Histeria!

Our Review

Kids’ WB put a history sketch show in Animaniacs’ old Sunday slot and dared elementary schools to keep up. Histeria! is Tom Ruegger’s love letter to the forgotten footnotes of the past: Paul Revere’s ride told as a radio broadcast, the birth of democracy interrupted by a game show, Susan B. Anthony, Louis Armstrong, and a Roman senator named Bobby Mack. The jokes are dense, musical, and pitched at everyone older than nine.

It flopped on air and became something better: a time capsule of late 90s Warners animation with the studio’s best voice bench doing chorus work. LaMarche, Paulsen, Tress MacNeille, and Frank Welker play hundreds of historical figures, and the songs by Tom Ruegger and Richard Stone are on par with the Animaniacs soundtrack, which is the highest compliment the genre allows. The history is loose but the hooks are real, and plenty of adults discovered actual figures here first.

It ran two seasons and 40 episodes, and the streaming homes are thin, which makes hunting it down part of the fun. For anyone who liked Animaniacs’ educational segments and wanted the whole show to be that.

Our score: 7/10. The most underserved cartoon Warner Bros. Animation made.