The reveal that the hunter in "Good Warner Hunting" is actually Chicken Boo seems odd since his disguise was actually convincing. However, there are one of two possible explanations. The first is that 22 years is plenty of time to practice at coming up with more convincing disguises. The other is the Rule of Perception; we're simply seeing what the people who are fooled in other sketches actually see, as opposed to sharing the perspective of the Only Sane Man.
This also offers a bit of a reason for the human designs in the series being a lot more Gonk than before: with designs like that it is a lot easier for a chicken to disguise themselves as a man.
And how did all those other characters recover from being mounted on the wall? Simple, they were reanimated just like the Warners.
Chicken Boo was always described as The Ace in his original shorts even though when we saw him he pretty much just acted like a normal chicken. Obviously whatever mystical force allows him to excel at whatever he's pretending to be, stops working the minute he's outed as a chicken.
In "Suffragette City", the song is interrupted when Dot learns that, while women won the right to vote in 1920, cartoons still haven't earned that right for themselves. This can be considered Truth in Television, as after women won the right to vote, black citizens had to wait another 45 years to get their rights in writing (despite black women being a major force in suffragette protests).
In "Fear and Laughter in Burbank", Nickelwise attempts to scare the Warners by depriving them all of the qualities mentioned in the original series opening theme song.
He shows Dot a version of herself that is no longer cute. (That backfires because Dot has been a kid for eighty-plus years and is interested in growing older.)
Another bit of theme brilliance—a couple scenes show the Warners and their careers literally rising from the dead, and they even sign their new contract with Death itself. Thinking back to their encounter with him in the original series, it makes sense why they would be able to revive the show—Death would be supremely annoyed with them after 22 years, and would be willing to send them back.
At the end of "Gold Meddlers", Nils refuses to drop the gold medals the Warners gave up and ends up in Hell because the ground gave in below him to its combined weight. So why didn't he drop them? Likely because he became too greedy, and since Greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, it made sense to fall there.
On that note, why did nobody stop Nils from leaving Hell? Because Nils was still alive and thus, didn’t belong in the underworld.
The Warners haven't heckled Nora yet the way they would Plotz. Why? Because it's not fun for them; Nora is a Reasonable Authority Figure who speaks on their wavelength and lets the Warners have free run of the lot. She's an ordinary person, and they can't deal with someone so mundane. Plotz, for all his faults, was anything but ordinary, and was easy prey for the Warners. Plus, while both wouldn't tolerate their antics, all Plotz would do is get angry and get Ralph to chase them, but Nora just plain refuses to deal with their antics personally and makes it clear she can be downright dangerous if she needs to.
As noted on the YMMV page, Pinky yelling out Leeroy Jenkins is a bit outdated. Looking at it from Brain's perspective, it's exactly the kind of thing Pinky would do, since he's far out of touch from reality. Brain spent 22 years building online culture, but Pinky only grasps the basics of it, and is often liable to simply speak whatever sounds funny to him. Plus, Pinky wouldn't exactly get the full meaning behind the phrase, and was likely saying it because he thought it sounded hilarious.
Why was Chicken Boo, of all characters, exclusively forbidden from appearing in the reboot when there were other characters allowed back? There's actually a few reasons that the others were brought back when the big old chicken wasn't, in spite of the fact that some of the segments were just as unpopular and formulaic, if not more so, as his own, and a lot of it all has to do with money:
Katie Kaboom: In spite of many finding her segments stale, Katie would nevertheless still be allowed back since the culture of teenagers has changed and has found a wider audience through social media. Adults may not be able to stand her, but people her age? An easy target for making money.
The Hip Hippos: Sure, Flavio and Marita may have been little more than one-note hippos, but since then, environmentalism has grown to a wider audience, and hippos are unfortunately a vulnerable species. The studio could help bring awareness to their plight—and draw a bigger crowd of environmentally conscious individuals—by including them.
Buttons and Mindy: Well, more Mindy than Buttons, but Mindy at least has the clout of being voiced by Bart Simpson'sactor, and the show, in spite of being viewed with disdain over Seasonal Rot and Flanderization, is still going strong and is now under the control of Warner Brother's biggest rival. Fans may not like Mindy, but the studio could easily profit on keeping a big name in animation around for the role and capitalize off of having a big name in the part. Plus, with rumors of another of Nancy's shows coming back, they could still get people's attention off of that and The Simpsons alone.
Noticeably, of all the other cartoons that Chicken Boo was able to stuff and mount, why not Baloney? Well, the big galoot was shown to be the cartoon equivalent of an Eldritch Abomination; no one, not even the Warners, could stop his cheesiness and big, goofy demeanor from driving them nuts. Heck, he was even used as a torture device in the movie. As horrible as he is, even a vengeful chicken would know better than to try and take him out. Surely, if he did, he would be doing the world a favor (given his namesake's infamous reputation), but the task would be next-to-impossible.
Plus, it's very doubtful that Baloney would even be relevant anymore, given how his inspiration fell out of the limelight and was quickly forgotten about.
The hunter not going after or having gone after Pinky and the Brain is brilliance for two reasons: 1) So far, they're the only non-Warner characters that have full on segments in the reboot, and 2) Theirs was the only Animaniacs segment that had a spinoff.
During "Hindenburg Cola," the Warners literally "cut the line" to get to the titular drink faster by cutting out the section of the page where everyone else is standing, skipping past them to the front, and then messily pasting the background characters back into place. Nils Niedhart sees this and enviously remarks, "I hate that they can do that without feeling self-conscious." On the surface he is talking about the line cutting itself, but the phrasing heavily implies that Nils is also capable of bending reality and utilizing meta humor as the Warners do, but lacks the confidence to do so. This, by extension, suggests that every character in the series can do this, but has been choosing not to make use of it for one reason or another (possibly except for Chicken Boo in "Good Warner Hunting").
If you look closely at Walter Grubb's trophy collection, you might recognise some of the heads as some of the "Jamalot" animals from "Hooray for North Hollywood (Part 2)". At first, it seem that Chicken Boo is so petty with his revenge that he is going after a group of unnamed gag-characters that only appeared for a few seconds, however, if you think about it, these characters appeared in a film in-universe making them meta-fictional film stars. That means that despite the audience only seeing them for a few seconds, in-universe they are famous cartoon actors, so Chicken Boo saw them as a threat to his potential stardom.
In the episode where Brain and Pinky tell stories to the Sultana, Pinky's story of Pinkbad the Sailor, while exaggerated, does portray how a lot of the lesser known One Thousand and One Night stories get weird and wild, like how in "The Fisherman and the Jinni", the Jinni tells a completely different story in the middle of the tale, and how after gaining magic fish he presents the to the sultan who's fascinated by how the fish would instantly cook.
Why did the animator from 'Yakko Amakko' look a lot less exaggerated than most of the humans in the reboot? Because she's from the 'real world', and thus looks more realistic than the cartoon characters.
Given her admitted issues and admittance to only having tormenting the Warners, the animator here was probably the one to animate the episodes where the Warners died. And why death? Well, she did mention being both a fan of Game of Thrones and a dislike of plot armor in the last two seasons of it. She's compensating.
Why did Julia have 'a tad too much Hillary Clinton'? Because Brain put in her tracksuit into Julia's creation, which was larger than a pearl necklace, a hat, or a memoir. A tracksuit is larger than all of those other items.
Wakko in one episode is shown playing a game called "Two Weeks": a period of two weeks, in medieval terms, was known as a fortnight.
While it kinda sucks that the water tower gag doesn't appear in the credits anymore, I think there might be a reason they did this. When watching the original series on Hulu, much of the time autoplay would annoyingly skip most of the credits long before the water tower gag comes up at the end (this problem doesn't seem to happen when playing the episodes via TV casting however), so it's possible that the credits gag got skipped to avoid this problem.
Slappy's composed expression in "Good Warner Hunting" makes a lot more sense when you remember that her entire thing was being a veteran toon who knew all the tricks that anyone could try against her and thwart them just by being sharper than them. She probably figured out how things were going and played along for a much more entertaining payoff in the end. Sure she could probably have stopped Grubb on her own but setting him up to get absolutely demolished by a whole mob of ticked off characters is a whole lot funnier.
It would also be completely in character for her to be as nonchalant as possible when Grubb tried to give her an And I Must Scream fate. A villain doesn't have nearly as much fun besting a hero when said hero barely cares that they won after all.
Nora's role as CEO with Plotz gone... considering how well paid CEO positions are its hard not to imagine that in the 20-something years between the original series and the revival Plotz simply retired. Also possible he was pushed out by the Norita family once they took over the majority shares of Warner Brothers as well. Either way, the lower paid employees on the Warner lot such as Scratchy and Ralph are still working the exact same jobs we have seen them in since 1993. At least in Ralph's case it seems to be Happiness in Minimum Wage.
More of a "Fridge Pun", but in "The Stickening", Dot goes on a teacup ride while having a super-sticky giant lollipop on her head. She spins it so fast and gets so much stuck to the lollipop that she ends up creating a black hole around herself that absorbs the entire universe. A black hole is an infinitely dense DOT of singularity!
Fridge Horror
"Good Warner Hunting" is full of it:
How did Walter Grubb get the jump on Slappy Squirrel?! Her whole shtick is she was smarter than anyone who tried to kill her. In fact, one could argue that Slappy was Her Own Worst Enemy in that she made things harder for herself on purpose to make an entertaining cartoon.
There is an alternative answer to what happened, Walter went for Skippy first. Hard to think of a zany scheme when your closest relative is at a hunter's mercy...
On a similar note, how did he bag the Hip Hippos, who are Nigh-Invulnerable? Better question: How did he manage to get them with a certain zoologist, Gina Embryo, literally breaking her back to protect them? Either Gina was too tired or badly injured to protect the hippos anymore, or Grubb took her out first.
Why was Chicken Boo out of all the Toons singled out for contractual exclusion? He wasn't popular, as the Warners note, but Katie Kaboom, Baloney, and the Hip Hippos were just as disliked. Rita and Runt, as well as Minerva Mink appeared less often due to off-screen reasons despite popularity, while Mindy and Buttons got reviled for poor Buttons' suffering. If anything, there should be a Long List about who couldn't return for the reboot.
The Warners were ready to perform a Karmic Trickster routine on Dr. Walter Grubb. They get blindsided when he actually catches them with a dirty trick— tossing a net over them. Wakko asks his siblings if they knew that Chicken Boo was in there the whole time. The answer is ambiguous since the Warners looked horrified at seeing the Toons stuffed and mounted, including Skippy with an anguished expression, and a bit despondent about being caught. Dr. Grubb broke the rules when the kids were going easy on him, feeling sorry that he was terrible at hunting them, and offered a truce.
Chicken Boo confirms he was willing to end the show prematurely and cause a Toon apocalypse by stuffing and mounting the Warners. Geez.
Even worse, if you look closely in the background, you can see the remains of countless other innocent toons who weren’t part of the Animaniacs cast mounted on his wall. Why would he also kill them? Like the Flame, they don’t return for the beatdown...
Actually, according to the Animaniacs wiki, a lot of the background heads are the "Jamalot" animals from "Hooray for North Hollywood (Part 2)", so it's safe to assume that all the toons he hunted down did appear in the show in some shape or form. Not that it makes anything better.
As Nightmare Retardant, Baloney isn't part of the cast chasing down Chicken Boo, so presumably he survived. Buttons and Mindy also don't join in the run, just giving a mutual Death Glare.
Chicken Boo went after the characters from his shorts who saw through his disguises like Colin.
The original concept for Chicken Boo, it's said, was a cannibal hermit who lived in a cave and consumed eggs. Note that Little Blue Bird (a minor character voiced by Tom Ruegger's youngest son Cody) isn't seen, either in stuffed effigy or chasing after Boo at the end. Come to think of it, Miles Standish's turkey pal is absent, too, and so is Steven Seagull. Could "Walter Grubb" not only be catching his old co-stars, but eating some of them (in particular, the avian ones) too?
Among the toons Grubb hunted down are Rita and Runt. Given the concept of their segment, it's easy to imagine that he could've killed them by simply offering them a home to lower their guards.
If the Gnome spends most of his time in people's mouths, then you can only guess where he goes to the toilet.
Wakko in Season 2 shrugs off a corporate disclaimer demanding demanding their firstborn by saying "We can't have children anyway, we're like mules!" Which raises a whole lot of rather...concerning questions.
The implications of Julia's character arc, although it's more like a Fridge Tearjerker. She could have done a lot of good in the world if Brain's attempt to control her hadn't turned her into his Mad ScientistArch-Enemy.
Speaking of Julia... Brain's A.I. replica of her in Season 3. While its clear Brain felt real regret for how he treated Julia there are some squicky implications of what he was doing with a computer simulation where he placed her as his happy wife; which starts to veer more towards the same territory as the "Holodeck romance" episodes from Star Trek.
Fridge Brilliance. Brain may be sorry for mistreating Julia, but (consciously or unconsciously) he still wants to control her, which is why he puts her in a 50sSitcom scenario where he is the undisputed head of the household.
