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A Nickelodeon animated series about three monster students learning to scare humans in a monster academy beneath a city dump. Created by Klasky Csupo, the studio behind Rugrats, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters delivered gross-out humor and distinctively ugly-cute character design that defined 90s kids' animation.
PBS's 25-season juggernaut about an aardvark navigating school, friendship, and suburban angst. Arthur Read, his friends Buster, Francine, Muffy, and the Brain, and his little sister D.W. defined childhood TV for an entire generation. The show ran from 1996 to 2022, becoming one of the longest-running animated kids' series in US television history.
Five ten-year-olds with code numbers, a high-tech treehouse, and an arsenal built from household junk: Sector V spent six seasons on Cartoon Network waging glorious war on adult tyranny. And it was the show the viewers themselves voted onto the air.
An ordinary earthworm in a robotic super-suit, here to save the world with run-and-gun style and pure, unapologetic weirdness. Earthworm Jim arrived in October 1994 as a 16-bit fever dream — fluid animation and gross-out humor that felt almost illegal on a Genesis. It was goofy, it was gross, and your parents didn't get it. That was the whole point.
Three kids with the same name and one unstoppable goal: scam the neighborhood kids out of quarters for jawbreakers. Ed, Edd n Eddy ran a full decade on Cartoon Network and turned suburban con artistry into an art form.
Timmy Turner's fairy godparents Cosmo and Wanda granted every wish—and every wish went catastrophically wrong. Nickelodeon's absurdist comedy about a miserable kid with unlimited magical wishes became a juggernaut that somehow survived 16 years, backseat-driven by evil babysitter Vicky and Mr. Crocker's obsessive screams.
Zim is an alien invader from the Irken empire sent to conquer Earth, except he's terrible at it — and his malfunctioning robot servant GIR, disguised as a green dog, is somehow worse. Jhonen Vasquez's creation was Nickelodeon's darkest, weirdest cartoon, and the network killed it fast. The kids who found it never let go.
Boy genius with the impossible ice-cream-swirl hair, a robot dog named Goddard, and a lab under the clubhouse. "Gotta blast!" carried a movie, three seasons of the TV show, and every kid who ever wished their science-fair project actually worked. It was Nickelodeon's first cartoon drawn entirely in CGI — and it looked like nothing else on the channel.