How They Got Technicolor

“Stay here, Caress,” Her Auntie Dot said as they waited around in what was supposed to be a psychiatrist’s office. They wanted to visit someone called Scratchy. “Buttons? Hey, you got this?”

The doggy next to her raised his ear. Usually Caress went with them everywhere, but since the reboot of Animaniacs, she had to stay away at points. Buttons had arrived for the show too, but he didn’t have many parts, so he looked for other work.

He must have been desperate to choose ‘moving Warner babysitter’. Papaya said when he actually showed up for the interview, that he was lucky. No one else showed up, and Caress was easy to watch.

Caress didn’t get into a lot of trouble compared to Auntie Dot, her Uncle Wakko and Papaya. She just sat quietly in her seat, moving her legs up and down.

“Oh.”

Caress heard a voice near her. Buttons didn’t growl though, so he must be fine. He had on a white trenchcoat and thick glasses. He didn’t have much hair. She waved to be polite.

“Caress. Right?” he asked her. “Here.” He reached in his pocket and gave her a piece of candy. “Be good, yah? I will talk to your . . .” He paused. “The Warners.”

Caress watched him walk away. She picked a funny looking article that was on the table. It looked old, but it had a picture of her family in black and white with no color.

Interesting. It was a script? It didn’t read like a newspaper. No, it didn’t read like a script either. It was like a piece of fiction.

___

1953: Warner Brothers Studio

“Feast your eyes on the one, the only, cartoon maker!” A scientist fixed his glasses just right. “No longer do we have to spend countless money on artist’s pay to have them create.” He pointed to the hole. “It pierces and scans the data of one cartoon. Then it uses the premade gallons of ink inside to make cartoons like the scanned one, with a pinch of dissimilarity to keep them from being clones of each other. For every trait, there could be ten variations of a trait, so for a whole single cartoon, you could make thousands of clones.” He wiggled his fingers in excitement. “In essence, it is the latest perfect invention. 50/50 male and female, with males being fixed. No relationships or kids, the cheapest ink around, just money money money. Only what the studio wants, the studio gets.” Oh yes, he knew what the studio wanted to hear.

“This will revolutionize the cartoon industry!” The studio chairman held onto his vest proudly. The studio had just bought the invention and was so far pleased with it. “First sound, now color, and now duplicating control. We can pay one animator for the price of a hundred animators.”

“The colors are already inserted as well with sound.” The first scientist waved his arm proudly. “The greatest invention known, this prototype will do wonders to the cartoon genres. Nothing can-” The scientist gasped. “Oh no, they’ve escaped!” He pointed to the top of the machine.

Yakko, Wakko and Dot all smiled down at the scientists. Dot held a sign in her hand that read ‘Hi there!-‘ She turned the sign around for the rest. ‘Did you miss me?’

Wakko bent down and looked at the machine, clearly curious about it.

“No. No, no, no. Kiddie cartoons come down, please?” The scientist whined but it was too late. Wakko had shoved his finger in the hole.

Wakko pulled out his finger and started to cry, silently, but enough that the ground was getting covered in tears. He held up a sign with his uninjured hand. ‘OWIE!’

“Stop the machine,” the studio chairman yelled as he pulled his hair out. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

“I can’t, it cannot be stopped without destroying it once a cartoon has been scanned.” The scientist stared at the numbers on the computer data. “Ten already created. 20 already created. 40 already, 80 already, 160, 240, 480, 960, 1920, 3840! There are too many copies!”

“Smash the machine before they are created!” The studio chairman yelled. Cartoons that looked and acted like the warners were not needed in the studio at all!

“They already are, they’re trapped and squished.” The scientist pulled some levers on them. “I already stopped it as soon as I could, it just takes a second to actually stop. In a second. Just a second. Got it.” The machine stopped. He read the final number. “30,000.”

“30,000 cartoons are stuck in there?” The chairman asked as he stared at the machine.

Yakko, Wakko and Dot jumped down, all holding up one sign. ‘Tight fit.’

“You! You, you, you escaped from the water tower again?!” The chairman was pissed. “The greatest invention will now massacre my poor city. Thirty thousand new cartoons like Wakko Warner!”

‘I have lots of brothers and sisters.’ Wakko smiled as he held up his sign.

‘Correction.’ Yakko flipped his sign over. ‘Not your ink, they scanned you.’

‘You’ve got cartoons just like you.’ Dot held up her sign. ‘Just as cool!’

“Do something, do anything. Thirty thousand cartoons cannot stay in there for long,” The chairman yelled.

The scientist punched in some numbers. “Okay.” He moved away from his device and waved goodbye to it. “I placed a failsafe in it, just in case. It’s off to outer space. Goodbye my precious prototype, the father of future creations.”

“The father of nothing. This never existed and will never exist again,” the chairman said as the machine took off like a rocket out of the room. “There are no extra variable copies of Wakko Warner. The studio knows nothing.”

Yakko, Wakko and Dot all held up a huge sign together. ‘Ahem?’

“Loose end. Dammit.” The chairman covered his eyes. “What do you want to keep quiet about this, Warners?”

Dot held up her sign. ‘I want a colored pink skirt, a yellow flower, and a cute red nose!’

Wakko held up his sign. ‘I want to be able to burp and sing!’

Yakko held up two signs. He raised the left one higher. ‘I want to be able to talk.’ He raised the right one higher. ‘So that I can finally express’. He flipped the signs over. He raised the left one higher. ‘my true knowledge of the English language.’ He raised the right one higher. ‘as well as other languages and’ He flipped his signs again. He raised the left one higher. ‘to share what I know faster instead of constantly.’ He raised the right one higher. ‘flipping signs.’

The silent black and white cartoons wanted color and sound? Only selected famous cartoons that were black and white were given those abilities now. Then again, the studio could not afford in this day and age for any bad news to come out about them. Creating thirty thousand essentially ‘warners’ and blasting them off to somewhere in space? No, that did not sound good. “Fine,” the chairman agreed. “Afterwards, you are going back to the tower. Don’t say or flip a sign at anyone telling them what happened or you’ll regret it.”

The guys just held up one big sign. ‘The Warner Brothers in Technicolor!’

‘and the Warner Sister’ Dot had written on her own sign.

—

What a strange thing. Did someone write that? Her family never said how they actually did get color. She looked up and saw her Uncle Wakko. “Did you bribe the studio into giving you color?”

“Who, us? Color?” Uncle Wakko seemed confused. He reached into his wacky sack, flung some stuff out of it, and brought out a sheet with the words ‘People I bribed’ on it. “They are on the list, several times, but not about color.” He dropped it back into his wacky sack. “Anyhow? It looks like less babysitters for you again.”

“Can you even call it canceled when we were lucky to even get a season?” Auntie Dot said as she came out of the office. “Eh. Show biz. It was fun while it lasted.”

“Barely had Scratchy in it, was really hoping we’d get more with him,” Papaya said as he came out as well.

“He didn’t seem broken up about it,” Uncle Wakko said.

“On the inside, he must have been crying. He must have missed us soo much,” Papaya said. “He was our special friend.”

“He can’t miss us, he sees us every other Tuesday for sessions,” Auntie Dot joked. “Hey, what you got there, Caress?”

Caress looked at the little article of fiction she had. “It’s about you.” She said the title. “How You Got Into Technicolor.”

“Huh.” Her Auntie Dot took it, and then started laughing. “What is this, an unfinished comedy? It’s not written in script form.”

“Oh, hey.” Uncle Wakko showed Auntie Dot his phone. “They still wouldn’t agree to Caress being in the show.”

“Oh, just cover all the ends now that it’s canceled,” Auntie Dot said. “Well, I still preferred the older show. This one just basically moved a lot of the real Animaniacs on the show out. No Rita, no Runt, no Goodfeathers, no nothing except Pinky and The Brain. I like those guys but really, just them?”

“Yeah. Everyone got one run on role,” Uncle Wakko stated. “Some of them. Others didn’t even want to show up for such a tiny part and got deepfaked. Really weird.”

“Oh, I don’t even want to get into deepfakes or AI generation stuff,” Auntie Dot insisted. “Let’s head back.” She placed the small fiction back down.

Caress grabbed it again. “What happened to the copies?”

“I don’t know,” Auntie Dot said. “You’d have to find the original writer to know what the heck happened in that silly story.”

Caress looked around the front. She looked on the back. She looked at the first page. She looked at the last page. “There’s no name.”

“An anonymous writer. That’s new. Everyone wants credit in Burbank.” Auntie Dot looked harder, page by page. “Hey, Yakko, here’s something for you to investigate.”

“Ooh.” Papyaya spun around and appeared in a detective uniform. He grabbed a magnifying glass and held it over each page, muttering insensibly before he closed it. “No author. No publishing company. Heavy weighted paper, but no stitched spine. Everything typed along with printed graphic design on front, but no accolades. Found in a dingy dirty psychiatrist’s offerings I suspect?”

Caress nodded. “It was in front of me on the table, Papaya.”

“Yeah.” He tossed it down. “Wannabe writer that forgot the name for when they got ‘accidentally found’.”

“Oh, it’s the Warners!”

Someone randomly said their name. That happened. They would probably leave.

“What is that though?”

These random people were pointing at her. Caress didn’t like talking to strangers much.

“She is the littlest of the Warners,” her Auntie Dot said as she picked her up and rubbed her nose. “The last drawing and treasure of our creator.”

“She’s an actual Warner?” the random person said. “She wasn’t on the show.”

“This show barely let anyone on,” Uncle Wakko said to them. “They just wanted the originals.”

“She was drawn in 2018 by Lon Borax. The last and best thing he ever drew, yes she is.” Her Auntie Dot rubbed her nose. “She’s almost as cute as me.”

“She stays still though.”

“He was really old by the time he drew her,” Papaya answered. “He passed on shortly after, and then we discovered her. Yours is cute too. Guessing not younger sister?”

So the random person was someone they knew from their old show.

“I thought I heard her say something about you being an ‘Auntie’?” they asked Auntie Dot.

“Well? She’s so small, we just sort of went by Uncle and Aunt. We don’t have the same kind of sibling rivalry with her,” Auntie Dot said. “Wakko is called Uncle. Yakko is called Papaya.”

“Papaya?”

“Don’t ask why, Randy Beaman Kid,” Papaya said. “It’s just always been this way.”

“Okay. Just. That’s kind of weird?” he pointed out. “Anyhow, come on Sweetie.”

“Bye Randy Beaman Kid!” Uncle Wakko waved. “Bye, daughter of Randy Beaman Kid!”

Caress was put down by her Auntie Dot, and she was swept up by Papaya. He usually held her the most. Her Aunt and Uncle were great, but before she was watched by the doggy, she was usually watched mainly by Papaya.

He’d play her silly games. He’d color with her. He’d talk with her. He’d hold her the most. Whenever she had bad dreams or wasn’t feeling well, it was Papaya that she went to.

“Well, Buttons.” Papaya reached in his pocket. “We are done with babysitting.” He held out some money. The doggy took it, saluted, and strolled off.

Caress smiled as Papaya placed her on top of his shoulders. That was more normal.

“The show was great, but I’m glad it’s over,” Papaya said. “We can all go back home where we belong without any camera crews in the way anymore.”

Yeah. The show they were always working on was supposed to be over now. No more late nights or early morning routines. “We get to just hang out again?”

“Yep.” He booped her nose. “You bet. At least until the fans demand another reboot. I don’t think it’ll be for a little while.”

Caress showed him her booklet. “Can I keep this?”

“That writing mystery?” He picked up the strange fiction article from her, waved it a couple of times, and then went over to the nurse lady. “Hellooooo Nurse! I got a question. Can we have this?”

Hello Nurse looked toward the fictional article he waved around. “Um? I will have to ask the doctor.”

“Eh, ask him later, and put it on my tab,” Papaya said as he gave it back to Caress. “Let’s go home.”

Caress held the strange paper book.

While they were walking out, Caress turned and saw the friend they had called Scratchy come out of the room. He still had such a strange look to him.