Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends
What happens to your imaginary friend when you grow up? At Madame Foster's home, they wait to be adopted — and there are a LOT of abandoned imaginary friends. A found-family show with one of the great cartoon casts of the 2000s.
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends premiered on Cartoon Network on August 13, 2004, as a 90-minute special before settling into a run that lasted through May 2009 — 79 episodes across 6 seasons. Creator Craig McCracken (The Powerpuff Girls) developed the concept with Lauren Faust, and the spark was a real-world adoption: after the two adopted shelter dogs, they wondered what an animal shelter for imaginary friends would look like. The premise wrote itself from there. Imaginary friends are real, physical beings; when kids outgrow them, they end up at Madame Foster's orphanage-like home, waiting for a new child to take them in.
The cast was a masterpiece of character design: Mac, the eight-year-old who visits every day; Bloo, his self-centered blue blob of a best friend; Wilt, the impossibly tall one-armed friend who apologizes for everything; Eduardo, a huge horned monster who is gentle to his core; Coco, a bird-plane creature who says only "coco"; and Frankie, the perpetually overworked caretaker holding the whole madhouse together. The look was new, too — it was Cartoon Network's first series animated primarily in Adobe Flash, and it won 7 Emmy Awards over its run.
The show ended in 2009, but the affection never faded: a preschool spinoff announced in 2024, with McCracken returning, proved the world wasn't done with Madame Foster's just yet.
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