Flavio and Marita
Flavio and Marita, the "Hip
Hippos", are characters which were introduced by
Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs an
animated TV cartoon series from
Warner Bros..
They form an extravagant and obscenely wealthy hippo couple who live in the jungle yet speak with a
Barcelona accent. Flavio, the husband, was voiced similarly to
Ricardo Montalban. Bored of their pastoral life, they came to the big
city and settled atop a
skyscraper in a lavish
penthouse suite.
In the series, an overexuberant
naturalist named
Geena Embryo — who strongly resembled
Nancy Kulp in
khaki — strove to keep the Hip Hippos from moving to the city by masquerading as a real estate agent and showing them undesirable location after undesirable location...but they liked them all. Geena would incur
injury after injury in her quest to preserve and observe the magnificent beasts in both the shorts she costarred in.
At other times, the Hippos
parodied the
opera La bohème, the
shirtless hunk
advertisement for
Coca-Cola, and the show
American Gladiators.
Brain even attempted once to use the Hippos in his scheme to rule the world by masquerading as their
baby. (He was actually masquerading as the
Rockefeller family's baby; the stork goofed up.)
The pair had relatively few starring roles, but were frequent guests on other shorts, often fulfilling some form of sight gag poking fun at their immense nature (such as stepping on smaller characters). They did not even appear in the
Animaniacs comic book until issue #38.
Flavio was voiced by
Frank Welker and Marita was voiced by
Tress MacNeille in the English version of the show and by
Yutaka Shimaka in the Japanese version.