Pinky and the Brain: January 1997
Cover
Drawn by: Walter Carzon and Mike DeCarlo
A hellish scene: The Brain is Satan, with horns, beard, pointed tail (still crooked), cape, pitchfork, and evil grin, surrounded in flames. Pinky is an angel, with robe, wings, and halo, looking as angelic as he can manage, rising from some puffy white clouds in a beam of light, unaffected by the flames.
Credits
Synopsis
We join the mice in the lab on a stormy night. The storm is scaring Pinky quite badly. He tries to hide, and distract himself with a book, but to no avail. He asks the Brain to tell him a story, and he agrees, since Pinky's antics are keeping him from getting any work done.
It's early in the sixteenth century. The famous scholar and magician, Dr. Faust, wants to take over the world so he can further his quest for ultimate knowledge. His assistant, Pinky, messes up his current experiment, and they take a walk to clear their heads. They encounter an old friend who's suddenly not so old any more, and the explanation leads them to a magic show, put on by a certain Mr. Mephistopheles. After watching him pull rabbits - and Pinky - out of his hat, Dr. Faust approaches him to see if he can get some of his knowledge. Mephistopheles beats him to the punch, though, and offers him unlimited knowledge if he'll just sign a contract. Faust quickly agrees, then discovers his soul is the price...but he shrugs it off.
Faust returns home, and has a revelation on the way of how to conquer the world. He quickly introduces inventions to make the people's lives easier and more productive, following that with financing great libraries and research centers, and earns the people's undying love. They reward him by crowning him emperor of the world. Emperor Faust turns the world into a utopia, ridding it of war, famine, and disease, and finally looks back on his life, well satisfied.
As the end of his life approaches, Faust is confronted by Mephistopheles, who demands his soul, as agreed. Faust demands a trial to examine the deal, as the contract stipulated; Mephistopheles agrees, and picks the judge and jury, as the contract allows him. He convenes the Courtroom of the Darned, with some of the most evil people in history - past, present, and future - as jury, and baseball maniac and bad guy Ty Cobb as judge. He calls Pinky, and then Faust, as witnesses, in order to prove that Faust did indeed sign the contract. Faust readily admits that he did, and when it's his turn to present his case, he calls Mephistopheles to the stand. He argues that Mephistopheles did not uphold his end of the bargain, on the grounds that if he did, he would have found a loophole in the contract.
This argument leads Mephistopheles to let Faust off the hook. In retaliation, he takes away everything he had given Faust: the glory, the greatness, the world domination, and even the memories of it all. Faust and Pinky return to their former lives, unaware of what they might have achieved.
Thus, the story ends, and with it the night and the storm. Pinky curls up to sleep, wondering what they will do tomorrow night...
Did You Notice...
The story follows the version of the Faust legend in Steven Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, which introduced the idea of the Courtroom of the Damned, at least for the bones of the story. Of course, Webster didn't try to take over the world, for good or evil reasons.- The framing story is written in the style of Edgar Allen Poe's classic The Raven. There's a picture of Poe on the wall behind Pinky as the storm scares him.
- Larry, Curly, and Moe are better known as The Three Stooges. That's them on the TV.
- The rabbits from the hat are Bugs Bunny, Buster and Babs Bunny (from Tiny Toon Adventures, in their first cameo in the Animaniacs or Pinky and the Brain comics, as Babs points out), and finally the Energizer Bunny (who keeps going, and going, and going, in a famous series of TV commercials).
- The inventions are all staples of TV mail-order advertising: the Ronco Vegamatic, the Ginsu Knives, and the Popeil Pocket Fisherman. The Buttmaster refers to the Thighmaster exercise machine. Faust is playing with a Rubik's Cube.
- The game at the bottom right of page 9 is Milton Bradley's Battleship; the dialogue refers to the TV commercial promoting the game.
- King Henry's comment about almost marrying a naked mouse refers back to The 7th Wife of Henry the 8th, in Pinky and the Brain issue 3, September 1996.
- Faithful readers of this Kompendium know that Robert Graff is the editor of the Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain comics. His representation in this story is recognizable, but he's not anywhere near that chubby; his build is more like Vanilla Ice's is drawn here. He's wearing a tie with the Warners on it. (I WANT THAT TIE!!! Warner Bros. Consumer Products, are you listening?...then again, they're probably not: just visit any WBSS and look for Warners merchandise...JM)
- The Klingon phrase is a bit mangled by being printed in upper case; Roman lettering of Klingon uses upper and lower case of some letters to represent different sounds, most notably q and Q. It should be shown as "toH! nuqDaq 'oH QI'yaH Qe'-vetlh?", and means, officially, "So, where's the roach-infested mess hall?". (Costanza, almost alone among the letterers used for these series, does do lower case; why he didn't here is a mystery.) However, it's safe to assume that the question is intended a bit more forcefully, as the translation above is far too polite for a Klingon, especially ones as obviously angry as the ones shown in the panel. Thanks to the folks at the Klingon Language Institute MUSH for the translation.
- Ty Cobb was a baseball player in the early 1900s. He was a great player, but had a notorious temper, and was generally not a very nice guy.
Technical nits
Pinky's feet have just one pad in a couple of panels.- Bugs Bunny appears just a little too skinny, and Babs has two pads on one foot and three on the other.
- It's spelled "Hippocratic oath"...and that would have made the joke in the next panel, about hippos, even funnier.
- The dialogue between the mice in the third panel of page 6 seems a bit disjointed.
- Pinky magically appears in green tights while Faust is falling down the stairs.
- Crowley's first name was spelled Aleister.
- Graff's tie changes between his first appearance and the next page, where he's shown sitting behind Faust. (Maybe someone swiped the nice one...JM)
Credits
Synopsis
At the dawn of time, a leader stands above a crowd proclaiming his prowess. The crowd's approval is interrupted by the Brain, who tries to push him aside, only to be laughed at. Thus confronted with his first failure, he decides that he must be more devious in his approach to taking over the world.
His first plan, to send a big wheel rolling over the humans, is quickly thwarted when they claim ownership of the wheel. As Pinky tries to lift the Brain's depression with a juggling act, a burning log falls on a nearby dinosaur's foot...and that hits the Brain over the head with an idea: he'll discover fire, then give a Tyrannosaurus Rex a hotfoot, making him chase away the humans. Pinky points out that they don't have fire, but the Brain knows where they can get some, and so they set out.
Their route takes them first across a lake. They use a log to float across, but have to abandon it in a hurry when Pinky hits a crocodile with a rock. They walk for a while on the other shore, finally stopping for food. As the Brain is eating, Pinky reaches for some fruit, but grabs the leg of a dragonfly instead. It quickly carries them to the top of the mountain where they expect to find fire.
As they head for the pool of molten lava from which they will get their fire, though, they're stopped by a horrible, frightening monster of a dinosaur: Baloney. He hugs them so tightly that they are squirted right past the pool...but their log falls in and is ignited. They recover it and quickly return home. Instead of being grateful for their discovery, though, the humans are completely unimpressed: while the mice were gone, they discovered the lighter.
Did You Notice...
- The title is a reference to the movie Clan of the Cave Bear. I can't find anyone who is willing to admit having seen it, though, and so can't say how well, or if, the rest of the story follows the movie.
- Though there's no real dialogue - indeed, very few words at all - all of the standard elements of a Pinky and the brain story are present and recognizable: the "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?", Pinky's objection that the plan can't work, and the Brain's gratuitous (or is that "necessary?...JM) bopping Pinky over the head.
- The bone flying, end over end, and then hitting Pinky on the head is a reference to a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (AM)
- Pinky sees a planet and a couple of space stations, as well as stars, when he's hit on the head.
- Chicken Boo is being chased across the landscape in front of the wheel the Brain's carving, and the guy painting the legend on the boulder with the credits is a caricature of Carzon.
- The herbivorous dinosaurs all look like Dino, the family pet in The Flintstones.
- The dragonfly looks an awful lot like Evinrude, the dragonfly in the Disney movie The Rescuers. (AM)
- Baloney - an obvious caricature of the insipid children's character Barney - has been seen before in two Animaniacs cartoons: Baloney and Kids, in episode 61, and Please Please Please Get a Life Foundation, in episode 73. (The latter is a wicked, and wickedly funny, commentary on fans such as myself, based on two documents similar to this Kompendium on the TV series...JM)
- The lighter is a greatly oversized disposable butane lighter, such as the ones made under the Cricket brand name.
Technical nits
- Pinky's nose is colored backwards in the third panel on page 24.
- The fruit the mice eat on page 27 looks more like pine cones.
Jay Maynard, jmaynard@phoenix.net
Last updated 28 January 1997