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Slappy Squirrel |
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This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2007) |
Slappy Squirrel (voiced by Sherri Stoner) is a character in the Warner Brothers cartoon show Animaniacs. She is characterised as a bitter, cranky old woman. She is an anthropomorphic gray squirrel, usually wearing a green hat decorated with a drooping white gardenia and carrying a pink purse and green umbrella that she occasionally uses to hit other characters. Hurray For Slappy reveals Slappy to be in her 80s, as Mary Heartless (a parody of Entertainment Tonight's Mary Hart) refers to Slappy as "octogenarian". She lives in a hollow tree with her nephew Skippy Squirrel despite their polar personalities, who loves to hear her tell stories about her former days of stardom. While Skippy represents a cuter style of cartoon characters, Slappy was and is a more chaotic and old-school character, enjoying violence for comedy's sake and resentful of milquetoast, censor-influenced modern cartoons.
She was first seen in Animaniacs' third episode, Slappy Goes Walnuts, originally aired on September 15, 1993, which also introduced an extract of a purely fictitious Looney Tunes cartoon featuring herself and suggesting that she was a retired Looney Tunes character who crossed over into Animaniacs. In several episodes, there are shots of fictitious Looney Tunes cartoons portraying a younger Slappy, under the pseudonym Slappy the Slap-Happy Squirrel, reference to the MGM cartoon character "Screwy" Squirrel.
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Her former co-star and arch-enemy Walter Wolf harbors a grudge against her, both for defeating him repeatedly (and violently) in the past and for becoming a big star, albeit now a faded one. He has also enlisted the help of her other ex-nemeses, including Sid the Squid and Beanie the Brain-Dead Bison. Much like Slappy, all these characters show signs of age and senility.
In addition to Walter's occasional attempts at revenge, Slappy must sometimes endure more mundane annoyances such as a cloyingly-perky new neighbor or Skippy's emotional traumas, for instance after he watches Bumbie (a parody of Bambi). In this case she tells Skippy that Bumbie's mother was played by an old friend of hers, the cartoon doe Vina Walleen, who, like herself, Walter Wolf et al, is now much older. She manages to convince Skippy that Vina played Bumbie's mother by taking him to Vina's home and asking her to morph into the character. But Vina cannot maintain the morph for long, and on returning complains that she can't do it as well as she used to.
Slappy easily outsmarts whatever foes she faces (who are almost universally dimwitted as well as decrepit) and exacts revenge with exaggerated cartoon violence, usually whilst reminiscing about her "classic" (but fictional) film appearances of her youth. She often will remark how her enemies remind her of various famous cartoon characters when they were very young. Her catchphrase "Now that’s comedy!" is usually delivered after visiting seemingly grave physical injury and humiliation upon her opponents.
In many ways, Slappy's one-liners are similar to those made famous by comedienne Phyllis Diller. Slappy would often poke fun at her age and ailing health, comments which would inevitably go over Skippy's head but which her Geritol-generation cohorts would find hilarious.
Slappy is also well known for the dialog Who's on Stage?, a 2 minute Vaudevillesque wit-round routine, based on the legendary sketch Who's on First?, in Episode 59 (Woodstock), in which she tries to determine which band is performing on stage ("The Band", "Who" or "Yes") which of course ends with Roger Daltrey inviting the pair on stage.
In a later episode, "No Face Like Home", Slappy had been combining her disdain for new slapstick-free cartoons as well as her dislike for cartoons that were mostly peppered with environmentalist messages and "pretty female animals who had no slaptick", and briefly looked at a cartoon where an attractive female bird recites to a villian why he ought not cut down trees, to which Slappy said not only could that girl not act, she had no anvils or other traits Slappy was famous for. Slappy also succumbs to Hollywood's craze with plastic surgery by attempting to have herself transformed artificially back into her youthful self and get back into cartoons "to make them the way they should be, with anvils and dynamite!"
The music played during the title card of her segments is an excerpt from Antonín Dvořák's "Humoresque".
Excluding cameos and brief appearances in ensembles, Slappy has appeared in the following Animaniacs episodes:
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