Chicken Boo
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Chicken Boo was a sketch character on the Animaniacs television series.
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[edit] Basics
A six foot tall chicken, Boo wandered through different situations and time periods assuming various human identities. He was remarkably adept at doing this, at different points becoming a ballet dancer, a dashing romantic lead, frontier hero, Confederate general, and even Santa Claus.
His success was meant to be confusing to the viewer, firstly as his "disguises" often consisted of nothing more than a jacket or fake mustache, and secondly because unlike traditional cartoon animals, Chicken Boo possessed no speech, cognitive or motor abilities better than those of an actual farm chicken. His behavior as a chicken was not subverted in his disguises to the extent that he answered questions with clucks. The character generally appeared without arms.
[edit] Sketch formula
Each sketch would find Boo in an incredible new situation, with one person immediately realizing what he was. Quickly escalating to an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like tirade, the person would appear mad and invariably say "He's a chicken, I tell you! A giant chicken!" to which everyone else would remain in disbelief. Some mishap would eventually cause Boo's disguise to fall off, inciting riot behavior from everyone he had fooled. (Occasionally the person from before would return to say "I told you he was a chicken!") This would force him to flee in face of the outrage.
Seemingly, his sketches were a postmodern commentary on the traditional anthropomorphism of animated cartoons, in which animal characters are typically treated as humans by other characters and more so by the audience. Chicken Boo stands in staunch opposition to his Warner Bros. predecessor, Foghorn Leghorn, and perhaps stands to humorously teach children about the dangers of mass ignorance. Boo would then usually have to leave the scene and remind himself that he is not meant to be in the human world. One exception to this was an episode where Boo played a department store Santa Claus. Through the usual bad luck, his disguise came off and he was literally kicked into the air. However, he was rescued by the real Santa Claus, who said that for once Chicken Boo would get a good ending.
[edit] Boo's abilities
One other side was that whenever Chicken Boo was introduced, he would be recognised as an expert in whatever field he was posing to be. Examples include 'General Boo-Regarde', where he's recognised by soldiers on both sides of the US Civil War as an accomplished, merciless general, and 'Davy Omelette', where he's a famed outdoorsman in the style of Davy Crockett. Notable in this and 'The Good, the Boo, and the Ugly' is that he displays the competence he's famed for--in both, he accomplishes the task he'd undertaken, merely to be undercut as he's stripped somehow of his disguise.
[edit] Theme and Voice
Each segment ended with the following theme song:
- Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you?
- You don't act like the other chickens do.
- You wear a disguise to look like human guys.
- But you're not a man, you're a chicken, Boo.
Boo's clucks were provided by Frank Welker.
