Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law

Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter created the series for Cartoon Network's late-night block, lifting Harvey Birdman from the 1960s cartoon Birdman and the Galaxy Trio and recasting him as an attorney whose clients come from the Hanna-Barbera, Warner Bros. and MGM back catalogs. His old nemeses turned up as opposing counsel, and the name itself was borrowed: a separate Harvey Birdman had been established on Space Ghost Coast to Coast by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, and the "Attorney at Law" tag came from that show's Dr. Nightmare in the episode "Lawsuit." A pilot sneaked onto Cartoon Network on December 30, 2000, and the series proper premiered on September 2, 2001, the night Adult Swim went on the air.

The comedy was surreal and reference-dense, cutting between courtroom scenes and specially drawn sequences that mimicked the look of the old cartoons being parodied. The mad scientist Myron Reducto became a paranoid prosecutor, and whole cases were built on playground myths about the classic characters, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo as recreational drug users among them. Unusually for Adult Swim, it was the first of the block's series to keep continuity across its whole run. Gary Cole voiced Harvey, Colbert played both the law-firm president Phil Ken Sebben and Reducto, John Michael Higgins presided as Judge Mentok the Mind-Taker, Peter MacNicol was X the Eliminator and Paget Brewster voiced Judy Ken Sebben, who kept suiting up as Birdgirl. The theme was an edited version of Reg Tilsley's "Slow Moody Blues."

Its digital ink-and-paint look made it Adult Swim's most expensive original series at the time, and after the second season's first episode the animation moved to Turner Studios, working in Adobe After Effects, because the original studios could not keep up with the show's pace and the constant retakes. The series ended on July 22, 2007, after 39 episodes across four seasons. Warner Home Video packaged the DVDs as three volumes shaped like law books, Capcom published a PlayStation 2, Wii and PSP game in the style of its own Ace Attorney series in January 2008, and IGN ranked the show the 91st-best animated series in 2009. Harvey returned in the 2018 special Harvey Birdman: Attorney General, with the original cast, and Judy got her own spin-off, Birdgirl, in 2021.