Today we have an episode of Pinky and the Brain – Brain of the Future. This was a hoot.
Brain plans to take over the world using a “Cosmos-Politan” quiz.
Pinky manages to ruin this plan almost immediately, but then the two of them are visited by a strange craft, piloted by Pinky and The Brain from the future. They’ve come to tell Pinky and the Brain how they can use their time ship to travel to the year 2 billion AD, collect a world domination kit, and return back to this moment in time. This is a beautiful example of the bootstrap paradox of time travel, one of my favourites.
The Time Warp effect looks like it was produced with AI.
Pinky manages to mess up the destination, and their first visit is 3502AD. Bill Clinton is still president. He’s negotiating a ceasefire with Canada. And the timeship is mistaken for a missile, sparking a nuclear war.
The war has the effect of evolving cockroaches into intelligent beings.
When they arrive in the year 2,000,000,000 the Earth is ruled by the Queen of the Cockroaches, who sounds a lot like Zsa Zsa Gabor. I’m guessing this might be a reference to Queen of Outer Space, which would be a niche reference even in 1997 when this was made.
They destroy the queen’s statue and are thrown in jail, where they meet themselves from a different timeline. “Before traveling to the future, we accidentally took a detour to the Year 37 AD, and in order to escape, we had to sneak across Caligula’s banquet table disguised as fruit.”
Our pair are brought before the queen, and manage to steal her world domination kit, and then find a fleet of time ships.
But it turns out there’s even more of them trying to escape.
But they make it back to their own time, and send their past selves off as required. But Pinky left the World Domination kit in the time ship, so they have to abandon that plan. Still, at least there’s plenty of them to make a new plan.
Media Centre Description: Cartoon chaos with the anarchic duo. The future Pinky and the Brain travel back in time to give their present-dwelling counterparts a book on how to take over the world.
BBC Genome: BBC TWO Wednesday 30 August 2006 08:25
After this, there’s a trailer for Roar. Then there’s the start of an episode of Smart, and it’s the first episode of the series in which they introduced Susan. So she was an addition. I’m assuming at the end of the series, they had a caption that said “Susan died on the way back to her home planet”.
VHiStory 
ITVX really should think about adding “Pinky and the Brain” and/or the new “Animaniacs” (or classic “Animaniacs”). But considering ITV remains unforgiven in this household (population: me) for their handling of “ReBoot” and “Superman: The Animated Series” I’m not holding my breath.