Hello, folks. I'm Kacy Shelley, better known as Nintendomaximus or FroggoFan64 (depending on where you've seen my work). I was invited to join this blog, and I figured, why not? I'm a big fan of Kids' WB!, having scanned all the print ads I could collect and making almost all the TV promos I collected available for viewing online. Now, appropriately enough, I decided that for my first post on this blog, I'd again recite this essay I wrote regarding what I believe to be the block's golden years. I first wrote it on the Mucha Lucha Fan Forum, then posted it on Retroland's forum about a year later, and then later posted it on DeviantART. And now this also seems like the perfect place to put it up, so here it is!Before There Was Kids' WB!
I suppose the best way to start this off would be to look at what Warner Bros. was doing in the cartoon business before they actually had their own network. Prior to 1995, Warner Bros. Television Animation had produced four different shows for the FOX Kids programming block - "Tiny Toon Adventures" (1990), "Taz-Mania" (1991), "Batman: The Animated Series" (1992), and "Animaniacs" (1993). By the 1994 season, the first two had already ended production (with the exception of two "Tiny Toons" specials that premiered in prime time), "Batman" was retitled "The Adventures of Batman & Robin" (because Robin was now more of a regular character), and "Animaniacs" was entering its second season (which was also its shortest, at only four episodes, all of them made from filler segments they didn't have room for in the first season). Warner Bros., however, made no new series for FOX Kids that year, and pretty soon, we found out why. The WB Television Network launched in January 1995, and pretty soon fans of "Animaniacs" would find a new place to catch their favorite show.
Season 1 (1995-96): And No Grown-Ups Allowed!
On September 9, 1995 (or the 10th in some areas), The WB broadcast their own three-hour Saturday morning block, Kids' WB!, for the first time (the festivities of that day are detailed here). And in the following week, it began airing in one-hour blocks on weekday afternoons as well. Apparently, the mere fact that Warner Bros. now had their own television programming block for kids was a good enough reason for them to celebrate, because the promotional spots and commercial bumpers that they aired had confetti falling all over the screen. (You'll also notice in the 1995 print advertisement that Kids' WB! had a simpler-looking logo back then.) Apparently, they were also keen on getting kids to watch The WB's prime-time line-up as well, because the stars of the channel's live-action sitcoms were all over the commercial bumpers. Heck, the little-known preview special, "Welcome Home Animaniacs!", had them mugging the camera as they introduced us to the shows. Needless to say, this cross-pollination would not last for much of the block's run.
On weekday afternoons, two holdovers from FOX Kids were featured - "That's Warner Bros.!", a half-hour show featuring post-1948 "Looney Tunes" shorts, and reruns of the first two seasons of "Animaniacs", which was now entering its third season. Looking at the print ad for this season, it would seem Warner Bros. was especially proud of the success they were making with "Animaniacs", because although there were four new shows premiering on Kids' WB! that fall, the ad proudly boasts of the fact that this two-seasons-old show was transferring from FOX to The WB, as Yakko, Wakko & Dot unfairly claim center stage in the picture. Now you would think switching to airing on a network owned by the same company that produces your show in the first place would be a good thing, but judging from some of the gag credits that appeared at the end of subsequent episodes, the "Animaniacs" writers apparently had no love for their show's new home (example from the first new episode they aired: "Be The First Kid On Your Block / To Actually Watch The WB!").
However, as the only one of the first four to still be in production, "Animaniacs" was also the only one of Warner's productions for FOX to immediately make the jump to the new channel. "Tiny Toons" went into reruns on Nickelodeon, and for whatever reason, "Taz-Mania" and "Batman" stayed behind on FOX Kids and then had their reruns sent to Cartoon Network shortly after Warner Bros. bought out or merged with Turner Entertainment in 1996.
Luckily, as mentioned before, four new shows were accompanying "Animaniacs" on Saturday mornings, which had a new episode aired alongside a rerun from the previous seasons in that block. Among this quartet of shows, three of them were Warner Bros. productions: "The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries", essentially the age-old Sylvester/Tweety formula from the "Looney Tunes" shorts, but with Granny having now become a detective; "Pinky and the Brain", a spin-off from "Animaniacs" that was popular enough to be aired on Sunday nights in its first season as well; and "Freakazoid!", the adventures of a nerdy teenager who turns into a zany superhero who behaves like Jerry Lewis. Since three new shows and a new season of one not-so-new show coupled with a rerun aren't enough to fill three hours, the last half-hour of Kids' WB!'s Saturday morning schedule featured its first non-Warner production - "Earthworm Jim", a Universal Studios production based on the video game of the same name. Despite being from another company, though, "Earthworm Jim" had the same sense of humor and was just as good as the rest of Kids' WB!'s initial line-up, to the point that some people still mistake it for a Warner Bros. cartoon.
Season 2 (1996-97): Big Kids Go First!
Kids' WB! still had its original logo when it entered its second season, and apparently Warner Bros. was still celebrating its creation, because the promos and bumpers were still featured confetti falling around in front of "Animaniacs" backgrounds (though by now they'd apparently realized we didn't need Harland Williams hamming up his telling us that "Freakazoid!"'s commercial break was done). But I guess they had good reason to celebrate, because the Saturday morning branch of Kids' WB! was now expanding from three hours to four. Besides giving new seasons to all the shows from the first year, not to mention changing the title of their "Looney Tunes" half-hour from "That's Warner Bros.!" to "Bugs 'n Daffy", Kids' WB! was adding three new shows.
First and most prominent (not to mention longest-lasting) of this new bunch, as you can see from the 1996 print ad, was "Superman: The Animated Series". A follow-up to "Batman", this series marked the fifth animated face of the Man of Steel (having starred in cartoons by Fleischer/Famous Studios, Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, and Ruby-Spears in the past) and would also notably spawn one of the worst video games ever made. "Superman" premiered alongside Tom Ruegger's latest work, another superhero cartoon titled "Road Rovers". Here, the superheroes weren't humans, but dogs who could use a machine of some sort to evolve into anthropomorphic canines with superpowers (and back again). And then there was "Waynehead". Does anybody remember "Waynehead"? 'Cause I sure don't.
However, the addition of these three shows meant some changes to how they were scheduling the shows, which may give you an idea of how network president Jamie Kellner felt about these shows. During the first season, "Freakazoid!" and "Earthworm Jim" had been sitting pretty in the 11 AM time slot (or 10 AM in my native time zone). But when "Waynehead" joined the line-up, they came up with a boneheaded scheduling method called "Big Kids Go First", which resulted in "Freakazoid!" and "Jim" suffering a demotion to the uncomfortable hour of 8 AM (7 AM central) - a time that no big kid (the kind of kid who would be watching those shows) would actually be awake for. It also didn't help that "Sylvester & Tweety" had now switched from half-hour stories to two 15-minute stories per episode, and the 20 episodes planned for this season of "Animaniacs" got cut down to eight because the advertisers weren't happy with it finding more popularity outside the block's target demographic.
Five weeks later, Warner Bros. finally gave Daffy Duck a show to call his own, but adding it to the Saturday morning schedule forced "Freakazoid!" and "Jim" off of it entirely. If I recall correctly, they were transferred to Friday afternoons in a package called "Freakout Friday!" But when that was removed the following February, two "Freakazoid!" episodes had been left unaired. "Freakazoid!"'s reruns were fortunately picked up by Cartoon Network, where they continued to air until March 2003. "Earthworm Jim", however, never reappeared on US airwaves. And it also looks like Kellner had no love for "Road Rovers" and "Waynehead" either, because the following season, they too were gone, and only one of them went to Cartoon Network. Guess which one.
Season 3 (1997-98): Toothless Camels Bake Apple Pies, Baby!
In 1997, Kids' WB! stopped throwing confetti on their promos and bumpers, and as you can see from the print ad, this was also the year they started using their more familiar logo that you may recognize from the opening of "Pokémon: The First Movie". Although Warner probably stopped celebrating because Disney was now giving them major competition in the form of ABC's One Saturday Morning block (which somehow walloped Kids' WB! in the ratings, which will never make sense to me because Kids' WB! clearly had the better shows), this slightly-different look was accompanied by the fact that the weekday version had now also expanded in length, adding an extra hour of programming to the afternoons and contributing another hour of programming in the mornings (even though the kids were supposed to be getting ready for school).
"Bugs 'n Daffy", "Animaniacs", "Pinky and the Brain", and "The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries" had managed to survive the first two years of Kids' WB!, so they and "Superman" came back for more new episodes this season. "Pinky and the Brain" and "Sylvester & Tweety" were even promoted to being shown on weekday afternoons as well (although I myself find it a bit surprising that "The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries" managed to outlast "Freakazoid!"). And the contract to run "Tiny Toons" on Nickelodeon had now expired, so on September 1st, the reruns of that show came to Kids' WB!
But finally bringing "Tiny Toons" home to its roost wasn't enough to fill up Kids' WB!'s 19-hours-a-week schedule. Several more new additions to the network popped up this particular autumn, among them three Sony Pictures productions: "The Legend of Calamity Jane", a series that was heavily hyped but only ended up airing three of its 13 episodes because of its excessive gunplay; "Men in Black: The Series", based on the movie that had come out the preceding summer; and "Channel Umptee-3", an educational series created to satisfy the FCC's demands for more educational programming on children's television, or as I call it, the E/I Act. To fill up the three-weekly-hour requirement of the E/I Act (which was mocked by the first new episode of "Animaniacs" in this season), they also showed reruns of "Captain Planet". They even managed to get Yakko, Wakko and Dot to sing about it in the promos and somehow memorize all the Planeteers' names.
That's not to say, though, that Warner Bros. wasn't busy themselves this year. On demand from the release of "Batman and Robin" (despite the film's critical and financial failure), Bruce Timm and his gang brought "Batman: The Animated Series" back to production in a new, somewhat-retooled series titled "The New Batman Adventures". Originally planned to be titled "Batman: Gotham Knights", this new series featuring the Dark Knight changed his cast quite a bit (most of the changes were explained in a special mini-series put out by DC Comics) and was paired with "Superman" in an hour-length show titled "The New Batman/Superman Adventures".
Oh, and did I mention that at one point during this season, they had a specially-themed Saturday called "Dubba Dragon Day", in which they promoted "Quest for Camelot"? I feel I need to.
Season 4 (1998-99): It's a Whole Morning of Mass Histeria!
Even though they had already expanded the schedule in the previous two seasons, I sometimes get the feeling that 1998 was the year when really big changes were happening to Kids' WB! Perhaps the most shocking change was that, after five seasons, Warner Bros. had decided it was time for "Animaniacs" to retire. The final episode aired in November in the form of an hour-length special titled "The Animaniacs Super Special".
"Pinky and the Brain", however, didn't quite go down as easily. In a move made on demand of some really pushy network executives (which was parodied on the show itself in the episodes "Pinky and the Brain... and Larry" and "You'll Never Eat Food Pellets in This Town Again"), and one that upset Peter Hastings so much that he moved to Disney, the show was retooled and retitled "Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain". Everybody hated it, probably because of its inconsistencies in relation to "Tiny Toons", such as Montana Max and Furrball having been replaced by Rudy Mookich and Mr. Pussy-Wussy (and unlike "The New Batman Adventures", these changes were never explained), so Warner Bros. canned it during its only season and disavowed almost all knowledge of its existence. Ironically, "Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain" managed to win an Emmy for Best New Animated Series.
There were two other action-oriented shows from other studios that came to Kids' WB! that autumn - "Invasion America" and "BRATS of the Lost Nebula". Apparently, they must've sucked even worse than "Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain", or they were too violent like "Calamity Jane", because they were both gone within a month. So it's pretty clear to me that the best thing to happen to Kids' WB! in 1998 was the other show that Tom Ruegger's crew had produced, and the best show to ever come out of the E/I Act: "Histeria!" Apparently, Warner Bros. believed that too, because as the above ad shows, "Histeria!" was the most prominent new series on the block that year, immediately airing both on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons. Heck, considering that it was obviously a worthy successor to "Animaniacs", I don't know why "Histeria!", originally meant to run for a full 65 episodes, got such lousy ratings. If anything, it at least lasted 52 episodes and managed to stay on the network longer than any of the other shows that premiered in the fall of '98 (though, let's face it, that was 'cause they needed to keep complying with the E/I Act).
Meanwhile, the Bruce Timm team was now apparently running low on story ideas for Batman's half of "The Batman/Superman Adventures", but in January of 1999, they put out a whole new series titled "Batman Beyond" (or "Batman of the Future" for those of you in Europe), in which the now-old and crippled Bruce Wayne gave his title to a former punk named Terry McGuinness. In the same week that it premiered , Kids' WB! premiered "The Cat & Birdy Warneroonie PinkyBrainy Big Cartoonie Show" (later retitled "The Cat & Bunny Warneroonie SuperLooney Big Cartoonie Show"), an apparent attempt to keep "Animaniacs" on Saturday mornings alongside "Histeria!", not to mention air the rest of the "Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain" episodes that they had already paid for. This show originally had a running time of an hour and a half, with "Histeria!" making up the last half-hour on the schedule. Look at that! Classic Warner Bros. animation combined with their last comedy cartoon of that style in a two-hour block! What more could you want?
But then, in February of 1999, the bombshell was dropped - Kids' WB! began airing "Pokémon" and as a result cut "The Big Cartoonie Show" down to a half-hour. At first, this wasn't too bad, since they were only showing the pocket monsters once a week, but things soon began to take a turn for the worse.
Season 5 (1999-2000): Kids' WB! Yourself!
By the time the fifth season of the block began, "Histeria!" had disappeared from their Saturday morning line-up so they could give Pokémon another timeslot, and "Histeria!"'s weekday afternoon showing was demoted to the morning timeslot. In fact, given that this season's intro sequence for the Saturday morning block followed a PokéBall around the studio lot, you might as well have believed that "Pokémon" was the only show kids were really watching Kids' WB! for (in spite of "Batman Beyond"'s domineering presence in the 1999 print ad). Warner Bros. Animation put out one more new show in this season - "Detention", which was essentially a short-lived rip-off of "Recess" that was incidentally created by someone who worked as a producer for "Histeria!", yet was actually better than "Recess".
But the damage that came from adding "Pokémon" was done. "The Big Cartoonie Show", "Batman" and "Superman" disappeared from Kids' WB! when more anime took over in 2000. It became clear that Kids' WB! had jumped its shark when "Yu-Gi-Oh!" joined the block in 2001, for at that point, "Histeria!", "Batman Beyond", and "Detention" vanished from both it and televised airwaves altogether. The WB's programming block for children would never reclaim its former glory.
So What Happened?
The WB Network ended its run in September 2006, but while Kids' WB! did not immediately disappear along with it, it might as well have done that, what with drek like "Loonatics Unleashed" and Warner's badly-drawn excuse to milk cash out of the "Scooby-Doo" franchise. Tom Ruegger practically left the animation production business after "Histeria!" was cancelled (he would later return to start up his own studio, and I know he also did some writing for "Duck Dodgers"), thus bringing an apparent end to the Silver Age of Warner Bros. Animation. Bruce Timm, on the other hand, stayed around to produce "Static Shock" and "The Zeta Project" in 2000, but even he apparently tired of Kids' WB!, because his last project, the "Justice League" animated series aired exclusively on Cartoon Network. And I probably would've left Kids' WB! out of my life altogether from then on if not for the fact that it was airing "¡Mucha Lucha!"
I don't know about you, but I'm willing to bet there's at least one person at Warner Bros. who, like us, wishes they could go back to the days of the company's now-practically-defunct animation division. "Tiny Toons", "Animaniacs", "Pinky and the Brain", "Freakazoid!", "The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries", "Batman", "Superman", and "Batman Beyond" have all been released in volumed DVD sets (although Warner Home Video is sure taking their sweet time with the final release of "Animaniacs"), and "Histeria!" managed to entertain hundreds (nay, thousands) of newfound fans on In2TV until they shut it down for no reason. But this still isn't enough; the US Boomerang still doesn't air "Tiny Toons" or "Taz-Mania", which doesn't make sense because they have no problem airing "Baby Looney Tunes", the 2003 "Duck Dodgers" series, and "The Batman". Boy, what I wouldn't give for Warner Bros. to make a cable channel for their own cartoons. I will be so happy when that happens. And if it doesn't, I'd at least be happy to have DVDs of "Histeria!"
