Animaniacs / Tropes J to R

Main page | A to I | J to R | S to Z

---

J-L

• Jaw Drop: The show uses this a lot.
  • In the episode "Meet Minerva", this is a squirrel's reaction to seeing the title character clad in nothing but a towel.
  • At one point in the Pinky and the Brain short "The Brain's Apprentice," not only does Pinky's jaw drop, but also his nose and his eyes.
• Jeopardy! Intelligence Test: The first Pinky and the Brain short had Brain go on the quiz show "Gyp-Parody!" in order to raise enough money for a device to Take Over the World. He gets every single question right, but bombs the final question and loses everything. Of course, the answer to the final question was Ralph Kramden, which Brain would have known if he had listened to Pinky earlier in the episode.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Slappy hates to admit this, but she does care for her nephew Skippy.
  • Mr. Plotz appears to hate the Warners, but he does harbor some respect for them. He'll even enlist their help on occasion when the pressures of running a major studio become too much for him.
  • Much of the humor from the "Pinky and the Brain" shorts derives from Brain's constant verbal and even physical abuse of Pinky, but he also takes a paternal stance toward his lesser partner. (And Pinky admires Brain in return, once referring to him as "very honest and hard-working.")
  • Rita sometimes falls into this trope, particularly in "When Rita Met Runt" and "Smitten With Kittens."
• Jesus Was Way Cool: One short in a Christmas Episode features a medley of Christmas carols, with the Warners playing the shepherds in the nativity story. In something of a meta-example, it's one of only two shorts that they don't treat as an excuse for irreverent havoc.
• Jury and Witness Tampering: A Slappy the Squirrel short has Slappy accused of cartoon violence against Walter Wolf. Slappy's defense consists of describing how she basically blasted Walter to smithereens, leading the jury to find her...not guilty, at which point it's revealed that Slappy rigged explosives under the jury's seats.
• Just Desserts: Befalls a Jerkass magician duo in "Magic Time".
• Kangaroo Court: In one episode, Slappy is put on trial for "assault with intent to squash" on her nemesis Walter Wolf. Given that the judge and jury are all wolves, Skippy is understandably afraid that Slappy is gonna get railroaded. Slappy tells Skippy not to worry, as she's got "a dynamite case". That is to say, she's wired the jury box with explosives, and gets off without a hitch.
• Karmic Protection: The Warners were only truly malevolent to the bad guys, which justifies a lot of the mayhem they cause. Even people who were annoyed by them but otherwise good characters would ultimately get the Warners' help in the end. One episode even lampshaded it and discussed it, when a kid watching at home wondered why the Warners weren't doing more to the antagonist.
  • One episode had them frustrated because a character they wanted to get rid of (a Sound of Music style Julie Andrews Expy) did nothing to invite retribution. In the end, they sicced Slappy Squirrel on her. Problem solved.
  • Still, a lot of what the Warners do could be needlessly cruel to the point of making them unsympathetic, such as stripping Otto in the "Schnitzelbank" song or leaving the woodchuck in the toilet in "Kid in the Lid"... until you remember that everyone's an actor; hardly any of what takes place is "real".
  • One cartoon was cut because they were too malicious.
• Karmic Trickster: From a proud Warner Bros. tradition. Both the Warners and Slappy Squirrel enjoy taking the air out of Jerkasses
• Kevlard: The Hip Hippos are very fat and also very durable, which comes in handy given their less than stellar common sense.
• Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy: Yakko explains in song why he is now the king of Anvilania:
  Yakko: I'm the cousin to the sister / Of son's niece's brother / Of the uncle's daughter's father / Of the nephew's sister's mother / And my grandpa's only cousin / Was the King's daughter's sibling, / But they're all gone,
  Crowd: So that is why
  Yakko: I am now your king!
• Know Your Vines: In "Sound of the Warners" After using the bathroom in a bush, Dr. Scratchansniff gets an awful itch, because he was in a poison oak bush.
• Lampshaded Double Entendre: "Goodnight everybody!"
• Lampshaded the Obscure Reference: In a short where the Warner Bros (and the Warner sister) met Rasputin. They did a pun between "Anastasia" and "anesthesia", and Dot said "Obscure Joke. Ask your parents".
• Last-Second Word Swap: During the song, "A Quake, A Quake" Yakko makes this clever pun.
  Yakko: Whose fault? Whose fault? The San Andreas Fault! 'Cause Mr. Richter can't predict 'er kicking our asphalt!
• Late to the Punchline: Most people who saw the show as kids. Seriously, watch it as an adult and embrace the revelations.
• Leitmotif: Just about every character had one. Nicely shown off in the last short: The Animaniacs Suite.
  • Certain actions warranted their own theme music too. For example, a character eating was usually accompanied by "Shortnin' Bread" and a character cleaning something would be accompanied by "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush". This is an obvious callback to Carl Stalling's work.
  • Hello Nurse's leitmotif (a sultry drumbeat) is an interesting case, where hers was started by Wakko in the first short ("Dezanitizsed") just to screw with the audience in true Warner fashion, but has since stuck with the character ever since.
• Limited Animation: Parodied in "Back in Style". Rumor has it that, in a rare subversion, the animation kept being sent back to AKOM because it came out looking too good.
  • Thanks to uneven animation, Varga Studio's "When You're Traveling" and most of Freelance Animators New Zealand's shorts tend to fall into this quite often.
• "Lion King" Lift: There's a spoof of the The Lion King (1994) where Yakko is the one to lift Simba, only to drop him off Pride Rock.
  Yakko: Oh, I thought they landed on their feet.
• List Song: "Yakko's World", among others.
• Little Guy, Big Buddy: Rita and Runt; also arguably Pinky and the Brain and Buttons and Mindy.
• Local Reference: When Rita and Runt go to Poland in "Puttin on the Blitz", Rita sings that it doesn't look like Burbank, more like Van Nuys. (Both are cities in the Los Angeles Area. You can guess which one has higher property values).
• Location Song: "Yakko's World" is a List Song listing every country in the world.
• Loophole Abuse: The candy store episode has Flaxseed save himself from the nuns about to attack him by pointing out they aren't allowed to resort to violence. They actually agree with him and pray for assistance, which brings the Notre Dame football team to the store so they can do it instead. Nothing stops the nuns from allowing sympathetic souls to take action they want to but their vows prevent them from doing.
• Lorre Lookalike: In the first episode, a photo of Peter Lorre's caricature from "Hollywood Steps Out" can be seen hanging on the wall of Doctor Scratchansniff's office.
• Losing Your Head: Happens to Minerva Mink in "Moon over Minerva" (see Heart Beats out of Chest).
• Lustful Melt: Happens to Minerva in both her cartoons, and to Dot and some aliens in "Space Probed".

M

• Mad Hatter: All three main characters, in the tradition of Looney Tunes and similar cartoons. "We're not monkeys, we're just cuckoo! Don't know what to say the Warners won't do!"
• Madwoman in the Attic: Yakko, Wakko and Dot were locked in a water tower for decades for being too zany.
• The Mafia: The Goodfeathers are an Affectionate Parody of Goodfellas and mob films in general. And, naturally, are The Family for the Whole Family.
• Magic Pants: Taken in an unusual direction in "Moon Over Minerva." Whenever Wilford changes into his hunky werewolf form, his pants actually shrink.
• Malaproper: A source for so much of the humor.
• Manchild: Ralph and Mr. Director (an Expy of Jerry Lewis), but special mention goes to Hercules in the "Hercules Unwound" episode, whose whining about Zeus making him do the 12 Labors is reminiscent of a teenager complaining about unpleasant chores.
• Mars Needs Women: All three of the Warner siblings. Although they seem to see themselves as more or less human-ish.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Dr. Scratchansniff's German last name is Freudlos, a double pun; it literally means "joyless", but it's also a reference to yet another psychiatrist...
  • Yakko and Wakko. Wakko, a play on "wacko", as in someone who is a little whacky (strange or crazy), and Yakko, a play on "yakking away" or talking incessantly. Yakko almost never shuts up.
• Medium Awareness: Mostly Slappy and the Warners. Slappy beats the Warners here:
  Skippy: But that was in a cartoon! This is real life!
  Slappy: *Aside Glance* Don't tell him, he might crack.
• Memorial for the Antagonist: Played with in "Rest In Pieces". Slappy Squirrel and her nephew Skippy attend the funeral of Walter Wolf, Slappy's life-long Arch-Enemy. While the audience learns that Walter is actually faking his death as part of his plan to trap Slappy, and so does Slappy later on, Skippy and the rest of the attendees don't know this, so Slappy's attempts to expose Walter come across to them as her making a mockery of his funeral.
• Mickey Mousing: Animaniacs actually had orchestral accompaniment - very, very rare for a televised cartoon series - and took full advantage of that.
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: "The Brain's Apprentice" and a couple of the Retraux Warners shorts.
• Misplaced Wildlife: In the "Tiger Prince" cold open, there are tigers substituting for lions in Africa... because they're parodying The Lion King (1994).
• "Miss X" Pun: This joke:
  Dr. Scratchansniff: You're misinterpreting!
  Yakko: [with a beauty pageant model] No, this is Miss Interpreting!
  Wakko: [also with a model] This is Miss Understanding!
  Dot: And I'm misterious.
• Mocky Mouse: The Slappy Squirrel segment "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Clock" has Slappy wind up in a nursing home after losing her memory, with the other senior citizens there being elderly spoofs of classic cartoon characters. Three of them are Rhena Rat (spoofing Minnie Mouse), Doofy (parodying Goofy) and Quacky Duck (a Donald Duck ersatz).
• Modesty Towel The episode "Meet Minerva" start with Minerva Mink walking out of home with just a towel (and another for the head), causing a head-turning reaction (Tex Avery-styled) to males of every species, before bathing naked in a lake. Then again, this trope was applied to Ms. Mink every chance the writers got in the comics.
• Monster Clown: A birthday-party clown is viewed this way in-universe in "Clown and Out" (by two characters who are afraid of clowns), but he's actually a very nice guy.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • There was one serious Slappy cartoon in which Slappy was put away in an asylum and Skippy was taken away by social services, and... to say that this episode was just an example of this trope is an understatement. The mood jumped up and down OVER AND OVER again, to the point of being a highly compressed intra-episode version of Cerebus Roller Coaster. It leads in with a comedic stretch where Slappy is driven mad by watching too many daytime talk shows (Jerry Springer etc.), which she can't stand. Then her madness is played for laughs for a while. Then Skippy takes her to the doctor, and even amidst there being a few gags in the scene, suddenly it starts portraying realistic consequences of her going insane. Then it just keeps REPEATEDLY ALTERNATING between playing it for laughs and portraying the tragic real consequences of a kid's aunt losing her mental faculties. Then she suddenly gets better and escapes the asylum for a happy ending. Then as a Continuity Nod in later episodes she references that now she actually LIKES those talk shows.
  • "The Ballad of Magellan" really makes us feel sympathy for the man, after which The Great Wakkorotti is brought in for comic relief.
• Mook–Face Turn: Several shorts involved Dot escaping from confinement by convincing the prison guard on duty with her cuteness.
• Moral Guardians: A frequent target of the show.
  • "Valuable Lesson" is centered around this.
  • "Bully for Skippy" involved an obnoxious senator imposing standards on cartoons to make them "safe and educational" for children. That same episode had Skippy repeatedly beaten up by a bully after following ineffectual advice from his guidance counselor. When Slappy and Skippy finally do use violence (cartoon violence) on the bully and it works, the senator and the counselor are both livid. Slappy's response to both their complaints is to use the machine the senator had sent to her, which carries out all cartoon violence off screen. Naturally, they both concede to Slappy's methods when they emerge as charred, beaten wrecks.
• Mr. Exposition: Lampshaded by Slappy.
  "Doug the Dog!? But he hates you, Aunt Slappy! He's been trying to eat you for years!!
  "Thank you, Mr. Exposition."
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: Was specifically designed for this. Kids will laugh at the potty jokes and the slapstick, but there's still plenty of Parental Bonuses to keep the adults entertained.
• Musical Episode:
  • Rita and Runt have at least one song per short. There are also numerous episodes that parody Broadway without those two characters that still act as musical episodes. Combining the two, one extended Rita and Runt segment is basically a parody of Les Misérables.
  • Episode 82 consists entirely of episodes based around music: "Wakko's 2-Note Song," "Panama Canal," "Hello Nurse," "The Ballad of Magellan," "The Return of the Great Wakkorotti," and "The Big Wrap Party Tonight." It even includes the extended theme song.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Dot is one of the few inversions in western animation that willingly introduces herself as this trope on a regular basis.
• Mythology Gag: Or more of a coincidence that was taken advantage of. Many animated shows only run for 65 episodes, a number deemed large enough for syndication. Animaniacs was originally to be no different, and it turned out that the fictional backstory of the Warner siblings had already established their debut as being around 1929, 65 years prior to the finale's broadcast. The episode thus played up the number, revolving entirely around a "65th Anniversary Special" tribute to the Warners.

N

• Naïve Animal Lover: A sketch ("The Hip Hippos") involved a Jane Goodall Expy maintaining vigilance over a pair of City Slicker, Nigh Invulnerable (because of their obesity) Idle Rich hippos. The Running Gag was her seeing them in (what she believed to be) danger and try to save them, only for the hippos to come out of the stunt all right and her hurt in some comedic fashion (with them not even noticing she was there).
• The Napoleon:
  • Mr. Plotz, the WB CEO.
  • Eli, a character in a Chicken Boo sketch.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Baloney the dinosaur just laughs off anvils much to the horror of the Warners. He can actually be harmed though, through the most mundane method you can imagine. Literally. If you imagine him in pain and suffering that's what happens. But the Warners don't properly catch on.
• Noah's Story Arc: There was at least one sketch called "Noah's Lark" that went like this. Buster and Babs Bunny walked up and stated they were no relation, so Noah let them on, along with the Hip Hippos.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: ...at least not by name.
  • Several notable public figures of the period were hilariously parodied in the show with such gems as Codger Eggbert and Lean Hisskill, as well as the Iraqi dictator Sodarn Hinsane.
  • The "Used Cow Salesman" in 'The Warners and the Beanstalk' is basically Pat Buttram.
  • The clown in "Clown and Out" is pretty much Jerry Lewis in whiteface and a silly outfit.
• No Fourth Wall: Was central to its humor, and is some of the best Postmodernism ever put in kids' comedy TV.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Buttons goes to enormous lengths, risking his own hide to keep Mindy from harm. Every episode ends with Buttons getting in trouble over some (Generally minor) misbehavior he performed in the course of his duties.
• No Punctuation Period: And that's why the writers created Katie Kaboom to explain to innocent little children why their big sister chucks a psycho for NO JUSTIFIABLE REASON WHATSOEVER once a month. Basically, their explanation was Teens Are Monsters.
  • "I'm Not Overreacting!! I'm a Teenager!!".
• Noir Episode: The episode "This Pun for Hire" with the Warners do a film noir parody, taking every cliché and killing them with many bad puns. Feature Scratchansniff and Ralph as villains and also Hello Nurse (and, after, Minerva Mink) as Femme Fatale.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Happens a lot, this being a cartoon.
  • Slappy: *waking up suddenly* I'd like to buy a vowel!
  • And in another episode:
    Death: *after falling off a cliff* I'll have the linguine with clams...
  • In "Frontier Slappy":
    Daniel Boone: (after attempting to break down Slappy's door, only to fail and bump his head on a tree) Daniel Boone was a great big guy!
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: The Warners' in-universe backstory states they were drawn in 1930, essentially making them all 80, and yet, none of them are geriatrics. It's particularly odd in that the Skippy and Slappy Squirrel segments make it quite clear that cartoon characters do age.
  • Maybe it's because cartoon characters come from their creators' imaginations, so it depends on whether they were imagined as characters that age. The Warners come from the era of monochrome, where cartoon characters were kind of simple/crude, while Slappy seems like she's more from the 40's, as a more realistic character.
  • Slappy throws a bit of a grim skew on it though in the short 'Rest in Pieces'. Though she and her old co-stars are clearly getting on in years, she tells Skippy that she knew Walter wasn't dead because 'there is no dying in the world of cartoons'.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We never see the faces of the Nazis in "Puttin On The Blitz."

• Not Where They Thought: In the episode "Meatballs or Consequences?", The Grim Reaper takes the Warner siblings to a dimension where he will officially make them dead if they lose a board game. Dot wonders if the place is Ohio.
• Nuns Are Funny: The candy store episode had the Warners tormenting a stuck-up store proprietor named Flaxseed after he refused to donate candy to a orphanage run by nuns. After driving him nuts, Flaxseed finally gets hold of Wakko and Dot... only for the nun from before to come back with reinforcements. They're about to kick his ass before Flaxseed points out that nuns aren't supposed to resort to violence. So, the nuns proceed to pray, and the Notre Dame college football team shows up to pummel the living crap out of Flaxseed.
  Head Nun: Our prayers have been answered!

O

• Odd Name Out:
  • Dot. She's the only Warner sibling whose name doesn't rhyme with the others'.
  • And let's not forget their voice actors: Jess, Tress and Rob.
• Ode to Food:
  • "Ice Cream" is about different types of ice cream.
  • "Be Careful What You Eat" is about food ingredients, which, despite the title, aren't all bad (it even includes beta carotene, a nutrient).
• Offscreen Teleportation: Often employed by the Warners. Performed on the Warners by the survey ladies ("Would you like to take a survey?")
• Oh God, with the Verbing!: Mr Director speaks like this.
• Old-Fashioned Rowboat Date: Dot briefly fantasizes about going on one with Dr. Scratchansniff, and creeps herself out, in "De-Zanitized".
• Old Shame: The Warner trio themselves, In-Universe; The company sealed them (and the cartoons which featured them) away in the early 20th century, refusing to release them because they (both the characters and their films) were nonsensical. Even in present time, they're trying to keep them locked up.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted with Kiki the Girlfeather and Kiki the gorilla from the Rita and Runt episode, "Kiki's Kitten."
• Only Sane Man: Whoever is the one person that knows Chicken Boo is a giant chicken — except in the Batman parody... in which Batman, voiced of course by Adam West, was the only one who didn't see through the Boo Wonder's Paper-Thin Disguise.
• Opening Narration: Done via a Deliberately Monochrome (with a splash of tomato red on the Warner's noses) newsreel called Newsreel of the Stars, used to explain the Warner's genesis, how they got loose, drove the world insane, humiliated the studio executives, and became sealed chaos in a can.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: As seen in "Moon over Minerva," the light of a full moon turns the nerdy Wilford Wolf into a Fabio-esque hunk.
• Out of Focus: Most of the characters got reduced screentime in favor of more Warners and Slappy cartoons in the Kids WB era seasons. They tried fixing this in season 4, only to go back to focusing on the Warners and Slappy in season 5. Pinky and the Brain have gotten their own show at this point. In Rita and Runt's case, it was getting expensive to fly Rita's voice actress to the studio.
• Overly Long Name:
  • Professor Otto von Schnitzelbuskrankengescheitmeier from the song "Schnitzelbank." It gets lampshaded during of the verses ("Is das nicht ein incredibly long name to have to try and say?").
  • Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fana Bo Besca III - but you can call her Dot. Call her Dotty and you die.
• Overly Long Gag: Who's on Stage?
• Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: At least three Warners shorts are examples of these:
  • "Wakko's Gizmo" has Wakko showing his siblings a giant Rube Goldberg contraption that ends up pushing a whoopee cushion.
  • "The Party" has the Warners inviting everyone up to the water tower for a party. Thaddeus Plotz at first refuses to go, but then they mention that "Steven" will be there. The party is a disaster, and Plotz keeps intending to leave, but the Warners remind them that "Steven" will be disappointed. At the end, "Steven" finally shows up... Steven Pudner, that is, a schlubby fat nerd the Warners met on the Internet. Of course, Plotz was expecting Steven Spielberg. Yakko lampshades this, saying, "Was that a long way to go for a gag or what?"
  • "Our Final Space Cartoon, We Promise!" is set up as yet another parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with AL replacing HAL. At the end, when AL begins humming "Hail to the Chief", the Warners realize AL is really Al Gore.

P

• Paper-Thin Disguise: Exaggerated with Chicken Boo. Every sketch opened with a new group of people (Hollywood actors, Confederate soldiers, people in a karate tournament, etc.) singing the praises of Boo—-who, as a reminder, is a six-foot tall chicken with absolutely no anthropomorphic features—who would then show up in the absolutely flimsiest of disguises (such as an extremely small mustache, a robe and headband, or a hat and wig). Exactly one person would realize Boo's true nature and try to tell everyone one about it ("HE'S A CHICKEN, I TELL YOU! A GIANT CHICKEN!") only to be disregarded. When Boo's disguise inevitably came off, the entire group would react in shock, and the chicken would be forced to move on to find another bunch to join.
• Parental Bonus: To the point where watching this show as a child and watching it years later as an adult are completely different experiences. While the show is well known enough for Demographically Inappropriate Humour, there is also a high amount of pop culture references, political commentary, and references to current events that virtually no child would be familiar with, but a grown-up sure would. As noted over in Real Life Writes the Plot, there was actually a list of all the Parental Bonuses compiled by fans on Usenet. Reading that after having seen the show will likely as not have you in stitches from all the Late to the Punchline moments.
• Parental Neglect: Mindy's parents, which is probably why she never calls them "mom" and "dad" like they want her to (except in Wakko's Wish) and instead calls them "Lady" and "Mr Man", something she might refer to a stranger as.
• Parody: Anything from The Sound of Music to Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers to Barney & Friends to Godzilla (naturally, Barney was far more frightening).
  • Oyyyyyyyyyyy, Macadamia!
  • We Are The Very Model Of Cartoon Individuals!
• The Parody Before Christmas: This show has "The Day Before Christmas", in which Ralph, with a sleigh drawn by the gangster pigeons, delivers presents to the Warner siblings.
• Parody Magic Spell:
  • A Pinky and the Brain episode had "Charlie Sheen, Ben Vereen, Shrink to the size of a lima bean!".
  • From their Shakespeare "translation":
  Witches: Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.
  Yakko: Loosely translated, "Abracadabra".
  Dot: Fillet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake.
  Yakko: "Let's cook a snake." Start with my agent.
• Parody Sue: The musical number "Hello Nurse" is all about this trope.
• Patter Song: "I Am The Very Model Of A Cartoon Individual," Parody of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General. To make the parody more blatant, it was sung to a pirate. A good amount of songs in the Animaniacs songbook are patter songs, including their most famous one of all, "Yakko's World."
• Phrase Catcher: "Hello, Nurse!" Guess who this is usually said to.
• Pimped-Out Dress: In the episode "King Yakko", Hello Nurse plays the prime minister of the kingdom, and she wears a magenta dress with ermine trim and a blue cloak.
• Pink Is Erotic: Minerva Mink gained infamy for her overly sexual design and in the cartoon, she's proven to be so attractive that all the males are aroused by the sight of her. In the episodes, she wears a pink modesty towel, a pink and purple dressing gown, and she is surrounded by pink flowers.
• Pin-Pulling Teeth: In "I Got Yer Can", an Escalating War with Slappy Squirrel causes Candie Chipmunk to do this; terrifying a pair of nuns before blowing herself up.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: The robots in "The Brain's Apprentice". A single one can raise a standard fridge off the ground.
• Platonic Life-Partners: Rita and Runt.
• Plane Awful Flight: In "Plane Pals", an obnoxious executive has the bad luck of sitting next to the Warners, who decide to make him their "special friend" for the flight.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: Played for laughs in Good Idea, Bad Idea. The Bad Idea is playing catch using grandpa as the ball.
  Good idea: Playing catch with your grandfather. [Mr. and Grandpa Skullhead toss a ball back and forth]
  Bad idea: Playing catch, with your grandfather. [Mr. Skullhead and a teen toss Grandpa Skullhead back and forth; Grandpa falls to pieces in midair]
• Plot Hole: Provides the page quote from a sketch of Shakespere's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" being translated for kids.
  Puck (played by Yakko): And this weak and idling theme, no more yielding, but a dream!
  Dot (the translator): There is a hole in this plot you could drive a truck through.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: The episode "Spell-Bound" is presumably one to Pinky and the Brain as a test to see if the sketch could work as its own show. This is made apparent because of the entire episode being a half-hour Pinky and the Brain cartoon with the only connections to Animaniacs being cameos by Slappy Squirrel and the Goodfeathers.
• Potty Dance: See below.
• Potty Emergency: Trope Namer, for the segment of episode 26 where Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are at the movies and Wakko drinks from an insanely large cup of soda and spends the rest of the short desperately looking for a bathroom. Wakko also has this happen on a car trip in "I'm Mad!" and when he gets scared of the cartoon world in "The Girl With The Googily Goop". It also happens in 2 Cartoon Network promos ^note  One where the Warners are going into other shows on the channel and one where Wakko is watching a barber cut someone's hair as well as the Kids WB Kooky Karolfest promo "We Flush You A Merry Christmas".
• Potty Failure: Lampshaded. In the episode with Rasputin, at the end when the moral of the day is revealed to be "Brush your teeth," Dot says, "That makes me feel all warm and squishy. Either that or I need to wear diapers." In episode 35, she said "That makes me feel all warm and squishy inside. Either that, or I sat in something."
• Pounds Are Animal Prisons: Rita and Runt first met in one of these, and "Les Miseranimals" opens with Runt escaping from one.
• Power Trio: Yakko, Wakko and Dot, naturally.
• The Prankster: Slappy Squirrel and the Warner Brothers both waver between this trope and being Karmic Tricksters.
• Precocious Crush: Yakko & Wakko's iconic crush on Hello Nurse. Dot also has one on Mel Gibson.
• Pro Wrestling Episode: "Fake"
• Previously on…: The first episode aired on Kids' WB! opened with a parody of this trope.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "I! AM! SATAN!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
• Pun With Pi: In one episode, the teacher Ms. Flamiel has a textbook called "Mathematics: Easy as [Pi symbol]."

R

• Raiders of the Lost Parody: An early episode wound up with Yakko directing Mr. Director through a few movie parodies. In one, Mr. Director was "Illinois Smith" and utterly failed with the whip - first he ends up tying himself up with the thing, then when he gets free he cracks it and it gets caught on the set rafters, bringing them down on him.
  • "I think it's a not-working whip."
• Rail-Car Separation: In "Whistlestop Mindy", Mindy strays onto the mail car of a train. When Buttons chases after her, Mindy pulls out the bolt that keeps the mail car coupled to the passenger coach, causing the two cars to separate. Buttons grabs the couplings of the two cars to keep them together and lets Mindy walk across him like a bridge. When Mindy gets to the passenger car, Buttons puts the bolt back in the couplings.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Bill Clinton playing the sax in the intro is not a Non Sequitur; he really did play the sax while he was an active politician, as seen on The Arsenio Hall Show.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The "Please Please PLEASE Get a Life Foundation" was written using actual nitpicks from a newsgroup-made reference guide (the Cultural Reference Guide for Animaniacs) verbatim. The show's writers even e-mailed the people who wrote that guide for permission to use their quotes. The show's run coincided with the early days of wide Internet access, and in those days (early to mid 1990's) most online discussions were done in newsgroups.
  Will Bell: (founder and maintainer of the CRGA) Several months ago I received email from [writer] Peter Hastings asking for copies of the CRGA by email and snail mail, which I provided.
  • A group of these fans were subsequently invited to the studios to see the short before its broadcast premiere, as shown in this E! news segment from 1995.
    • After the short was screened for the fans, one fan pointed out an error in the short's quoting of one of the nitpicks. From memory. This was met with incredulity by the staffers and no surprise at all by the fans.
  • During the brief point in time when it looked unlikely that Bill Clinton would serve a second term, the creators hedged their bets by changing the theme song lyrics from "While Bill Clinton play the sax" to "We pay tons of income tax".
• Recurring Extra: The Hip Hippos.

• Refuge in Audacity: So much.
  • In "Hot, Bothered and Bedeviled," the Warners take a wrong turn at Kennebunkport and end up in Hell, tormenting Satan. The same episode features Saddam Hussein plunging into a lake of lava and three demonic stand-ins for The Andrews Sisters singing a jazz tune about eternal damnation.
  • An in-universe example in the "Baghdad Cafe" portion of the Animaniacs Stew episode, the villain-of-the-week is "Sodarn Insane" - presumably the same guy. The Warners mistake him for the headwaiter, but the part of Dot is being played by Slappy, who sees no reason not to cut directly to Comedic Sociopathy:
  Slappy: And I'm Princess Louisa Francesca... y'know what: forget it. I'm done. Have some dynamite down yer pants.
• Regional Riff: In "Yakko's World", as Yakko mentions Japan, the famous "Asian Riff" is briefly interpolated into the melody of the song.
• Remember the New Guy?: The backstories of the Warner siblings and Slappy Squirrel were that the Warner siblings were created as Buddy's co-stars in an attempt to spice up his bland cartoons and Slappy is a retired Looney Tunes star.
• Reminder of Impossibility: Provides the page quote.
  • In one Slappy episode, Slappy and Skippy are dealing with a dog named Stinkbomb. After climbing their tree, Stinkbomb follows them up. Leave Slappy to bring up one important fact that Stinkbomb forgot about. Dogs can't climb trees.
  • One instance of Buttons protecting Mindy has him following her up a tree. After she tells him that dogs can't actually climb, he immediately falls.
• Retraux: The "lost" shorts.
• Rhyming Title: Used in several episodes:
  • "Guardin' the Garden"
  • "Scare Happy Slappy"
  • "Smitten with Kittens"
• Rhyming with Itself: At the end of the "Wakko's America" song about 50 states and their capitals:
  Sacramento, California; Oklahoma and its City;
  Charleston, West Virginia; and Nevada, Carson City.
  • For the more grievous example see Humiliation Conga.
• Rhyming Wizardry:
  • A Pinky and the Brain episode had "Charlie Sheen, Ben Vereen, Shrink to the size of a lima bean!"
  • In the same vein, one of their skits "translating" William Shakespeare covered the Three Witches scene from Macbeth:
    Witches: Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.
    Yakko: Loosely translated, "Abracadabra".
    Dot: Fillet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake.
    Yakko: "Let's cook a snake." Start with my agent.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: The hippos.
• Right Behind Me: In one episode the Warners proceeded to trash talk the people working on the show ^note including their own voice actors as the credits rolled, not realizing that their microphone was still on.
  • Slappy subverts this in the very first short featuring her, whipping out a club to hit the eavesdropping Doug the Dog without even looking at him.
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: The "Good Idea, Bad Idea" shorts.
• Roommate Com: The Warners appear in in-verse show Acquaintances, which is a parody of Friends (a prime example of Roommate Com).
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Played for laughs at the end of the Get A Life sketch. The anal-retentive nerd points out they intentionally misspelled The "Please Please Pleese Get A Life Foundation" just to see if we were paying attention.
• Rude Hero, Nice Sidekick: The show uses this trope a lot:
  • The Brain is a condescending Insufferable Genius, while Pinky is a Minion with an F in Evil who still likes and admires Brain, no matter how much abuse he gets from him. They are still this in their own show, Pinky and the Brain.
  • Slappy Squirrel is a cranky old lady. Her sidekick in all her segments is her nephew, the cheerful and adorable Skippy.
  • Rita is an arrogant and sarcastic cat who is always accompanied by dimwitted Big Friendly Dog Runt.
• Rule of Funny: A given on this show in general, but lampshaded in the Slappy short "I Got Yer Can", when Skippy drops an anvil on Candie Chipmunk apropos of nothing, justifying it to his aunt with a nonchalant "Who cares? Anvils are funny."
• Running Gag: Again, too many to count. Notably "Wanna See My Pet?", the Warners being chased by Ralph in the background of other shorts, and Yakko announcing "Good Night Everybody!" if something even remotely suggestive was said.
  • A short-lived one was used in both "This Pun For Hire" and "Anchors A-Warners": A character says "No no no." Yakko in the first instance and Dot in the latter instance asked the character to repeat that. The character again said, "No no no." Then each replied, "I love that!"
  • What about the dragon!? The dragon! The dragon! The dragon! The dragon! The dragon!
    • Would someone please stop this man from saying "Dragon"?