26 items
![Video thumbnail — [Adult Swim] 2001 Pool Bumps](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hoWcIE8VRMI/hqdefault.jpg)
Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.
Adult Swim's gleefully nonsensical cartoon about three anthropomorphic fast-food items — a milkshake, a box of fries, and a wad of meat — sharing a house in New Jersey. It made no sense on purpose, and it accidentally shut down Boston.
Ten-year-old Ben Tennyson's summer road trip becomes an alien adventure when he finds the Omnitrix — an alien watch that locks onto his wrist and transforms him into ten different heroes. Every kid wanted the Omnitrix toy, and every playground became a forum for debating which alien was the coolest.
Four boarding-school kids, a supercomputer in an abandoned factory, and a virtual world under attack by a rogue AI. The French import where every episode could end with a 'Return to the Past' — and only the heroes remembered any of it.
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.
A timid pink dog protecting elderly Muriel from genuinely terrifying supernatural threats on a Kansas farm. Courage the Cowardly Dog was a kids' show that made no apologies for being *scary*—featuring the King Ramses curse, creepy spirits, and a level of psychological horror that had no business airing at 3 p.m.
A pint-sized boy genius with a secret laboratory hidden in his bedroom, a fake scientist's accent, and one recurring problem: his fun-loving sister Dee Dee, who breezes in and wrecks everything by pushing the wrong button.
The after-school anime that taught a generation of American kids the words "Super Saiyan." Adapted from Akira Toriyama's manga and animated by Toei, Dragon Ball Z turned multi-episode power-ups, screaming energy charges, and glowing gold hair into appointment television — most of all on Cartoon Network's Toonami block.
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.
![Video thumbnail — Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends - Theme Song [HQ]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WyDu2DEavVg/hqdefault.jpg)
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.
The washed-up 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero who traded crime-fighting for a law degree and spent twelve minutes a week defending Fred Flintstone, Shaggy and the rest of the Saturday-morning gang in court. Adult Swim's surreal legal sitcom premiered the night the block launched in 2001, with Stephen Colbert voicing both the deranged boss of the law firm and a paranoid prosecutor.
The half-demon with the dog ears, the schoolgirl who fell down a well into 1546, and the jewel shards they chased for 167 episodes. Inuyasha premiered on Adult Swim on August 31, 2002, and ran there through 2006, the gateway anime for a generation of American teenagers up late on Saturday nights.
Blonde pompadour, sunglasses, a black T-shirt over a chest twice as wide as his hips, and an Elvis voice that never once worked on a woman. Johnny Bravo was Cartoon Network's highest-rated show in 1999 — and an early stop for the people who went on to make Family Guy and The Fairly OddParents.
Seven superheroes, the voices that defined a generation, and Bruce Timm's vision of what DC could be on its own terms. Justice League premiered on November 17, 2001, and became the epic centerpiece of the DC Animated Universe.
A young ninja in an orange jumpsuit, ostracized by his village, dreams of becoming Hokage. Naruto Uzumaki's long-running shonen saga about friendship and determination became the hook that pulled American kids into anime culture.
Seth Green's action figures, animated into eleven minutes of sugar-rush sketches on Adult Swim. Robot Chicken premiered February 20, 2005, dropping toy-aisle heroes into mundane adult life, and its Star Wars special got George Lucas himself into the recording booth.
The Japanese magical-girl anime that took North America the long way around: transformation sequences, a talking cat, saving the world in a sailor uniform, and a catchphrase declaimed on a thousand playgrounds. By the time Toonami got hold of it, you couldn't escape it.
A feudal swordmaster flung into a dystopian future wages a quest to return home — wielding a magical katana against a shapeshifting demon in near-silent, gorgeously cinematic episodes that borrowed from '70s film and manga masters. Tartakovsky's samurai epic ran four seasons without ending its story — a cliffhanger that wouldn't resolve until 2017.
A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero, recycled into a late-night talk-show host who interviews real celebrities on a monitor and rarely understands their answers. Space Ghost Coast to Coast was one of Cartoon Network's first original series, the precursor to Adult Swim, and the reason a generation of teenagers stayed up past 11 on Friday nights.
The anime-influenced DC superhero show that nailed the mid-2000s tonal whiplash — dark arcs one episode, gag-faced slapstick the next. Puffy AmiYumi's theme is still stuck in your head. Cartoon Network cancelled it after five seasons in 2006, and the 2013 spinoff only made fans madder.
Aaron McGruder's anime-styled Adult Swim satire about Huey and Riley Freeman, two Chicago kids transplanted with their Granddad to a white suburb called Woodcrest, with Regina King voicing both brothers. It opened in 2005 by declaring "Jesus was Black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11," and it never got less confrontational.
The Grim Reaper, beaten at limbo by a dim kid and his terrifying friend, becomes their best friend forever. Maxwell Atoms' Cartoon Network series ran from 2001 to 2007, first as half of Grim & Evil and then on its own, with Grim's put-upon drawl and Mandy's scowl carrying six seasons.
Adult Swim's saga of a failed super-scientist, his two dim teenage sons, their secret-agent bodyguard Brock Samson and a butterfly-themed archnemesis who gets his arching assignments from a villains' guild. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's riff on Jonny Quest grew from a 2003 pilot into seven seasons of comics-nerd world-building, all of it, as Hammer put it, about "beautiful sublime failure."
A public-access nightmare on Adult Swim: fake commercials for useless Cinco products, amateur actors recruited off Craigslist, John C. Reilly as the dazed newsman Dr. Steve Brule, and editing that made every frame feel slightly broken. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim called it "the nightmare version of television," and from 2007 to 2010 it was either the funniest or the most hated thing on the block.
Cartoon Network's action block where a generation of American kids met anime. Hosted first by Moltar, then by TOM — the robot captain of the Absolution — it made Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon after-school rituals and treated its young audience like the stories mattered.
Survivor for cartoons: 22 teenagers, one crummy summer camp, a sadistic host named Chris McLean, and a hundred grand on the line. The animated reality-show parody that late-2000s kids treated as completely, unironically real drama.