Poll Pic: Minerva Mink's Balloon Boobs (Patreon)

Minerva's Furflation Adventures, premiering this Summer on Adult Swim!

Yeah, I wish.

And before anyone asks, assuming anyone was gonna, maybe you don't give a crap and that would be pretty fair, but I still haven't watched Animaniacs 2020 yet. I'm gonna at some point, but I'm still not holding my breath. I'm still pretty concerned that the adult humor is gonna be nerfed. As much as they did seem from the promotional material to make jokes that the kids won't get like "I can't wait to see if my Hootie & the Blowfish album finished downloading on Napster," but that's a joke that a parent would probably be willing to explain, that was only half of what made the old show's adult humor so memorable that the show got to remain well-regarded into the modern day and be nostalgic enough to justify rebooting at all. The other half was jokes that the kids *shouldn't* get like the infamous "finger Prince," and "conjugate? I've never even kissed a girl," jokes that the parents hope like hell they don't get asked to explain.

I get that reboots should be different from the original, and the promos even show that that seems to be a plot point in the first episode: "reminiscent of the first season, but different so we're not your dad's Animaniacs." I'm not hoping for the show to be a total carbon copy as if the original never ended, but what people liked about what came before still needs to be carried over into the new one, otherwise there's no point having them share a name, at that point you might as well just design new characters and call it something else. Even if the intention is to reimagine from the ground up, the original spirit still needs to be there, and with adult humor, particularly adult humor that pushes boundaries, being so integral to the old show's spirit, then the spirit just isn't there if the show doesn't raise its proverbial middle finger firmly in the air and refuse to give a fuck about what they are or aren't "supposed" to do in a "kids' show," something I put in quotes because for some reason in the US it just seems like anything animated that doesn't have curse words in it is automatically considered a kids' thing, even if it's best watched as an adult. (I challenge anyone who thinks Recess is a kids' show to a Xiaolin Showdown, I'll be wagering the Millennium Puzzle because that's a Shen Gong Wu, fuck you, let's go, Gong Yi Tenpai)

And yeah, I still haven't watched it yet, so maybe the spirit is actually totally still there, and the people making it understand Animaniacs just as well as the trailers made it seem like they respect it, and I just made myself look like a dumbass to anyone that did already see it. But for some reason pushing boundaries, especially in "kids'" media, just isn't considered nearly as cool anymore as it was as recently as this time a decade ago, and has fallen out of style. I can't think of a single good reason why pushing boundaries should ever go out of style, but it did. So I still think it's pretty fair based on precedent to expect otherwise. And again, I'm still gonna watch it when I feel like and give it a chance to prove me wrong, wouldn't really be fair otherwise. And it's not like the jokes they did show in the promotional material were groaners, so even if it doesn't go a hundred percent in capturing the spirit, it could still be good on its own merits exclusively, because reboots are weird like that, you can have something good that isn't a good reboot (like how Starfox Adventures, with its emphasis on dogfighting in a spaceship delegated to a minigame is a pretty bad Starfox game, but what they replaced the flying with is a not-quite-perfect but largely competently-made adventure game, which is why it's much better-regarded by people about my age who had it as their first Starfox game) just as you can have a bad show that IS a good reboot (like Ben 10, I don't like the 2016 version, it's far from my preferred version, the art style is same-y and unimpressive, and the increased emphasis on comedy isn't an upgrade to me when I don't find it funny. But the fact that it still has an emphasis on action, the stories are still largely about Ben needing to defeat a supervillain, and the show wasn't afraid to give stakes to those conflicts, at no point when I was watching it did it ever feel like an unrelated product that the name confusingly got slapped onto, it felt just as much like I was watching Ben 10 as any of the other Ben 10 series', I just find it an inferior one.)

So go right ahead and consider my expectations pessimistic, because in my experience in having expectations on upcoming pieces of media, I've found it much easier to be disappointed when expecting the best and much easier to be pleasantly surprised when expecting the worst. There's benefits to cynicism, the key is to make sure to hope for the best while you're expecting the worst.