Saturday, March 18, 2017

SATURDAY COMICS - "PINKY AND THE BRAIN"



Just a little quickie for this week's "Saturday Comics" and it's all thanks to my fellow Crossoverist, John D. Lindsay, Jr.

We travel to the Tooniverse this week with comic book appearances by Pinky and The Brain, two lab mice intent on escaping their cage and taking over the world.  And they always prove as successful as Wiley Coyote catching the Roadrunner.

From Wikipedia:
"Pinky and the Brain" is an American animated television series. It was the first animated television series to be presented in Dolby Surround and the fourth collaboration of Steven Spielberg with his production company, Amblin Television, and produced by Warner Bros. Animation. The characters first appeared in 1993 as a recurring segment on "Animaniacs". It was later picked up as a series due to its popularity, with 65 episodes produced. Later, they appeared in the series, "Steven Spielberg Presents Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain".

Pinky and Brain are genetically enhanced laboratory mice who reside in a cage in the Acme Labs research facility. Brain is self-centered and scheming; Pinky is good-natured but feebleminded. In each episode, Brain devises a new plan to take over the world which ultimately ends in failure: usually due to Pinky's idiocy, the impossibility of Brain's plan, Brain's own arrogance, or just circumstances beyond their control. In common with many other Animaniacs shorts, many episodes are in some way a parody of something else, usually a film or novel.


According to John, this is how they look in the Comic Book Universe, the Quadrant, thanks to "The Incredible Hulk" #438 and #440:
  

Once again, we turn to Wikipedia:
Pinky and the Brain were alluded to in The Incredible Hulk #438 as two white mice, kept by Omnibus. One of the realistically drawn mice had an enlarged cranium, and when their cage was destroyed the sound "narf" is indicated. Also when Jailbait asked what they would do during the night Hotshot replied "The same thing they do every night... whatever that is".

O'BSERVATION:
Even though the many Marvel TV shows and movies have their origins inspired by the line of comic books, they are vastly different universes.  (Many of the Marvel shows in the greater TV Universe blend with the Cineverse in the Borderlands.)  

So just because Pinky and the Brain of the Tooniverse have counterparts in these comic books, that doesn't mean we can expect to find them in a third metafictional universe, that of the Cineverse or Toobworld.  (Although they may have counterpart cousins in another TV dimension, as the pan-dimensional beings who built the super computer Deep Thought.  Which would mean Pinky and the Brain were humanoids in that dimension, but appear as white mice in the Tooniverse.)

But the Pinky and the Brain we know from the Tooniverse are represented as they should look in the tie-in comic book line for Animaniacs:


  






[CLICK TO ENLARGE]

As you can see from these few examples, many of the covers parodied classic movies just like the cartoons did (including my all-time favorite movie.)

Well.... That was so much of a quickie as I thought it would be.

Thanks, John!



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