Pinky and the Brain

Brain(voiced by Maurice LaMarche)-The Brain bears a resemblance to Orson Welles, particularly in his vocal characteristics. LaMarche won an Annie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Male Performer in an Animated Television Program Production for this role in 1998. Series producer Tom Ruegger initially based Brain on a caricature of WB animation staffer Tom Minton, a long-time cartoonist. The Welles connection comes from LaMarche, who is a big fan of the actor/director. LaMarche describes Brain's voice as "65% Orson Welles, 35% Vincent Price". Brain is highly intelligent and develops Rube Goldberg plans for global domination. His tail is bent like a staircase (which he often uses to pick the lock of the cage), and his head is large and wide, supposedly housing his abnormally large brain. He appears to be coldly unemotional and speaks in a deadpan manner. Nevertheless, Brain has a very subtle sense of humor, and has even fallen in love once, with Billie (voiced by Tress MacNeille), an initially rather dippy girl mouse with a Queens accent (perhaps based on the Citizen Kane character Susan Alexander, in another Welles connection). Later, Billie became even more brilliant than Brain, but showed no interest in either him or the idea of planetary conquest. Intellectually, Brain sees his inevitable rise to power as beneficial to the world rather than mere megalomania. In one episode, when Brain finds himself under the influence of hypnosis by a psychologist he had planned to manipulate for one of his schemes, it is revealed that Brain lived in a can with his parents when he was young. The researchers took him from his home, and the last he saw of it was a picture of the world on the side of the can. The psychologist speculates that Brain's hunger to take over the world stems from needing to get his world back.

The characteristics of Brain would lead one to believe that he is more suited to be an antagonist rather than a protagonist (in fact, he was a major boss character in both the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo versions of the Animaniacs video game), 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. Such a thing is typical of an anti-hero, which many consider Brain to be. The absurdity of a normally insignificant creature hungering for world dominance adds to the comical effect, and one senses a Napoleon complex within him, despite the gravitas of his Wellesian diction — highlighted when other characters inadvertently become as smart as or smarter than he. Unfortunately for the Brain, his schemes are inevitably doomed to failure by reason of one or more of a few common mishaps: Pinky doing something idiotic to ruin the plan, Brain gravely under/overestimating the masses' intelligence, or, simply, bad luck. In many of Brain's plans, he plainly says to one of the people he is trying to fool that he is actually a genetically altered lab mouse bent on world domination, but the person usually takes it as a joke. That habit has been the reason one of his plans failed. A possible reason he keeps doing this is that he is testing the humans' intelligence. Brain is more compassionate than many give him credit for: he rarely seeks to do anybody direct harm, and in many episodes he rescues Pinky and other mice from being killed, and defends the world from those who seek world domination for their own evil ends, and Brain has stated that he wanted to take over the world in order to make it a better place, after saving the world from his evil arch-rival, Snowball the Hamster.

Brain's similarity to Orson Welles was made explicit in the Animaniacs episode "Yes, Always", which was based upon an outtake from one of Welles' television commercials, colloquially known as Frozen Peas, in which he ranted about the poor quality of the script. This cartoon was described by writer Peter Hastings as "a $250,000 inside joke": LaMarche used excerpts from it as sound check material, and Hastings took it to its logical conclusion. Strengthening the Welles connection was an episode in which Brain took on the mind-clouding powers of a radio character called "The Fog": a parody of The Shadow, a popular radio character for which Welles once provided the voice. Other episodes alluding to Welles included an episode entitled "The Third Mouse," a parody of The Third Man in which the Brain played the part of Welles' character Harry Lime (with Pinky as Holly Martins), and an episode, "Battle for the Planet," in which Brain, inspired by Welles' infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the hysteria it provoked, stages an alien invasion on television, believing that this will cause humanity to erupt in mass panic, allowing him to seize power.