Ralph the Guard
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Ralph T. Guard was a fictional character in the Warner Bros. animated television series Animaniacs. He was a fat, bald unshaven stupid man who was the security guard at The Warner Brothers Studio. He was voiced by Frank Welker. In the Japanese version of the show, he was voiced by Fumihiko Tachiki.
His main task on the show was to re-capture Yakko, Wakko, and Dot a.k.a. "The Warner Brothers (and Sister)", and lock them back in the water tower. He was the main one responsible for this, though others who tried to re-capture the Warners were Dr. Otto Scratchansniff, Hello Nurse and "some movie stars".
Ralph was an archetypal idiot, he tended to start every sentence with "Duh..." and ended a lot of words with a superfluous 's'- e.g "yous" instead of 'you', "there they ares" instead of 'there they are' "The CEOs" instead of 'the CEO' etc. His grammar was very poor, one time a teacher Ms. Flamiel drew an F on his head after he told her he "ain't never seen yous before." He loved to eat donuts and suck lollypops, and could be quite sweet and childlike. He spent much of his time sleeping on the job.
Interestingly, prior to Animaniacs, Ralph appeared occasionally on Tiny Toon Adventures (to be more exact, "Hollywood Plucky", "The Return of Batduck", and "Buster and Babs Go Hawaiian"). There, he was a nameless security guard whom Plucky Duck and Hamton or Buster and Babs have trouble sneaking past (although he welcomes Roger Rabbit into Steven Spielberg's studio). He also makes a brief cameo at the beginning of the direct-to-video movie How I Spent My Vacation. Although he was never referred to by name (the closing credits even refer to him as simply "Guard"), Ralph looks, sounds, and acts just like he would on Animaniacs. It should be noted that this version seems to be marginally smarter than his Animaniacs counterpart, outsmarting the Tiny Toons with each attempt to sneak into the studio.
A similar character with the same name appeared in a few other episodes of Tiny Toons. He appeared alongside the others in two separate "naming songs" where they all named each memember of the Acme Looniversity gang, and Ralph came at the end, to which the others said "Ralph? Who's Ralph?". He looked a lot less cuddly than he did in Animaniacs--sloppy, fat--albeit without a double-chin--having bad teeth and uncombed hair, dumb and with the same voice. The proto-Ralph strongly resembled director Ralph Bakshi.
In Animaniacs, Ralph would often chasing after the Warners with a net, rather like one used by a dog catcher, in order to stop them from wreaking havoc and return them to the water tower they were locked up in. In typical cartoon chaser/chasee conventions he never caught them, and if he came close they'd always find some way to outsmart him or escape. Very few actual episodes were structured round this idea though, mainly it was within episodes of the other segments, or in between episodes, where the Warners would perform a brief sketch (such as the "Wheel of Morality" segments performed at the end of an episode) and it would end with them running away from Ralph.
At the end of most episodes, the Warners would run back up to their water tower and Ralph would chase them, though they always got there in time and an anvil would land on Ralph or something equally comically violent would befall him while the Warners would go back into their tower. Why he continued to chase them when they were going back to their water tower, which presumably is where he would have taken them back to if he had caught them, is strange, but it is perhaps worth remembering that he was incredibly stupid and single-minded.
In one Christmas special episode, A Christmas Plotz (first broadcast 6th December 1993), the (fictional) CEO of Warner Brothers Thaddeus Plotz sacked Ralph because it was too expensive for the studio to pay him to try and capture the Warners when he always failed to do so. The episode was a parody of the Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol and the Warners appeared as the three ghosts to persuade him to not be so cruel to Ralph, especially at Christmas. Wakko, as The Ghost of Christmas Past showed home videos of five-year-old Plotz taking his lawyers to Father Christmas at a store to demand, among other things, a white horse with a brown tail- "Not a pony- a HORSE, got it?" and overthrowing his own father as CEO of Warner Brothers because he believed he was too old to run the company.
With Dot, who was the Ghost of Christmas Present we first got to see out first glimpse of Ralph's homelife.
He lived in a trailerpark with his wife and son. His wife was not named other than "Ralph's wife" or "Mrs. Ralph". She was basically the female version of him, looking and sounding similar, and with similar mannerisms of speech- "Duh... dinner time! We couldn't afford a turkey this years after your father got fireds". Unsurprisingly she differed from Ralph in appearance by having no five-o-clock shadow and with curly blonde hair in a beehive style. She seemed to like to cook, making fruitcake and "delicious turkey jello" for Christmas. She appeared a couple of times again as a background character, usually as Ralph's date to any parties he might attend.
Ralph's son was unnamed, though Plotz called him "Ralph Junior". He only appeared in A Christmas Plotz. He was very very different from his parents, even saying to himself he must be adopted. He had brown hair and glasses, and was quite bitter and violent, pulling the head off his teddy bear after learning that Plotz had fired his father and vowing revenge.
Yakko, as the Ghost of Christmas Future took Plotz to the future where Ralph's son was the new CEO of Warner Brothers. He was now middle-aged, had grown a little bald, potbellied, and even more ruthless and grougy than Plotz was. Plotz himself had been demoted to Ralph's old job as the security guard. When he was told off for not being able to catch the Warners he replied they were too fast for him, Ralph's son fired him in exactly the same way Plotz had fired his father (and how Plotz had fired his OWN father) with the words; "You're finished, you failed, you're fired! Merry Christmas!"
Upset by this Plotz ravished tons of gifts on Ralph's family, and tried to be extra nice to Ralph's son, offering to buy him a pony. The boy replied "I want a horse!"
[edit] See also
- Animaniacs
- Tiny Toon Adventures
- Tiny Toons petition, started in December, 2005
- [[1]] Animaniacs Petition
