Ren and Stimpy was doing some wild things back in the day
Space Madness!
I'm not sure I really watched it as a kid. Loved it as a young adult. It was also really hit or miss.
I'm not even sure I'd call it a show for kids. But it's hard to top its weirdness
All kids love log!
I was about 5 years old, and every Saturday morning I just HAD to watch The California Raisin Show. It was about these raisins who were a singing group and went on adventures. All of the characters were fruits and vegetables.
I grew up with all the strange ones from the late 90's early 2000's and loved them all; Rocko's Modern Life, Cow and Chicken, Catdog, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ahh! Real Monsters
I still have weird dreams of stuff I saw watching Courage. That live action human head guy inhabits my nightmares.
What is the live action human head
The spirit of the harvest moon. I couldn't think of his name. Just the image is embedded in my memory.
Aaahh!!! Real Monsters
The 90s had lots of weird cartoons, but this one was one of the more wholesome of the word ones
The one episode that I firmly remember is when one of them strikes it rich by finding a bag of toenail clippings.
While doing some research to determine if I hallucinated an Angry Beavers episode, I discovered that that show also features toenail clippings. Season 4 episode 8, Blacktop Beavers... "The beavers race a trucker (who is revealed to be Truckee in the end) to the world's largest pile of toenail clippings."
Just thought this was funny.
Probably Ren & Stimpy, if we're talking actual weirdness. I also liked KABLAM! a fair bit. My all-time favorite weird show (albeit not a cartoon) was Pee-Wee's Playhouse. I was raided on that shit. Had his suit and tie and everything.
KABLAM was the shit. Prometheus and Bob have always been some of my favorite short skits.
Melt Man! With the power to... MELT!
Damn I loved Action League Now.
Invader Zim
The Dark Harvest episode
YEEEEAAHHHHH ULTRA PEEPI
Aeon Flux
Was going to go with that and The Maxx.
The Head from MTV back in the day
Are you talking about Max Headroom? My dad and I watched that together. We loved it!
No this was just called the head
The Head https://g.co/kgs/WTzvXVQ
I'm gonna look this up and watch it. It looks wild.
You def should it is very wild.
Ugly Americans was pretty wild, but Drawn Together was a whole different level of wacky.
oh my god i completely forgot about Drawn Together. Most memorable moment is the Pikachu ripoff tearing apart the Betty Boop ripoff lmfao
Fun times.
Not sure if it counts as a cartoon, but 'The Oblongs' still lives rent-free in my head after seeing it on Adult Swim years and years ago.
I don't know why, but I think of the Oblongs every time I see Steven Miller's head. Like Milo grew up to be him or something lol
It counts as a cartoon, but I sure hope you weren't watching it "as a kid."
I think I was watching it when I was like 11? But I was also watching shit like Archer, South Park, and Futurama at that point as well haha.
When I was really young, there were some fairy tale cartoons on super early in the morning.
They were broadcast in very short segments, about 5 or 15 minutes each, but the animation was amazing.
Many decades later, I learned these were Soviet productions from the 1950s and 60s, and a lot of the human motions were rotoscoped, i.e. traced from actual moving human models.
The Frog Princess, dubbed in English (more in the YT user's account): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY6sI3muOjc
The Snow Queen, dubbed in English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaF6oqHZ-GM
The Fisherman and the Fish, in Russian with subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHuSqNuv9Ng
So beautifully done… You opened a door to me.
Snorks were pretty weird. Like aqua smurfs sort of.
The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy
Animaniacs
Invader Zim
Ed Edd n Eddy
The Mighty Bee (this came out while i was a teenager but felt like a fever dream)
Angry Beavers
The opening theme still pops in my head every once in a while.
Like right now.
That one episode where one of their rich cousins or something has a pocket dimension literally in their pocket is the one that always stuck with me. While trying to figure out if I just hallucinated that, I found the list of episodes on Wikipedia, each with a one-line description of the plot, and they are just so funny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Angry_Beavers_episodes
"Norb lives his dream of being a Lipizzaner stallion."
I can't find anything similar to what I'm thinking of, so maybe I just hallucinated it?
There were so many odd ones, but it was a great show. I remember there being an episode where Norbert became really good at plastic surgery and went into a competition where he had to turn his subject into a photo-realistic platypus and even as a kid I was like “this show is unhinged”.
GKR, pronouned Geeker, sometimes got up extra early on Saturdays to catch it. It was about a super powerful robot guy who was absolutely insane, voiced by Billy West. Best friends with a sentient T Rex and a mercenary cyborg lady with a gun arm. Totally oddball, kind of cyberpunk, I'm sure it was garbage
I'm surprised I don't see Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo on here.
My brother and I used to watch it on on-demand when my parents were out of the house in the early 2000's. Absolute insanity. I tried to re-watch it a couple years back for nostalgia, and my more matured brain just couldn't comprehend it... That was before I started smoking weed, maybe I should give it another shot, it might make more sense if I'm zonked out of my gourd.
Courage the Cowardly Dog
For me it's Mr Bogus! I'm not sure how well I remember it but I loved catching it on some channel 30 or so years ago. Claymation and good stuff.
Ovide and the Gang - we had this one on tape and it was a touch of streaming without commercials decades before that happened. Animation was OK for its time but still had a lot of errors even a kid will notice. Something about it as a kid felt a little weird but the setting was refreshing.
Hammy Hamster - Grandma taped this one for us. If you like making dioramas and want your pet hamster, guinea pig, and other critters to be TV stars this laid the groundwork. Not a cartoon but it fits right in with them.
Wapos Bay - is also worth a mention. It's a more modern stop motion take on the Cree community in Saskatchewan. It has a unique brand of humor and that "way up north" feel to the setting and aboriginal community dynamics which makes for a good change of pace. It was almost like a cleaned up family friendly South Park.
All of these shows are Canadian in origin if that explains anything. Wapos Bay I didn't see until later in life but usually would drop everything if my dad told me it was on. First two I haven't thought of in so long I had to google them to make sure they were real and not my imagination. Truly weird TV shows are always worth the time because there's never anything like them.
Sport Billy had a weird premise. Monchhichi was another weird one. Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea was really trippy.
Rockadooodle deserves a mention.
Vacalactica.
Ah! We seem to have an MTV Latino watcher from the 90s in da house!
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities