The whole thing refers to the cover of Howard Stern's book, Miss America. (EC)Drawn by: Omar Aranda and Scott McRae
Wakko has been made up as a beauty queen for a Mess America poster...well, as much as can be done without surgery. He's got on a slinky blue dress with straps falling off the shoulders, a long brunette wig, lipstick, mascara, red andblue eye shadow - and his red baseball cap. A rather striking image, all told.
Dot and Yakko are standing in front of the poster. Yakko is very unhappy with the results, and Dot says, apologetically, "Hey, a Mary Kaye gift certificate can only go so far!"
Across the top is a caption: "Believe it or not, this is our Christmas special!"
The whole thing refers to the cover of Howard Stern's book, Miss America. (EC)
It's Christmas Eve on a major New York City radio show. The host is talking to a caller who's complaining of feeling lonely in his nursing home, and not being very helpful, to the amusement of his staff. The next caller wants to air his Christmas wish, and they put him on.
It's Wakko, who's the only one of the Warners who gets up early enough to hear the show. The host has a hard time hearing him over his sibs' snoring, and offers him a Christmas present: his very own radio show if he can get there in an hour - which he thinks is impossible. The Warners pop right in, being toons, and the host decides to give him his shot. As Yakko and Dot raise the usual mayhem, Wakko starts in on the callers. The first one wants to know what Wakko looks for in a woman (his reply: "Bones are a good start"); the second, a guy named Bob Cratchet, wants to complain about his boss.
Right about now, the host decides he's had enough and starts to chase the Warners out. Yakko appears as an FCC investigator, and scares the host badly. Wakko pretends to be a Hollywood executive and tells the host to come in for a screen test. That's Dot's cue to fix the host's hair, her way. Naturally, that's not his way, and he gets even angrier, but gets interrupted before he can exact revenge by Wakko, who comes in dressed in a radiation suit and convinces the host to climb inside a radiation-proof barrel. He eventually figures it out, and starts chasing Wakko around the station, past a dial that changes the station's format temporarily, then outside.
They start up the station's tower, with the host getting ever closer and more menacing. Just as he grabs Wakko, Santa flies by in his sleigh, and gives the host the biggest and best present of its kind - a really huge lump of coal. Wakko climbs down to meet his sibs, who've gotten him his present, a talent agent who wants to sign him to a big radio, bok, and movie deal, but he decides to he would rather remain in Burbank with Yakko and Dot.
Although we only see his first name, the host is obviously Howard Stern, king of obnoxious radio. The staff follow his real staff: the reporter is Robin Quivers, the producer ("fa-la-Larry") is Gary "Baba Booey" Dell'Abate, and the others are the kind of folks that hang around Stern's show. This isn't the first time that Stern's appeared in the Animaniacs universe, although it is the first he's been shown accurately. In the cartoon Morning Malaise, in episode 66, he and Robin were shown as birds. The idea was similar, except that it was Yakko who was the main protagonist, and the action didn't include Robin much, and the other staff none at all. As a result, the two stories have different flavors. They share one feature, though: Stern is thoroughly beaten by the end. (Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing this happen in real life; Stern's about as obnoxious as they come, and I have no idea why he garners the audiences he does...JM) George Bailey and the 59th Street Bridge refer to the Christmas movie It's a Wonderful Life. The inside of the watertower has no definitive representation except that it's always obviously the inside of a water tower. There are about as many different representations through the cartoon series as there have been cartoons showing it. The one we see here is as good as any of them. Among the Warners' stuff in their tower is a Taz doll and a Pinky and the Brain comic book. That's a pretty good drawing of George Takei as Sulu on page 5. Cratchet refers to the classic Dickens story A Christmas Carol. Yakko as Callahan refers to Clint Eastwood's policeman character, "Dirty Harry" Callahan. The hairdo and sneer are vintage Eastwood, as well. "Do you feel lucky?" is a trademark Dirty Harry line. The FCC bit refers to Stern's constant troubles with the FCC, who has repeatedly cited him and the stations that carry his program for content they deem unsuitable. The Warners borrown Thaddeus Plotz' name for the gag about Stern's screen test. Wakko's outfit, as Stern says he looks like Liberace, is the usual one the pianist wore for concerts. There was always a candleabra like the one shown on the piano during the concert, as well.
Aranda still comes up with screwy expressions for the Warners, though he's slowly learning how they should look most of the time. Good examples of both can be found on page 3: Dot, in the second panel, looks downright weird - both her eye and lower lip are subtly, but distinctly, strange; Wakko's happy face at the bottom left is perfect. Wakko's radio station wouldn't be on 100.0 MHz; the 100 kHz part is always odd in the US, so it'd be either 99.9 or 100.1. Sulu didn't become a commander until after the change to the uniforms shown in the movie Star Trek II. His uniform is shown correctly as the lieutenant he was during the original series. Wakko's shirt is a strange green at the top left of page 6. It's correct at the bottom right of the page. Dot's speech balloon at the bottom left of page 9 appears to have been re-lettered by someone besides Mapa. It's a good thing there wasn't any radiation in that room: if there had been, Wakko's tail would have been contaminated with everything else, since it's hanging out of the suit. Wakko would probably say "Faboo!" instead of "Awesome!" on page 11. Radio towers in snowstorms are notorious for collecting lots of ice. There should have been quite a bit more shown.Yakko and Dot are rushing Wakko to the hospital. Wakko has lost his sense of humor, and can't appreciate jokes any more; his sibs' usual stream of puns and wisecracks is causing him to feel sick. They arrive at the emergency room, and check in, only to find that the wait is quite long.
The Warners aren't known for their patience. When a doctor calls for two residents in the ER, they take that as their opportunity to speed things up a bit, by lending a hand. They don't let the fact that they don't know much about medicine get in the way. Cracking puns the whole time, Yakko puts patients in stitches with jokes instead of a needle and thread; Dot goes overboard treating a few minor injuries; and Yakko goes on to perform an operation with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel.
Wakko, meanwhile, gets tired of waiting, too, and goes off to see if he can make someone laugh. Unfortunately for this plan, he picks the morgue, and concludes from his failure that he's lost his funny forever. While he's doing that, Yakko tries to convince the nurse that Wakko needs to be treated immediately, by showing her X-rays enhanced by Dot. The ruse doesn't work, and Yakko drags Wakko off to a conference to try to get some atention. There, he demonstrates that Wakko's gag reflex is working, but he doesn't think it's funny.
Dot tracks the doctor down in the physician's lounge, and gives him her best cute act, ending with a really big smooshy kiss. The doctor agrees to do anything at all as long as she doesn't do that again, and they all go off to take a series of tests. At the end of what turns out to be a standard battery of psychiatric tests, the doctor's convinced they're all certifiably insane, and he tries to get them confined in the psychiatric wing. Instead, they run into an experimental lab, where the Warners use toon abilities to dress the doctor up as a nurse. Everyone else is revolted by the sight, but Wakko thinks it's genuinely funny, and so he's cured.
The principal characters in the emergency room are all taken from the TV series ER. In particular, the doctor is George Clooney. The Surgeon General's warning in the first panel is singularly accurate. There are as many puns here as any of Gordon Bressack and Charlie Howell's stories. Yakko's "Origami-Armani?" on page 19 refers to Italian menswear designer Giorgio Armani. In the waiting room are Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart (who have speaking lines), Gomez and Puggsley Addams (from the TV series The Addams Family), and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. A rhinoplasty has nothing to do with rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?); it's an operation on the nose. The "fork in the road" map joke is a reference to a standard gag by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Bananas in Pajamas is a cartoon series aimed at young kids. Yakko's inkblot joke refers to Clooney's selection to play Batman in the upcoming fourth film. The registration on pages 19 and 27 is off, leading to the fuzzy effects of those pages. Aranda tends to draw the Warners' snouts as pointing straight up immediately adjacent to their faces. This is most pronounced in profile, but can also be seen in direct views; it leads to their snouts looking oversized and bulbous, instead of tapering with only a slight bulge. On the other hand, his depiction of the dejected Wakko is on-target. wakko's ears are shown in X-ray as having bones along the edges. This is at variance with the few other X-ray shots of the Warners, which all show just a few bones down the center. It also doesn't match what one would expect to see. Also, Wakko's hat would only show up very indistinctly on X-ray, if at all. The brothers magically jump from beside the podium, to behind it, to beside it again, in the space of one action. In the last panel of page 28, Yakko's eyes have highlights from different directions. They're highlights, not pupils, and so should all reflect the same light - and so should appear in approximately the same position in each eye and the nose. Dot's face appears fairly chubby in the third panel on page 29. The highlight in Yakko's nose is colored brown, the same as the desk he's seated in front of, in the fourth panel on page 30.