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.
Zap Comix #3
The crazy stuff on Liquid Television
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"
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.
The Last Unicorn
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..?
Adolar'e Fantastical Adventures
An old Hungarian cartoon about a boy who hides an inflatable rocket in his violin case. He uses it to fly to strange planets like a two dimensional one. Most vivid image I have in my mind is how the rocket stretches when it approaches light speed.
The Brave Little Toaster. It's a bit endearing until the LSD trip goes bad.
Captain Condom
Watership Down.
Was visiting relatives and we rented movies from a tiny video store that didn't have a lot of options or kids, so we got that and Crocodile Dundee.
Dundee was fun. The bunnies were less so.
My husband is still scarred by that one.
Watership Down.
Ren and Stimpy
Beavis and Butthead
Love B&B, still traumatized by the Ghost Fart from R&S
Do Saturday Night Live skits count?
The Ambiguously Gay Duo
I'll allow it
I was 12 and just getting into Anime, fresh off seeing Akira and Ninja scroll and hungry for more, I was not ready for Wicked City.
When I was like, 2? My parents were like "Hey! What's this new cartoon? Let's take the kid to the drive-in!"
Fritz the Cat:
In my mid-teens, after Saturday Night Live they showed Fantastic Planet on Night Flight. That was an experience.
I watched that on acid... Wow what an experience. Highly recommend
Check out Gandahar. Anyone who thinks Star Trek has the most messed up time travel plotlines needs to watch this.
Vacalactica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF7tKWzkzi4
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.
Ugh Probably Teens Titans GO: Its episodes just go from Fart Jokes to how to pay Taxes.
The most hauntingly memorable was a weird mid-century Donald Duck piece of math propaganda. We watched it in school.
Donald Duck in MathMagic Land. Not scary, but odd.
i loved that. should do a whole series through calculus.
What was the message it was trying to propagate?
I think they were just trying to promote math. I always thought about it later in life as I tried to drunkenly calculate pool angles at the bar.
"Dammit - Donald tried to explain this when I was 10! Why can't I remember the details?"
“The great mouse detective” had a fight scene at the end that freaked me out as a kid.
I saw a lot of Christian propaganda cartoons.
I remember there was a whole series where kids traveled through time to watch "historical" events.
What do you think of Veggie Tales? Actually wasnt mad imo
I think I was older when it came out so I thought it was lame, pushing annoying.
The Point!
From Wikipedia: The Point! is a fable that tells the story of a boy named Oblio, the only round-headed person in the Pointed Village, where by law everyone and everything must have a point. Nilsson explained his inspiration for The Point!: "I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses [each] came to [a] point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's [still] a point to it.'"[4]
I’m pretty sure this is why I do drugs today.
Mid-90s, I used to stay up all night long on Fridays, watching weird cable access shows and infomercials. There was a Highlander: The Animated Series cartoon that came on around 4AM. No one ever believed me when I tried to describe it.
Probably the Toxic Crusaders, but only after watching the movie it's based on.
The cartoon itself is just another knockoff TMNT, which was the style at the time. I have no idea how someone showed a board of directors the Toxic Avenger in the early 90s and said, we should take this and make it a cartoon for children.
I'm so glad all this shit got greenlighted tho, tv in the 90's was wild, especially for kidz
TV series:
- Johnny Test
- Teen Titans Go
- Uncle Grandpa
- The Amazing World of Gumball
- Regular Show
Movies:
- Coraline
Web series:
- SMG4
- asdfmovie
The original sonic cartoon is like a chili dog induced fever dream
Will check out
