where the action takes place. 

It takes inspiration from the famed Bible story of the Earth’s creation directly mentioning that God created the world as well as the first human beings, Adam and Eve.  The great thing about this is the sheer willingness to set a funny, gag-driven cartoon against a religious belief in the world’s origins that only a select few people believe in.  The show has already referenced plays and movies that tend to fly over the heads of certain audience members, especially kids, but it’s especially great that it’s also willing to seamlessly work in not just references, but a whole backdrop to a reading from one of the most sacred texts in history. 

Elements from this Bible story also give a backdrop for the gags.  With Adam and Eve in mind, we also have the Garden of Eden, the forbidden fruits, here portrayed as apples, growing from the Tree of Knowledge, and a snake trying to tempt them into eating the apples.  That’s where Slappy comes in as an appointed creature to keep the snake from getting to the apples.  From there, it’s full on gags inflicted on the snake, and since Slappy has an actual job to do, she’s free to be as pain-inducing as she wants to the snake.  While the gags themselves aren’t out of the norm for Slappy, or any explosive slapstick-driven cartoon character, what makes them shine is the characterization of the snake at the receiving end of Slappy’s attacks.  If you were to read about the original Adam and Eve story, it would be easy to perceive the tempting snake as an intelligent force of sin and nothing more.  Here, there’s more layers to him than you’d expect.  While he mostly approaches the apples in a menacing manner, when he’s thrown with a rock tied to him, struck with a mousetrap, shot with a golf club into a mini golf hole, or hitting a frying pan after launching himself with a bow and arrow, he ends up looking funny and feeling pathetic and humiliated.  It adds a layer to the spirit of temptation he represents in the actual Bible story, suggesting that those who tempt others to sin are just weak soles who don’t know what to do with their lives, so they act out.  It’s quite telling when you think about it. 

Also, Slappy is as great as always when delivering the gags as well as offbeat snarky remarks to sell how pathetic the tempting snake is, and proving how on top of her game with cartoon comedy she is in general.  Even when the apple falls off the tree, making it seem like Adam and Eve will be tempted into eating them after all, it turns out she had that planned out all along when that apple ends up being a bomb that blows the snake up again.  Some may feel all her efforts are devalued when she ends up eating the real apple in the end, but you know, if they weren’t eaten, we mortals wouldn’t be the way we are now, so it works here. 

The only minor gripe I have is that they don’t go all out with how Slappy functions in the dawn of time, mostly for how modern elements like phones, the appearance of her mail, and the mini golf course appear even though they wouldn’t exist for centuries.  You could argue that this is the nature of modern cartoon characters being placed in earlier time periods, but I feel like the cartoon would've worked just as fine and be more engaging if the time period was fully embraced.  It's not like that's impossible to happen.  Other than that, this is a great fun cartoon with an interesting, worldly backdrop for the comedy. 9.5/10

Plane Pals

The Warners are known to be annoying who they come across, yet hilarious to who’s watching them.  This cartoon is one of the best examples of this idea, especially since the guy they annoy is completely deserving of what he gets. 

Right at the start, we meet businessman Ivan Bloski, who’s a huge, explosive, and arrogant jerk.  He berates the airline workers over a simple computer error that costs him his nice plane seat, pushes past the other plane passengers while giving harsh, needless insults, and acting like he’s the most important person in the world.  Blowski is a very unpleasant person you’d never want to meet in real life, and the fact that he just sits calmly after talking down to innocent passengers is just despicable.  However, within an airplane environment where one could wind up sitting with a total stranger for the flight, it’s fitting that his karma involves just that. 

Blowski ends up with the Warner siblings, and from there, hilarity and consequences for rudeness ensue.  While sitting with Blowski, how the Warners annoy him is hilariously staged.  Through messing around in their plane seats and with the safety equipment with Blowski getting the short end of their shticks, and disrupting him with weird faces, goofy questions about the plane features, and bizarre phone calls, the Warners are on fire when with humor and characterization.  They’re annoying to Blowski’s relaxation for sure, but their behavior feels like their own unique and cartoonish way of going about life with no intentional malice.  Also given Blowski’s extreme rudeness earlier and him acting like it was nothing make it impossible to feel for him when he’s being annoyed, so you’re free to enjoy the heck out of the Warners’ antics.  Even so, it’s nice that for all of Blowski’s unlikable qualities, the Warners are still willing to make him their friend, but Blowski completely snaps and harshly insults the three kids who are really just having fun on a plane trip.  It further sells Blowski as a completely unlikable presence, and justifies the Warners upping their treatment of him. 

With it made so clear of how big a jerk he is, what they do is more geared toward messing with him as opposed to just humorously interacting with him.  They start by messing with his conscience by pretending to be hurt by his insults only to suddenly start laughing when he begins to feel bad, and then there’s an even bigger set of antics as he tries to get away from the kids.  Through him running into the kids in random disguises like Yakko as a fertilizer salesman or Wakko as a vicar, getting confused and frightened by a monster as a refreshment, and getting inflated, the things going on further increase the power of this plane-themed gag collection in the name of dealing with a huge jerk.  It’s also nice that even when the Warners are deliberately tormenting Blowski, they still want him to be their friend. 

As for how it ends, Blowski getting caught in the Warners’ annoyances continue past the end of the cartoon when he parachutes out of the plane, and proceeds to swim away from them as they chase him over the ocean.  So the cartoon kind of stops as opposed to ending, but it does show that with the Warners around, your jerkiness will always have comeuppance until you clean up your act, so the action stops with good value to their appeal as characters. 

As a result, the cartoon is a masterful and hilarious showcase of the Warners’ workings as character that takes advantage of its airplane setting and featuring the perfect character who deserves to be stuck with them. 10/10

Cartoon Ranking

1. King Yakko
2. Hello Nice Warners
3. Meatballs or Consequences
4. Plane Pals
5. Slappy Goes Walnuts
6. H.M.S. Yakko
7. Hooked on a Ceiling
8. Temporary Insanity
9. Bumbie’s Mom
10. Les Miseranimals
11. Hearts of Twilight
12. Space Probed
13. West Side Pigeons
14. Battle for the Planet
15. Four Score and Seven Migraines Ago
16. When Rita Met Runt
17. De-zanitized
18. Win Big
19. Guardin’ the Garden
20. Taming of the Screwy
21. Chalkboard Bungle
22. La La Law
23. Nothing but the Tooth
24. Piano Rag
25. Pavlov’s Mice
26. Cookies for Einstein
27. The Big Candy Store
28. Davy Omelette
29. Garage Sale of the Century
30. Wally Llama
31. Where Rodents Dare
32. The Flame
33. Roll Over Beethoven
34. Hurray for Slappy
35. Cat on a Hot Steel Beam
36. Operation: Lollipop
37. No Pain No Painting
38. Chicken Boo-Ryshnikov
39. Goodfeathers: The Beginning
40. The Cat and the Fiddle
41. La Behemoth
42. A Moving Experience
43. The Boids

Song Ranking

1. Yakko’s Universe
2. Yakko’s World
3. The Monkey Song
4. Wakko’s America
5. What Are We?
6. Little Old Slappy from Pasadena

Miscellaneous Ranking

1. The Great Wakkorotti: The Master and His Music
2. Hitchcock Parody
3. Gilligan’s Island Parody
4. Nighty-Night Toon
5. Flipper Parody

Be sure to stay tuned for the review of the next episode where each cartoon gives a lesson about healthy lives and environments with the Warners singing about the ingredients in junk food, Buttons chasing Mindy through the Amazon Rainforest, and the Goodfeathers enduring the wrath of a trash landfill.

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