"Meet Minerva"

One of the great lost opportunities of TV cartoons is the character of Minerva Mink from "Animaniacs." They could have done a lot with the concept of a sexy female mink (voiced by Julie Brown) who defeats her antagonists through her sex appeal; it was sort of like a Tex Avery "Red" cartoon except with the female character as the star. But the network and studio executives, fearing that the humour was too openly sexual for what was supposed to be kids' TV, put an end to the idea of giving Minerva her own series of cartoons on the show; after making only two solo cartoons, she was relegated to cameos for the rest of the series.

YouTube has her "pilot" cartoon, "Meet Minerva," written by "Animaniacs'" splendid writer-producer Sherri Stoner. (Stoner worked out the idea of the charcter with Paul Dini, and Dan Haskett is said to have designed Minerva.) The cartoon was co-directed and storyboard by probably the best storyboardist on the "Animaniacs" crew, Barry Caldwell, and animated by Jon McClenahan's crew at StarToons in Chicago; Kirk Tingblad was the director at the StarToons end, and contributors to the animation included McClenahan, Ron Fleischer and James Tucker. I wish I could point out individual animators' work -- StarToons, along with Tokyo Movie Shinsha, had some of the best animators working in TV -- but I do know there's a lot of excellent animation and timing here, and some of the biggest laughs come not from the broad wild takes but from subtler moments: the funniest scene in the cartoon is the scene near the end where Minerva's antagonist holds a conversation with himself, moving his head from one position to another each time he changes "sides" in the conversation.

But of course, it's mostly about the wild takes, crazy gags (turning into the Big Bopper? twice?) and phallic jokes. Hard to believe this ever got onto kids' afternoon TV, but I'm glad it did.