I’m dusting off this old pile of words in commemoration on the recent announcement that the Warner brothers — and the Warner sister, of course — are on their way back. This was originally posted in my former online home.

When I was a little kid, watching Saturday cartoons with the focused strategy of a battle-hardened general, I was certain that I’d never give up on the things I loved. Yes, I’d grow up, but I’d never outgrow the happy anarchy of these colorful adventures that I pumped into my brain as often as I could. I didn’t follow through on that conviction very well, but there have definitely been times when I’ve been drawn to material that doesn’t fit properly into my age bracket. One of those times was the fall after my college graduation, when I took advantage of new idle hours to become crazily devoted to the second product of the high-powered collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros. Animation.

They’d previously put their stamps of creative ownership on Tiny Toon Adventures, which reimagined fairly familiar characters from the Looney Tunes stable as spirited youths. For their second outing, the creators opted for something more original, but in the same spirit as the wildly inventive cartoons that were part of the enviable heritage of Warner Bros. animation. The result was Animaniacs, presented in syndication as a daily half-hour show collecting shorts featuring an array of new characters. The main drivers of the show were the Warner siblings, Yakko, Wakko and Dot. They lived in the water tower on the Warner Bros. studio lot and got into varied misadventures, at least when they weren’t relating the contents of a world atlas in ludicrously catchy fashion.

There were other segments, including fiercely cantankerous Slappy Squirrel, the splendid pairing of Rita and Runt and, speaking directly to my movie geek heart, the amazing sight of a Martin Scorsese masterpiece rendered in cartoon pigeon form. Undoubtedly the crowning achievement of the show was the ingenious creation Pinky and the Brain, a pair of lab mice bent on world domination. Besides their usual antics, the characters allowed room for brilliantly off-kilter bits, such as spoof of an obscure incident involving The Brain’s voicesake Orson Welles.

Since my crew of friends was especially adept at peppering movie, music and TV quotes into our daily conversations, there were all sorts of bits from Animaniacs that made their way into our shared vocabulary, including Mindy’s standard valediction or the Warner Brothers’ helpless shout when they spotted a gorgeous woman. To this day, I can’t hear Dana Delany’s name without immediately imagining Yakko Warner waggling his eyebrows lasciviously while dropping her name in one of the variations of their opening theme.

So maybe I didn’t keep watching cartoons relentless, but at least I watched the right ones.