CatDog
A cat and a dog conjoined at the waist, sharing one body and absolutely no ability to agree on anything. Peter Hannan's Nicktoon was absurdism disguised as a kids' cartoon — the kind of show that made you ask questions the show itself flatly refused to answer.
CatDog got a sneak-peek airing on April 4, 1998, right after the Kids' Choice Awards, before its official Nickelodeon premiere that October. The central conceit was the whole engine: one creature with a cat head at one end and a dog head at the other, two front halves, no tail, no hind legs. Jim Cummings voiced Cat — fastidious, scheming, perpetually exasperated — and Tom Kenny voiced Dog, carefree and impulsive, and every plot flowed from the fact that neither brother could go anywhere without dragging the other along. Around them orbited Winslow the blue mouse, the bullying Greaser Dogs led by Cliff, and Shriek, the poodle devoted to Dog.
The show ran four seasons and 68 episodes through June 2005, part of the late-90s wave of Nicktoons that filled every after-school block. Its greatest cultural residue is the playground question it engineered and never once dignified with an answer — logistically, how? — a mystery that did more for its immortality than any episode.
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