At a public appearance, the writer of this song, Randy Rogel,
said that the end of each chorus had been changed. If I recall
correctly from the report of this appearance that someone posted
on alt.tv.animaniacs years ago when it happened, instead of
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and you're not
the first chorus ended:
You might think that you're essential
Try inconsequential
It's a big universe and you're not.
This was substantiated by a radio appearance that Rob Paulsen
(Yakko) made on the Alex Bennett Show in San Francisco,
when he sang those lines as an example of the kind
of songs that they sing on Animaniacs.
I hope I'll get myself to dig out the old tapes and record an MP3 of that at some point.
The writer of this song, Randy Rogel, has submitted the following more detail about changes made to the song:
I originally wrote the following lyrics to the bridge:
It's a great big universe and everyone's a part of it,
And no one knows just where's the end or start of it,
We all live here together,
It's our home forever, (...and now the punch line)
It's a Small World After All.
I of course worked the melody to come out on that last line to the famed Disneyland song. I then followed it with the Twilight Zone theme. Business Affairs was afraid we'd get sued, so I had to change it to what it ultimately became.
There was another big change as well. The original second verse went like this:
And we're part of a vast interplanetary system with everyone revolving 'round the sun,
With Mercury in between us, and after that comes Venus,
And still the solar system's just begun.
Past the Earth on towards the stars, where we find the planet Mars,
Which is over fifty-million miles away,
And orbiting in pattern, are Jupiter and Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune, Pluto so we say, ...all together!
It's a great big universe...
I had been out of town when I wrote this song, and when I got back, Paul Rugg (another one of our writers) had already written a ditty for the planets with a gag at the end about Uranus, so we didn't want to repeat the planets. That's why the second verse is what it is.