EEEEdiot!
Ren Hoek of Ren and Stimpy.
Another really influential cartoon from the last decade. Of course helmed (originally) by John Kricfalusi, who heads up a much mightier and more useful blog right over here:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/
Especially recommended for artsy types.
Oh I hates me some of that He-man.
Skeletor from He-Man.
Skeletor is a jerk.
I know that a lot of… if not all the cartoons from the 80′s were basically twenty-two minute long toy commercials. Clever hobbit tricks to convince impressionable pre-teens to divorce their parents from their cash in the name of pretending and fun and die-cast metal lions.
And maybe He-Man was chief among all other offenders in that regard, but you know, I loved the shit out of those shows. I’m pretty sure I still do… I mean, ideologically.
Take smaller bites, dum-dum!
I originally wanted to count this one as nine AND ten, but decided against, since I didn’t do as much with Yogi and Boo-Boo.
Jughead from Archie, accompanied by the Great Gazoo, a kind of obnoxious know it all alien genie thing from the last season of the Flintstones. Fred and Barney find him and his crashed ship and he subsequently ruins their lives with incompetence on an unbelievable scale. Jughead’s just a cool-breezin’ teenager who loves hamburgers.
Basically, Jughead’s just wandered into the twilight zone… and also his own private hell.
Smarter than your average bears
Yogi and Boo-Boo from any number of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, most notably, The Yogi Bear Show.
There’s something great about Yogi and Boo-boo. The big, gregarious, optimistic grifter and the little, melancholy pragmatist… then again, maybe I just like bears in hats and ties.
The smartest boy you've ever seen
Dexter, from Dexter’s Lab, of course.
To be perfectly honest, I HATED this show when it debuted. Luckily, true to my nature, I was too stubborn to give up on it and it eventually won me over, due in no small part to the Monkey shorts.
Dexter’s Lab is one of the defining cartoons of the last ten years or so. If you haven’t watched it: DO.
They bite *bass riff* They fight *base riff* The street sharks!
My little brother was way too into the Street Sharks when he was young. These misshapen horrors monopolized more than a few of my Saturdays in the nineties. The idea seems so awesome… how could the show be so bad? Vigilante mutant sharks that literally swim underneath asphalt in search of revenge… or fin to kick.
How do you mess that up?
Can't stop the Little 'cause the Littles don't stop
Dinky and Slick from the Littles.
The Littles was a show about tiny people that live in the walls of the Biggs house. There were two rambunctious kids a crotchety old guy, some parents and of course Dinky and Slick.
You can’t really go wrong when you team up a roller skating turtle and an idiot pilot.
Vrooom-a-zoom-zoom!
Speed Buggy is something like a car with a speech impediment… actually, that’s exactly what he is.
Speed Buggy’s from a Hanna-Barbera show during the 70′s called- wait for it… Speed Buggy. The show itself was similar to Scooby-Doo. A group of kids who always seem to find their way into trouble, along with their hideous talking mascot.
Speed Buggy was a favorite when I was a kid.
All-Star has the bombest swagger.
All-Star from ‘The Snorks’.
Everyone knows that the Snorks are similar to the Smurfs in a few ways and it is actually by design.
What fewer people know is that the two are more deeply connected than a quick smash-grab move by saturday morning cartoon merchandisers to capitalize on the unchecked zeitgeist of Smurfsteria… though it was that too.
The guy who created the Snorks had actually previously worked on Smurfs as an executive. At some point he couldn’t get Peyo (creator of the Smurfs) to sign off on liberties being taken with the TV adaptation of the Smurfs, courts got involved and everything got reeeeaal messy.
His solution was to create a new show… you guessed it ‘Snorks’ Which had a similar style and feel to Smurfs. It was initially almost certainly a hanger-on to that gravy train. It seemed to me though, that Snorks had a definite difference in theme and atmosphere and certainly broke out of only being a pale imitator of Smurfs and into it’s own weird thing.
Whereas in Smurfs everyone besides Brainy and Papa are basically the same outside their respective gimmicks, with the Snorks you can have All-Star, who’s kind of a bossy cuss sometimes, Kasey, who’s brave and good and true, that green freak snork who can’t talk, the wild-kid snork and your mad scientist uncle and they’re all good-guys but they’re also all different and distinctly themselves.
Oh… and also, you can still hate the CRAP out of Junior Wetworth, cause he’s a dick.
Weird, awesome thing, the Snorks.
No, Spunky... no more squeeky monkey
The second drawing is Spunky from another Nicktoon ‘Rocko’s Modern Life’.
Spunky is a dog… there’s…there’s not much to say about Spunky.
