Product Description
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Steven Spielberg Presents Pinky and The Brain: Vol. 1
From the Peabody Award-winning series Steven Spielberg Presents
Animaniacs come two hilariously popular laboratory mice now
starring in their own animated comedy spin-off--PINKY AND THE
BRAIN--as they take on the modern world in an intelligently silly
way with their plans for global domination.
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Are you pondering what I'm pondering, animation fans? Yes! Pinky
and the Brain have finally arrived on DVD, and they're going to
take over the world! Well, at the very least, these genetically
engineered lab mice are going to prove, once and for all, that
they're the best comedy duo ever created for an animated series
ed at children.... but, why limit their appeal to kids? As
executive producer Steven Spielberg said to the show's creators,
he wanted this brilliant, Emmy®-winning half-hour cartoon series
to lure adults into watching it with their kids, and like the
classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the past, it's likely the
grown-ups will enjoy it even more! This is largely due to the
fact that Pinky and the Brain was produced under the radar,
almost as if nobody was watching, so while this delightfully
inventive spin-off from Animaniacs ( /gp/series/92277 ) is purely
entertaining for kids, it also includes a wide variety of
in-jokes, movie spoofs, and outrageous dialogue that only older
viewers can truly appreciate. It's all innocent fun, but if you
watch and listen closely, you'll quickly realize that the writers
and first-rate voice cast were having the time of their lives,
inventing absurd plots and one-liners purely for their own
creative pleasure. How else can you explain Pinky's bizarrely
suggestive responses when The Brain asks "Are you pondering what
I'm pondering?" or the hilarious send-ups of classic movies like
The Third Man (spoofed here as "The Third Mouse"), The Manchurian
Candidate ("The Pink Candidate"), and the tearjerking TV classic
Brian's Song (satirized, of course, as "Brain's Song")?
Better yet, these 22 episodes culled from P&TB's four-season run
(1995-98) demonstrate how the show's basic concept--two talking
lab mice ("one is a genius, the other's insane") and their
nightly attempts at global domination--lent itself to a broad
spectrum of hilariously ingenious plots, with no restrictions of
timeframe. So you've got episodes in ancient Egypt, Napoleonic
France, and 1940s Vienna, along with contemporary schemes and
shorter, time-filler episodes (like "Cheese Roll Call") that
qualify as mini-masterpieces of educational comedy. "A Pinky and
the Brain Christmas" is a bona-fide sentimental classic (offering
proof that the Brain's got a soft heart, after all), and the
polar-site pairing of Pinky and the Brain is just about
perfect, largely due to the voice talents of Maurice LaMarche
(expertly channeling Orson Welles as the Brain) and Emmy-winner
Rob Paulsen as Pinky (both seen, to splendid effect, in disc 2's
behind-the-scenes featurette). Additional voice talents include
Roddy MacDowall (as the Brain's nemesis, Snowball) and Ernest
Borgnine, but the show's primary strength is its go-for-broke
writing, brilliant animation (a flawless homage to Warner Bros.
tradition, yet uniquely styled to match the material), and music
scores (mostly by Richard Stone) that pay tribute to the late,
great WB cartoon composer Carl Stalling while incorporating
frequent passages from the classical repertoire. All in all,
Pinky and the Brain is perfect entertainment for the young and
young-at-heart, destined for cult-favorite status as one of the
best overlooked TV series of the 1990s. As Pinky might say,
"Poit! Narf! Oh, this is SO much fun!" --Jeff Shannon