[…]

THE ANIMATOR: Animaniacs will not make sense to them now. It will make the world make sense to them later.

[Silence, but for EXEC #1’s barely-breathed ‘narf’]

THE ANIMATOR: In the past there were no divisions between children’s and adult entertainment. Everyone sat ’round the kerosene lamp reading The Leatherstocking Tales and everyone at the trading post made the same puns. But in our PG-13 age, who’s going to introduce your daughter to essential Americana, if not the Godpidgeon?

EXEC #2: I mean, maybe she doesn’t need to know about organized crime just yet?

THE ANIMATOR: Cultural literacy is an Always food, my friend.

EXEC #2: You’re saying that ten years from now, a young person will watch The Godfather or read Freud for the first time and realize that the Viennese shrink archetype in their minds was actually from Animaniacs all along? And the mumbling mafia don and the plot of Les Miserables and the fall of the Tsars? That the show will act as a sort of contextual membrane through which kids absorb quintessential images that will one day render direct source material more accessible, and that the cultural déjà vu they experience when they encounter said material will recur throughout their adult lives?