The 10 Best Episodes Of Tiny Toon Adventures, Ranked
Created by Ton Ruegger and overseen by executive producer Steven Spielberg, "Tiny Toon Adventures" debuted in September of 1990, marking a sea change in mainstream TV animation. "Tiny Toons," tapping into 1990s trends toward self-awareness, regularly addressed its own status as a cartoon show, and the characters would frequently give side-eyes to the audience, extract scripts on camera, or even exit their animation cels to cause havoc for the animators. The show's regular obliteration of the fourth wall reflected — and guided — the prevailing winking sarcasm of the 1990s, making it (and I am not exaggerating) a vital and definitive text of the decade. It's no coincidence that it landed the same year as Richard Linklater's "Slacker."
"Tiny Toons" was striking, funny, and launched an entire series of notable Spielberg-backed 1990s cartoons like "Animaniacs," "Histeria!," and "Freakazoid!"
The characters on "Tiny Toons" were largely all distaff "youth" counterparts of established Looney Tunes characters. Bugs Bunny became Babs Bunny (Tress MacNeille) and Buster Bunny (Charlie Adler, John Kassir). Daffy Duck became Plucky Duck (Joe Alaskey). Porky Pig became Hamton (Don Messick), Elmer Fudd became Elmyra (Cree Summer), etc. They were all about 12 years old and attended Acme Looniversity, a school staffed by said Looney Tunes characters who taught their charges how to be better cartoon characters. Despite being designed after established characters, the Tiny Toons emerged as complete, unique figures in their own right. Acme Loo was a combination of a public junior high school and an upscale acting academy.
Being a daily program, "Tiny Toons" sometimes flagged in quality, likely due to its rushed production schedule. But when it was on, it was on, clearly the second best of the 1990s Spielberg TV shows (after "Freakazoid!"). Here, then, are the ten best episodes of the show:
10. K-ACME TV
"Tiny Toon Adventures" was a 30-minute program that was broken into three segments to accommodate multiple ad breaks. Sometimes the three segments would link together into one overarching story, although just as often, an episode would be split into three smaller, character-forward shorts that were perhaps only loosely connected by a host segment. The split-up episodes lent "Tiny Toons" a freewheeling quality, taking a few drops of Monty Python and adding them to the 1980s-specific experience of watching several Looney Tunes shorts in a row as part of a Saturday morning broadcast block.
That wildness came to the fore in "K-ACME TV" (February 26, 1991), an episode constructed like a half-hour of random channel surfing. There were a few longer shorts (as when Dizzy Devil, played by Maurice LaMarche) ate his podium on a televised game show), some commercial parodies, and shorts that lasted perhaps five seconds; when the cuddle-obsessed animal murderer Elmyra discovers porcupines, it doesn't go well.
For those keen to see the upcoming "Coyote vs. Acme," know that "K-ACME TV" already featured a short wherein Calamity Coyote sued Acme (represented by a giant rat) for its malfunctioning gadgets. Acme's defense? Calamity wasn't using them correctly.
9. Hollywood Plucky
Plucky Duck possessed the same egotism as his forebear Daffy but expanded to a cosmic degree. Leaving the show entirely, Plucky took to the road to travel to Hollywood, California (not a long car ride from Acme Acres, which appears to be located in Burbank) and pitched his script idea to Hollywood bigwigs. His idea is "The Plucky Duck Story," a (highly fictionalized) tale of his own upbringing.
What "Hollywood Plucky" (September 24, 1990) proved was that reference-and-caricature-heavy Looney Tunes shorts like "Hollywood Steps Out" (1941) could still work in the 1990s. Pop culture references could be updated, and still function comedically. When Plucky gets a job as a waiter in an upscale Hollywood eatery, he interacts with big stars of the day like Jack Nicholson, Roseanne Barr, Michael Keaton, and the stars of the then-new "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier." Additionally, "Hollywood Plucky" further highlights that the characters are not mere anthropomorphic animals living in a parallel comedy universe, but struggling child actors hungry for fame. There is, then, a mercenary quality to "Tiny Toons," used to expose the bleakness of the fame-obsessed Hollywood machine. This is fine satire.
8. Journey to the Center of Acme Acres
Those who weren't living in Southern California in the late 1980s may not remember the great earthquake panic. Kids might remember hearing news reports about how SoCal was immediately poised to be the site of an earthquake of 8.3 magnitude on the Richter scale, pretty much wiping out the entire west coast. Hollywood responded to these predictions in kind by producing a few notable earthquake-related entertainments that remain relics of their time. Universal Studios in Hollywood famously made a "Big One" portion of the famed tram tour in 1990, while "Tiny Toons" made "Journey to the Center of Acme Acres" (September 25, 1990), a fantasy story about gremlins living in the center of the Earth.
Because "Tiny Toons" was largely sarcastic, it took the topical subject, and kind of poked it in the ribs. There was a talk in the episode about plate tectonics (illustrated by Elmer Fudd putting cracks in his own skull with a mallet), but the actual science was abandoned to cartoon absurdities. The center of the Earth is made of gold, and its naughty gremlins (like in Bob Clampett's 1943 film "Falling Hare") cause the havoc. It's slickly animated and well-told.
7. Night Ghoulery
"Night Ghoulery" was the final episode of "Tiny Toon Adventures," aired as a one-hour TV special on May 28, 1995, as a weirdly timed Halloween special. Borrowing from Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" (similar to the way "The Simpsons" did in "Treehouse of Horror IV" in 1993), "Night Ghoulery" was an anthology of horror stories that allowed the Toons to spoof horror tropes in their own inimitable fashion. It helped that Charlie Adler had been replaced by John Kassir as the voice of Buster Bunny, lending the Cryptkeeper's own voice actor to contribute (Adler angrily left the show in 1992 when he wasn't offered a role in the then-upcoming "Animaniacs," despite being reliable on "Tiny Toons" for years).
The spoofs of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" were spot on. The highlight of the episode was the spoof of Spileberg's own "Duel," wherein a man was stalked by a mysterious truck on a barren highway. In the "Tiny Toons" version, the truck does things like sneak into a bar to wait for Plucky Duck. Weirdly, "Night Ghoulery" is also scary; their twist on "The Tell-Tale Heart" sees one character forcing another to behave like a living vacuum cleaner.
6. Milk, It Makes a Body Spout
By far one of the funniest episodes of "Tiny Toons," "Milk, It Makes a Body Spout" (February 22, 1991) saw Plucky and Buster each declaring themselves to be the funniest child actor in school. To put their pride to the test, they each try to see which of them can make a distracted Hamton squirt milk out of his nose. Their efforts to make Hamton laugh are truly bizarre. Plucky invents Mr. Revolto, the Talking Spud, a monster that seeks to eat him. Buster makes music with a toilet plunger.
Their jokes are odd, unique, and genuinely funny. It's one thing to say someone is funny, but not produce any funny material (see the movie "Punch Line"). It's quite another to say you are going to do something funny and actually pull it off. Throughout the competition, Hamton is unmoved, looking on with only mild interest. Eventually, Plucky just looks at Hamton and points out, "You know, milk is mucus-forming." Comedy gold.
5. Fields of Honey
"Fields of Honey" (November 2, 1990) saw Babs Bunny having something of a crisis. She looked at her peers, and saw that they were all indeed derived from classic Looney Tunes ... and that they were all males. There were many female characters on the show, of course (Fifi LaFume and Shirley the Loon were regulars), but Babs was miffed that classic Warner Bros. animation didn't have any women among them. She trekked into Acme Looniversity's basement film archive — and how amazing it was to have a film archive as a regular location on TV! — and discovers several 1930s cartoons starring a lost character named Honey.
Honey was a real character from 1930s WB shorts and starred opposite Bosko, a character who first appeared in 1929. The plot of "Fields of Honey" follows Babs as she tries to arrange a film festival of Honey cartoons, hoping to revive the character's popularity. "Fields of Honey" saw that "Tiny Toons" and its characters had an awareness of animation history, and, as seen above, allowed classic characters to live into the present. All that's needed is screenings and the laughter it would evoke.
The revival of Bosko and Honey also led indirectly to the introduction of a black-and-white portion of Acme Acres — Two-Tone Town — where 1930s cartoons like Foxy, Roxy, and Goopy lived. These episodes would evolve into the creation of "Animaniacs." Fortunately, they were given updated designs as their original incarnations were inspired by racist caricatures of the era.
4. Buster and Babs Go Hawaiian
The script for "Babs and Buster Go Hawaiian" was scripted by three 13-year-olds named Renee Carter, Sarah Creef, and Amy Crosby. They submitted their script to the "Tiny Toon" offices after merely doodling ideas on notebook paper during their lunch periods in 8th grade. Astonishingly, the three young women were contacted by Warner Bros. hoping to turn their script into an actual episode. In true "Tiny Toons" fashion, the fact that Buster and Babs were making a fan script became a central part of the story, and the two cartoon rabbits went to visit Steven Spielberg over the matter. Carter, Creef, and Crosby all appeared in animated form in the episode.
Both the fan script and the meta-script were hilarious, with each side commenting on the other. In the meta-script, Buster refuses to do the episode because he doesn't shoot on airplanes. In the actual script, we're given bangers like "Would you like brown lumps in grey sauce or grey lumps in brown sauce?"
Renee Carter Hall once talked all about the experience in an interview with Doug Walker. However one might feel about Walker, it's an insightful back-and-forth.
3. TT: Music Television
"TT: Music Television" (February 1, 1991) was a spoof of MTV, depicting Babs and Buster as artificially hip-talking veejays here to introduce kids to the hip music of the day. Of course, "Tiny Toons," a series for kids, wasn't about to start screening videos of Janet Jackson, INXS, Mariah Carey, C+C Music Factory, or Nelson, as those would likely require massive licensing fees. They did, however, manage to license two tracks from They Might Be Giants' 1990 album "Flood," and made full-on music videos for their songs "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" and "Particle Man." These are excellent music videos that are almost too slick to appear on MTV.
Later in the episode, Babs and Buster and, uh, Fuddonna, go to visit the distractingly busty Julie Bruin (the show wasn't above the occasional ribald gag) who was played by real TV personality Julie Brown of "Strip Mall" and "The Edge" fame. They show videos for Aretha Franklin's "Respect," and Barrett Strong's "Money."
"Tiny Toons," it seems, could actually be hip. Well done.
2. Kon Ducki
The episode "Kon Ducki" (February 10, 1992) is split into two parts. The first is a straight-up spoof of Thor Heyerdahl's celebrated 1947 Kon Tiki expeditions, wherein it was proven that one could sail on a homemade raft from the west coast of South America to Polynesia. In "Tiny Toons," Plucky took on the role of Heyerdahl, attempting to prove that one could sail from the island of Yap to Salinas, California, but only using materials that one would have had on hand in the 1970s. There are 8-track tapes on the voyage. Plucky is his usual egotistical self.
The second half of "Kon Ducki" pulls back the curtain to reveal that Plucky was merely directing a staged Hollywood epic called "Kon Ducki," and the episode becomes a fake documentary about the making of it all. Plucky remains horrible and egotistical, most notably when he keeps dropping a ship's mast on his stunt duck, Hamton. The "Mango Juice" sequence never fails to elicit a laugh. This is the "Tiny Toons" metanarrative at its best.
1. How I Spent My Vacation
This may be something of a cop-out, as "How I Spent My Vacation" was a 79-minute straight-to-video movie that was released on TV in four chunks, but damn if this thing isn't a banger from start to finish. Taking place in between seasons 2 and 3, "How I Spent My Vacation" details the summertime adventures of each of the Tiny Toons. Buster and Babs start a squirt-gun fight that leads to the destruction of a dam and a riverboat adventure that takes them far away from Acme Acres. It's, in Babs' words, "Downright Twain-ian, in a Hitchcock-ian sort of way." Meanwhile, Plucky talks his way into an extended road trip to Happy World Land with Hamton and his family. The issue is that Hamton's family is square to the point of unreality, and Plucky is driven slowly mad by a trip that seems to take months.
Back in Acme Acres, Shirley the Loon (Gail Matthius) fends off the romantic advances of Fowlmouth (Rob Paulsen) and Fifi (Kath Soucie) pursuing her teen idol crush. Elmyra terrorizes every animal she sees, including a pride of lions.
1992 was a banner year for animated movies, and included the release of "Aladdin," Bill Plympton's "The Tune," Hayao Miyazaki's "Porco Rosso," Ralph Bakshi's "Cool World," and "FernGully: The Last Rainforest." "How I Spent My Vacation" fits easily into that lot, being sharp and hilarious and tighter than a drum. It's everything great about "Tiny Toons."
The 2023 reboot "Tiny Toons Looniversity" aired on the Cartoon Network in September. It seems to have escaped notice, and that's a shame.