‘Arrow’s Stephen Amell Wants ‘Pinky and the Brain’ for Cartoon Crossover

The CW’s long-running series Supernatural is getting its very own animated crossover with Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo next week, and while there’s no cartoon adventures planned for the network’s DC Comics-inspired superhero show, Arrow, series star Stephen Amell already knows what animated series he’d like Arrow to crossover with.

Fan site Green Arrow TV asked on Twitter if Arrow were to ever get a crossover with an animated series, who would Amell want to see Team Arrow team up with and the answer was a little surprising: Pinky and the Brain.

We can kind of see some places where an Arrow/Pinky and the Brain crossover event would work. Oliver Queen/Green Arrow and his team often deal with threats to Star City that could have global implications and genetically enhanced lab mice with global domination plans aren’t that much weirder than Damien Darhk’s magic. However, Arrow is a show that takes itself a little more seriously, something that we’ve definitely seen even when Green Arrow shows up elsewhere in the Arrowverse (we’re specifically thinking about the “Crisis on Earth-X” crossover where a grumpy Oliver has to remind The Flash and Supergirl that “superspeed; I don’t have it.”) It’s hard to imagine an animated Team Arrow dealing with Pinky and the Brain.

But Amell’s Pinky and the Brain suggestion was in response to a question about a team up, not who Team Arrow would fight so that would be an even stranger crossover. If you’re not familiar, Pinky and the Brain was an animated series from Amblin Television and Warner Bros. Animation and is a spinoff of the original Animaniacs. As we noted above, the titular characters are genetically enhanced laboratory mice living in a cage in the Acme Labs research facility. Brain is, as you might have guessed, the “brains” of the pair and is always scheming. Pinky is the good-natured mouse in the pairing, but he’s also not particularly bright. Each episode, Brain devises a new plan to “try and take over the world” which inevitably fails — usually due to Brain’s hubris, Pinky’s lack of intelligence, or some combination of the two. Considering that the mice are more the type of characters Team Arrow would need to stop, there’s no telling what an honest-to-goodness team up would look like.

As for what Team Arrow — both of them — are dealing with this season, while there aren’t any cartoon mice involved there are plenty of “rats”. The season’s real big bad Ricardo Diaz (Kirk Acevedo) has got his fingers in various facets of Star City, including its city government and law enforcement, priming Star City for a takeover — and a takedown of Green Arrow.

Arrow airs Thursdays at 9/8c on The CW.