Danger Mouse - I think the consistent 4th wall breaking, kidnapping narrators, and sense of humour as a whole had an effect on my from a formative age.
Monkey Dust - the cartoon that made it clear to me that cartoons weren't not at all nesseccarily safe for kids. I was too young to appreciate it at the time, it was too disturbing for tween me.
Sealab 2021 and Excel Saga both crazy animations that I found easier to digest about that time, too.
Watership Down, other folks have already mentioned.
I have no idea when I first saw it but I loved it right away! I definitely loved it when Family guy would do anything claymation or with action figures like Dwayne Johnson showing Peter and Lois "having sex"
You have a point. In this thread, we're biased towards relatively more obscure cartoons, yet Looney Tunes practically invented the hyperactive uber-crazy cartoon.
I thing Dutch people from my generation have you all beat:
Purno de Purno (porn pun very much intended)
A psychedelic cartoon about a funny guy in spandex that has a shitload of nudity (tits, penisses etc) to the point of him even crawling in the vagina of a giant lady in space. It has references to litaral drug use. Have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o6MIJ7Iq1U doesn't matter if you know the language, just browse through. That episode is called 'In het hol van de kietelaar' which translates to 'In the clitoris' lair (hole)'
This was on kids tv. Nobody got seriously harmed by it. It was funny and weird, but you don't really register exactltyy how weird it is untill you hear about sensitivities on US TV (nipplegate lol)
If we're counting highschool as still a kid, the old Chinese cartoon Calabash Brothers. Still looking for ENG subs for the newer version that released in the 2010s, though.
It's a cartoon where a snake and scorpion demon escape from a mountain and an elderly man has to grow a magic calabash seed that turns into 7 different calabashes that turn into little dieties when ripe in order to stop the demons.
Compared to other Chinese donghua I've seen in the past, the show definitely feels a little more unhinged. Most things I see today are a lot more average, in my opinion.
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 masterbation milking episode
It 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.
Gantz, Watership Down, Animal Farm, Super Jail, and Urslua looks like my father's mother, whom I hated, so I freaked the fuck out when my mom brought that VHS he.
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.
If you like weird old SF books, the guy who wrote TAS and Gargoyles (RIP J. Michael Reaves) did a space-noir called Darkworld Detective, it's pretty good. Obviously unrelated to Batman though.
Here they aired it at night, when not much else was there to watch. In my teenage years I was always hoping for some kind of erotic scene, but I was only left with confusion and switched the channel.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that art style looks very familiar. I'll have to look into it more, since I'm starting to doubt some of the other details I provided. Oh, and the wiki says the animated series started airing on Canal+ in 1996. Maybe it aired elsewhere before?
But yeah, I think this is it 👍.
P.S. Iznogoud, like "is no good". I must have misremembered his name, cuz that makes sense!
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
Hey check out Mineshaft Magazine. Crumb is currently submitting work to them and they also regularly publish work from a few of those old Comix guys like Glenn Head, Hal Robbins, Kim Deitch, and Robert Armstrong, etc. They release about 2 per year.