Saturday Morning Cartoons (Part 1)

When I was a kid, I watched cartoons. I think most of us did, right? Talking to people these days, it seems a lot of people agree with me; kid's tv these days is worse. The focus has moved from cartoons to formulaic live action stuff. What cartoons there are are generally not great. But this post (or soon to be series of posts) aren't to complain about the state of kid's television today. It's to remember what it used to be like, when I was growing up in the nineties and early part of the two thousands. This first post is going to concentrate on the cartoons from Cartoon Network, specifically the ones under the 'Cartoon Cartoon' brand. This was Cartoon Network's own brand of original cartoons.

It consisted of fifteen different cartoons, however some of these I'm not at all familiar with. It may be because they were after my time, or perhaps they weren't aired here in the UK. Or maybe I just missed them. So the following Cartoon Cartoons will NOT be included in my list: Sheep in the Big City, Time Squad, Whatever Happened to...Robot Jones?, and Codename: Kids Next Door. further, I'm only familiar with The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which was originally part of a show called Grim & Evil, I'm not familiar with the Evil Con Carne part of the show. So of the fifteen, that leaves me with nine which I'm actually familiar with from when I was a youngling. So I will be ranking these nine in order of my favourite, from least to most!

Nine - Ed, Edd n Eddy

I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this one. I know this show has a lot of fans, but it's one that I was not only never able to get into, but which I really disliked. The ugly character designs, the weird constantly moving lines of the animation style, the grating character voices, the incredibly dumb main characters (I get that one of them was supposed to be intelligent, but anybody who goes along with the other two characters and their schemes is a far cry from being accepted into MENSA in my book). This show has its fans, but it's about as far from my tastes as you can get. I'm also one of the few people with a strong dislike for Spongebob based on very similar reasons as my dislike for this show. Either way, this show gets the bottom spot on my list.

Eight - Mike, Lu and Og

This show nearly got put into the "I never watched this" list, before I watched the opening theme, and vaguely remembered it. It follows the character Mike, a girl who as part of an exchange program goes to live on a remote island populated by stereotypical tribe-like natives. I honestly don't remember much about this show at all. The complete lack of impression it made on me puts it this low on the list, simply because I can't think of anything to make it rank higher. If you're a fan of this show, then sorry, but it obviously didn't grab me in any particular way.

Seven - I Am Weasel

This show revolved around the character I. R. Baboon's attempts to usurp and upstage the popular, intelligent, all around good guy I. M. Weasel. Weasel is smart, generous, talented. Baboon is not. The shows themself weren't terrible at all, but the concept got old fairly quickly, and they all felt a bit samey. The theme song manages to get stuck in my head with surprising ease though.

Six - Cow and Chicken

Mama had a chicken, mama had a cow, Dad was proud, he didn't care how. That line from the opening song is about as much of a plot as you get in this show. I Am Weasel was in fact a spin-off from this show, and I feel the main show was a bit funnier than I Am Weasel. I wasn't a huge fan, though I do appreciate the surreal nature, as it's something I like in some other cartoons I really enjoy. The show followed the adventures of Cow and Chicken, a brother and sister duo, and most often dealt with them running foul of The Red Guy, a demon like character which may or may not be a Satan analogue. I liked some of the weird humour in this show, and some of the characters were pretty funny, like The Red Guy, or their cousin Boneless Chicken (a chicken with no bones...why? Who knows, the show was just like that). Jokes like the parents literally only existing from the waist down, making fun of the tendency of parents to appear like that in many cartoons, or Cow having a superhero alter-ego, who for some reason was fluent in Spanish made little sense, but they got a laugh out of me. Still, overall, this ranks pretty low on my list, partially because I feel a lot of the humour fell kind of flat, and partially because I felt other shows did the surreal humour thing better, stuff like Ren and Stimpy, or Freakazoid!

Five - The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

In this show, the Grim Reaper loses a bet over the life of a hamster, and as a result is forced to be the best friend of two children 'forever and ever'. The children are the incredibly unintelligent Billy (his IQ is given as -5, he was outperformed in the IQ test by a shovel) and the cynical and domineering Mandy. It's an interesting concept for a show, and allows them to explore odd and supernatural stories. I feel like this show might be higher on the list, but it came about towards the tail end of my days of regularly watching cartoons, and as such, I don't have such a sense of nostalgia for it. Nonetheless, it was still pretty enjoyable.

Four - Dexter's Lab

The story of a diminutive boy genius and his hyperactive sister, who screws up his plans at every juncture. Dexter's Lab is one of the first shows to spring to mind when you think of Cartoon Network (and it was in fact the first of the Cartoon Cartoons). The boy who has a vast laboratory hidden under the house, and the mad science he gets up to there; it's a simple concept, but it left a lot of scope for plots, be they ones revolving around mad science, the brother sister dynamic, or Dexter's rival boy scientist, the evil Mandark. It was a clever show, and generally funny, as well as usually full of interesting visuals. To this day, one thing bugs me though...why DID Dexter have an accent, when the rest of his family did not?

Three - Johnny Bravo

So, given my earlier proclamation of disliking shows where the main characters are dumb, why does this rank so highly? Well, there are always exceptions to a rule, and I think the performance given to Johnny transcends my usual dislike. Jeff Bennett gave a wonderful performance, a sort of Elvis Presley type voice, but with a slight hint of child-like naivety. This great portrayal, combined with some clever writing made this a really funny show. Fun fact, it's also a show that Seth McFarlane mainly worked on, though he did work on Dexter's Lab, Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel too. Seth later went on to create Family Guy. Butch Hartman, who also worked on this, went on to create Fairly Odd-Parents. So there was some decent talent behind this. Whatever the reason, this show was funny enough to get into the top three, and should celebrate; come on, do the monkey!

Two - The Powerpuff Girls

 Number two on this list, and probably one some people were hoping would be number one. The show follows the adventures of the Powerpuff Girls; a trio of superpowered young girls created by Professor Utonium, who kept the Townsville safe from various villains. It had clever writing, a great cast of voice actors, and was entertaining for both kids and adults. This show had genuinely great humour. The show was full of pop culture references and sly humour, and the cast of characters were entertaining and creative. My particular favourites were the villains Mojo Jojo and Him. It's also probably the first show I watched to feature one of my favourite voice actors; the lovely Tara Strong as Bubbles. A fun fact is that the show was developed from a short called Whoopass Stew! and the girls were originally going to be called the Whoopass Girls.The original short can still be viewed on youtube. Now, on to number one! Those who know the Cartoon Cartoons will, by process of elimination, know what it is, if not, I'm gonna tell you!

One - Courage the Cowardly Dog

This is it, the top dog (pun intended). Courage was a strange show. It had a small cast, was creepy as hell, and unlike pretty much everything on this list, it wasn't really a show that was intended to be funny. But it gets the top spot because it was really unique. It centred on the titular Courage, who lived with his owners; the sweet and kind Muriel and her curmudgeonly husband Eustace. The show generally followed a monster of the week format, but the creatures they came across were usually genuinely creepy and weird. The show had an odd pacing, and the strangeness of it all probably put people off too. But I loved the atmosphere, as well as the way it played with B-Movie style plots and tropes. If you can hunt it down, in some form, I definitely recommend watching it, if you haven't already.

Hopefully my list awoke some nostalgic memories in you, or at least interested you somewhat. If not, then congrats for reading this far. Hopefully I'll be covering other cartoons in future posts, so keep your eyes peeled!