Animaniacs

When Steven Spielberg puts his monicker on a cartoon, you kind of know that you’re not going to be watching Scooby Doo. So when Spielberg presented Animaniacs for the first time, the world paid attention. And with good reason, since this is the best kids cartoon for about three decades. Smart, bitingly funny, topical and never boring, the characters combine slapstick humor with intellectual humor, spoofs with pratfalls and have the audience invariably keeled over with laughter. There’s Wakko, Yakko and Dot Warner, the WB creations considered too "zany" to be allowed out of their water tower by the studio. Then there are perennial wannabe world controllers, Pinky and the Brain, a pair of mice determined to rule the world from their science lab cages. Bobby, Pesto and Squit are part of a group of gangster pigeons who worship Martin Scorsese. It goes on and on. This isn’t Tom and Jerry stuff, it’s where cartoons should have evolved to, rather than becoming poorly drawn rush jobs, cranked out in third world countries with celebrity voices slapped over the top. If you’ve never watched Animaniacs, give it a crack, no matter what your age. You’ll sincerely laugh. You’ll laugh out loud. It’s that good.