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The two are genetically enhanced lab mice who reside in a cage in the Acme Labs research facility. Each week sees Brain come up with a new plan for the two (led by him) to take over the world, which ultimately ends in failure. In common with many other Animaniacs shorts, many episodes are in some way a parody of something else - usually a film.
The Brain bears a resemblance to Orson Welles, especially in voice (voiced by Maurice LaMarche). He is highly intelligent and develops Rube Goldbergian plans for global domination. His tail is bent, like a staircase, and his head is large and wide, supposedly housing his abnormally large brain. He is coldly emotional and speaks in a deadpan manner. Nevertheless, Brain has a very subtle sense of humor, and has even fallen in love once, with Billie, a rather dippy girl mouse with a Queens accent. Intellectually, Brain sees his inevitable rise to power as beneficial to improving the world rather than being pure egotism.
The characteristics of the Brain would lead one to believe that he is more suited to be an antagonist rather than a protagonist, but the series tends to present him as a quixotic fellow striving for greatness against the odds, evoking sympathy from the audience and causing viewers to like him, despite his seemingly evil plans for world domination. Unfortunately for him, his schemes are always doomed to failure at the hands of one or more of several common mistakes: Pinky does something dumb to queer the deal, or Brain gravely under/overestimates the masses' intelligence.
The Brain's similarity to Orson Welles was emphasized in a famous episode entitled "Yes, Always" which was based upon a real-life out-take from one of Welles' television commercials, colloquially known as Frozen Peas, in which the actor-director ranted about the poor quality of the script.
Pinky (voiced by Rob Paulsen) is another genetically modified mouse who shares the same cage at Acme Labs but is substantially less bright. He speaks with a heavy accent, possibly Australian or cockney English (the actor that voiced Pinky was a fan of Monty Python). He frequently says nonsenseNonsense is an utterance or written text in what appears to be a human language or other symbolic system, that does not in fact carry any identifiable meaning. Distinguishing sense from nonsense While Emily Dickinson wrote that: Much madness is divinest S interjections like "Narf", "Zort" and "Poit". Although also an albino lab mouseFor the computer peripheral, see computer mouse. A mouse is a mammal that belongs to one of numerous species of small rodents in the genus Mus and various related genera of the family Muridae. Mus musculus, the common house mouse (or laboratory mouse) is like the Brain, he has a straighter tail and a severe overbite. Pinky is more open-minded than the Brain - perhaps excessively so given that his off-and-on again girlfriend is a horseThis article discusses ungulate mammals. For other meanings of horse see Horse (disambiguation). The Horse Equus caballus is a large ungulate mammal, one of the seven modern species of the genus Equus''. It has long played an important role in transportat and he thinks a spool of thread is his little sister - and generally friendlier. His parents are also nimrods; perhaps it's genetic.