Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation was a fantastic watch. If you look for some of the best and most successful Direct-To-Video animated films ever made, there is a lot of Anime in those lists, quite a few DC Animated films, and then you might come across this little flick called Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, and at first, that may feel a little out of place, at least it did to me.
But this movie, when it came out back in 1992, was one of the highest-selling videos in the United States. It was a rage among kids growing up at that time in its home country. The movie has a great 7.9 rating on IMDB, which is fantastic for a direct-to-video animated film. It has an audience score of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also the first feature-length animated film to get a direct-to-video release in the USA. It has Steven Spielberg as one of its executive producers. And that was all I needed to know to give this movie a shot.
Now, I have always been familiar with the Tiny Toon characters but I never got to watch the series as it was never aired in my country. But I loved these characters because of the Tiny Toon Adventures game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which, in my humble opinion, is one of the top-tier NES games of all time.
Coming back to the movie, the plot, as the name of the movie itself would suggest, follows the Tiny Toon characters through their summer vacation once their term at Acme University ends. About five stories are being told concurrently, but the movie is a lot simpler than what that may sound like. To briefly explain the plot, one story involves Buster and Babs getting into a water pistol fight which somehow ends up in the acme acres being flooded. They both then float down the river and end up in the southern United States. Throughout the movie, they avoid getting eaten by the river’s residents and try to find their way back home.
The other major storyline, which is the most fun to watch, sees Plucky Duck joining Hamton J. Pig and his family on their trip to an amusement park named Happy World Land which is supposed to be Disney Land. Another hilarious bit involves Elmyra Duff who loses her cat Furrball and visits a nature park looking for a new kitty only to terrorize wild beasts in the process. And then there are a couple of minor but equally entertaining bits with Fifi La Fume trying to get an autograph from her favorite movie star Johnny Pew and another with Fowlmouth dragging Shirley to see Skunknophobia (a parody of the 1990 film Arachnophobia).
The plot, as you would expect from a movie like this, is simply there to support the series of gags on which the film truly thrives. If anything, the film has a very thin story, even for a kid’s movie. The gags truly make it work and help it stand out from some of the similarly budgeted and drawn works from the late 80s and early 90s.
The younger audience would not be bored with this film. It is fast-paced, the animation is energetic, and the right amount of looney! The Tiny Toon characters were, needless to say, extremely well drawn, retaining the charm of the original Looney Tunes characters. Well-drawn cartoons always inspire young kids to take up drawing or sketching, which is something that the animated shows and movies of that era did so well and Tiny Toon was no exception. The kids would get a kick out of seeing Buster and Babs going on this little adventure and evading wild creatures. They would also enjoy the Warner brother’s animation’s classic slapstick humor that is ever present in this movie. All the segments having Plucky tolerate Hamton’s family throughout their road trip is a highlight.
Just reading some of the reviews for this film by people who grew up watching it mention how it was seen by them not once but multiple times and the repeat value boils down to the fast-paced comedic ride that Tiny Toons Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation Is.
Now, the actual strength of the movie and why it is still so fondly remembered after more than three decades lies in its clever humor. There is a lot of humor in this movie that kids won’t even get but is actually targeted towards an older audience. This includes segments that parody popular culture, celebrities, and other movies. Just to list some of the highlights of the movie, there are jokes involving celebrity caricatures of David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, and Jay Leno, popular films such as Die Hard, Indiana Jones, The Little Mermaid, a fun little cameo involving Superman, which was as charming as that Superman cameo in the Road Fighter NES game. I also found Plucky reading a comic book titled “Teenage Mutant Samurai Slugs” extremely funny; that is one comic book I would love to read!
There is also a joke involving the notoriously loud THX Sound System promo which concludes with the tagline ‘the audience is now deaf’. It is these little things that make the movie. It reflects the time that it was made.
You would expect the sight gags to be great in a movie about characters that are the spiritual successors of the Looney Tunes but the terrific dialogue is what surprises you. The jokes are clever and appealing to an older audience but at the heart of it, the movie never forgets that it is made first and foremost for the kids to enjoy.
The team of writers interestingly includes Paul Dini who needs no introduction. The voice cast is great, and Cree Summer, voicing Elmyra Duff is particularly memorable. The movie was made on a budget of $350,000 which was far more than the usual budget for an episode of the series. The animation was produced by the Japanese Animation Studio TMS Entertainment, formerly known as Tokyo Movie Shinsha. The film was a huge success in terms of sales, staying in Billboard magazine’s 40 “Top Video Sales” for 16 weeks. Producer Steven Spielberg is said to have insisted on a direct-to-video release instead of a theatrical one citing that animated features are ideally suited for repeat viewing.
Watching Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation was a fun and interesting experience. Its success, both critical and commercial, is something that I found particularly fascinating and can be equated to clever writing. I guess there could have been a little bit more to the plot instead of the segmented storyline, it would have been nice to have something at stake in the story, but it is a cartoon movie that is happy being a cartoon movie. It is having fun, and so does the audience. If anything, another Tiny Toon feature-length film is long overdue.
