- Quads
Duckman, though that was not for kids.
Ren and Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life both had stuff that was bizarre and only allowed in a kid’s show because it was over their heads.
Batman TAS and Gargoyles both had some heavy shit. The latter also had a guy die by having fire erupt from behind his eyeballs, and a scene where a surgeon explains a gunshot wound in visceral detail. God I love that show.
The Last Unicorn. Runner up, The Rats of Nymn.
The original sonic cartoon is like a chili dog induced fever dream
You mean Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog? I love Robotnik in that show!
Yeah that’s the one, with the surreal desert backgrounds like krazy kat comics
I’ll have to take a look at Krazy Kat
Will check out
I was a kid in the 90’s. It’d probably be easier to list the normalest cartoons. Like Doug.
Freakazoid, possibly. Or Toxic Avenger. Though the latter is more insane that they turned the original concept into something for kids in the first place.
Rocko’s Modern Life was a helluva ride
I was amazed at the shit they were allowed to play in the after school block on Nick/CN sometimes. Rocco might take the cake with the
masterbationmilking episodeIt wasn’t originally designed for kids, and it really shows with the pilot episode. It had swearing in it and most of the jokes would go over kids’ heads. Certainly went over mine until I re-watched it as an adult.
Just stare into Really Really Big Man’s Nipples of the Future.
The crazy stuff on Liquid Television
Aeon Flux is still super weird 30 years later
Zap Comix #3
I’m still not sure whether “Angela Anaconda” was real or a collective fever dream.
“hey what if we made a cartoon entirely about the revenge fantasies of a 12 year old girl?”
“Sounds great, make it papercraft too, just to make it extra unsettling”
“How about everything is in color except the peoples skin.”
“Brilliant.”
Amazing show!
The first one that comes to mind is this one from probably the early 90s. From what I remember it was a group of kids and one of them is sick or something and the other kids try to save him? In the end they each sacrifice a year of their life so that the sick friend can live. I wanna say Steven Spielberg was a producer.
There was also that one crossover movie where a bunch of cartoon characters from whatever was popular in the 80s did an anti-drug movie.
cow and chicken
One of the shows that taught me English. And Dexter’s Lab taught me French.
Omelette du fromage
That’s all you can say!
Oh, man, when I was a kid around 1990 I was in France (maybe? Pretty sure it was somewhere in Europe), and they had this subtitled cartoon (I didn’t know either language) that “starred” a villain named something like Amin Tumani (“I’m in to money”, but made into a name) that was a stereotypical middle easterner. And to add to the crazy I’m 99.9% sure he died at the end of every episode.
If anyone knows anything about this cartoon, LMK.
Iznogoud maybe…?
The Brave Little Toaster. It’s a bit endearing until the LSD trip goes bad.
The Last Unicorn
Ren and Stimpy
Beavis and Butthead
Love B&B, still traumatized by the Ghost Fart from R&S
The old Nintendo cartoons, things like the Mario Super Show and the classic Sonic show. If you thought live action Mario and Luigi arguing with fungus people was weird, sometimes the people behind the cartoons would get so lazy that they wouldn’t fully draw some of the frames or throw in a lazy scenario for the main characters like “what if Yoshi had a secret family he was hiding off-screen”. Of note, people often ask me “why are you so relatively soft on the Zelda CDi games” and the answer relates to the deal of effort.
If puppet shows count, objectively it’s Mr. Meaty.
That moment when Shigeru Miyamoto made Mario because he couldn’t get the rights to Popeye, yet DiC has the power to make Inspector Gadget a part of Mario canon. Chad move.