Worst Cartoons Ever

While watching the cartoonish debates on CNN, I got to wondering what the worst cartoon ever made was. While I immediately answered my question, it got me to considering what the worst cartoon series ever were.

Let me note that I haven’t seen every cartoon, so it’s possible that there are execrable cartoons left off this list. And we’re talking about cartoon series here, not one-shot terrible cartoons or cartoons that were only on for a short time, then cancelled.

Secondly, if your favorite cartoon appears on this list, it means that your favorite cartoon sucks. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you may have poor cartoon taste.

Thirdly, I’m giving Scooby Doo a pass, despite the catastrophically bad seasons with Scrappy and guest stars (remember Don Knotts?), because of all the great Scooby cartoons that came before and after that regrettable period. But I’ve got my eye on you, Scooby, and the minute you start having the flavor of the month on again (“Today Scooby meets Britney Spears!”) you’re right in the list at #2.

I’ll leave open comments so you can flame me or make suggestions, as you want.

16. Laff-Olympics
Imagine if you took some of the suckiest characters from Hannah Barbera cartoons, then put them in a ridiculous spoof of the Olympics where one team always cheats but never wins (and the governing body, like MLB watching Bonds’ head inflate like a balloon, does nothing). Now watch this show, and you’ll imagine what children in hell must watch every single morning.

15. Dungeons and Dragons
Of all the rich stories one could mine out of D&D, with fantasy and monsters and elves and dwarves, this piece of shit was the best they could do? Why not just do a cartoon version of Mazes and Monsters next time, assholes? Some dorks get sucked into the D&D world, nobody gets killed, and the retard 5-year-old gets the magic club. Don’t even get me started on the abuse they heaped on the cavalier for being a coward despite the fact he saved their butts every single episode. Hey, Ranger-boy: aim for its head already! The dungeon master can kiss my ass: I’d have killed him off, allied with Tiamat, and lived like a king for the rest of my days.

14. Flintstones Kids
Part of the lamentable late-80’s idea exhaustion that brought us the “let’s remake show X as kids!” fad, this was easily the worst of the lot. First of all, it completely destroyed Flintstones continuity (they met as adults, not as weenie kids). Secondly, it turns out that when you take the subtle undercurrent of spousal abuse out of the Flintstones, you lose a lot of the comedic zing.

13. Godzilla
I’ll summarize every single episode for you:
One of 3 incompetent adults: “Oh no, the Godzilla button doesn’t work!”
Little kid: “Quick, Godzookie, call Godzilla!”
Godzookie: “Bleat!”
Godzilla: “Raurgh!” (this is the actual sound effect)
Any of the three bisexual swingers: “We’re saved!”
Child watching TV: “What a bunch of fucking morons.”

12. Johnny Quest

This is what you get if you take Godzilla, remove all the giant monsters, and instead of a woman have some poor Hindu boy slave that has to do all the dangerous jobs. Oh, and instead of Godzookie you have Bandit, who I was always hoping would drown or eat poison or get rabies or something. Then, because nobody was asking for it, the wretched 60's version was remade in the 90's as...the Real Adventures of Johnny Quest. Unfortunately, he didn't die in this version, either. But all the ambiguous sexual heat between his dad and the gray-haired guy was still there, though.

11. Dynomutt and the Blue Falcon
One day some TV executive asked: what if we took Batman and gave him a sidekick that was a cross between Scooby Dumb and Inspector Gadget? Dynomutt was born. I hope that TV executive rotted in development hell for the rest of his career.

10. Bullwinkle and Rocky
One of the reasons I hate the baby boomers is that they shoved this piece of crap down our throats when we were young. Listen, the repetitive “pull a giant lion out of the hat” gag wasn’t funny. Nor were Boris and Natasha, particularly. And don’t even start giving me Dudly Doo-Rite and George of the Jungle as a defense of this subversive piece of garbage. They sucked, too.

9. Family Guy
I know a lot of people love this show. A lot of people are morons. If I want to watch random flashback-based episodes about a fat naked guy, I’ll sniff glue until my short-term memory is gone and Google “Ernest Borgnine Naked.”

8. The Jetsons
You’d think that a cartoon featuring flying cars and robot maids would be cool. You’d be wrong. Apparently George’s testicles got ripped off in a Food-O-Tron accident, because he spent every episode cringing at threats from Jane, Mr. Spacely, and Elroy. I kept hoping the future didn’t have OSHA and he’d die in a workplace accident.

7. Speed Racer
Another baby boomer nostalgia that I hated. Every episode is the same: long soliloquy about how Racer X is really his brother, followed by a race where the monkey and the boy save the day by engaging in bestiality and/or disabling the other race cars. What’s the draw here, again?


6. Super Friends
Everything I could ever say about this show has already been said better on the hilariously NSFW SeanBaby Superfriends site. I’ll just close with this thought: maybe the Super Friends wasn’t the best venue to push international cooperation and racial harmony. I spent more time mocking Heap Big Indian Guy and Samurai Suckass than I spent admiring their native cultures.

5. Silverhawks
By the same team that brought you He-Man and Thundercats, this indicated that they were essentially bankrupt for new ideas and assumed children were too stupid to figure that out. The villains included a giant frog with a tuning fork. That’s supposed to scare me? These guys were ultimate space pussies for not being able to take out what was essentially a biker gang.

4. Trollz
Imagine if you took Charmed, mixed it with Beverly Hills 90210 and Totally Spies, then made all the characters Troll dolls for no apparent reason. You’d have this show, only not as shallow and vapid. I have banned my daughter from watching this piece of tripe for fear that it was giving her brain damage.

3. Ed, Edd, and Eddy
I had a coworker who used to watch this show and talk about how great it was. Then he got fired for gross incompetence. This is not a coincidence.



2. Batfink
If you do it once, it might be funny. If you make an entire series of cartoons about a bat with wings of steel and his racially insensitive oriental sidekick named Karate, it’s not so funny. If you show the same 25 cartoons over and over for years on Saturday morning, it should be considered torture under international law.

1. Captain Planet
Ever wondered what a cartoon would look like if it was made by Ted Turner and Greenpeace? Wonder no more! In Captain Planet’s skewed world, there are only 5 continents, a Russian is an excellent representative of Europe, and people pollute because they want to destroy the planet (so much for nuance). The stories were so pathetic that they were an insult to the intelligence of an 8-year-old. And what the hell did that ‘heart’ ring do, anyways, other than make the South American kid get kidnapped every other episode? And I’m not even going to go into Gaea and the giant mysterious unknown supercomputer that monitored everything that happened on Earth. On a super-hero scale these guys land somewhere between Marvin and Wendy.