69 items
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.
Six mystical bears in a medieval world, bouncing like rubber balls on Gummiberry Juice — behind one of the most infectious theme songs television ever produced. It premiered on NBC in 1985, but for 90s kids it lived in the after-school Disney Afternoon rotation, where 'bouncing here and there and everywhere' lodged itself permanently.
The boy reporter and his dog Snowy stepped off the comic-book page and into a faithfully animated series that arrived on HBO in 1991. For many American kids, this was their first Tintin — and it stuck.
Two bachelor beaver brothers — smug, scheming Norbert and unhinged, shrieking Daggett — share a dam in the Oregon woods and turn sibling annoyance into an art form. One of the strangest, yell-iest Nicktoons of the late 90s, and beloved for exactly that.
The manic variety cartoon that slipped jokes for adults past kids and a geography lesson past everyone. Yakko, Wakko and Dot burst out of the Warner Bros. water tower alongside Pinky and the Brain, Slappy Squirrel, and a cast of oddballs — fast, smart, and endlessly quotable.
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.
The Nicktoon that took middle school seriously — Ginger Foutley navigating the popularity food chain while her characters did something almost no cartoon characters did: aged, grew, and actually changed their clothes.
Nickelodeon's animated epic about the last Airbender and a world where people bend the four elements. The show's serialized storytelling, humor, and character arcs (especially Zuko's redemption) proved surprisingly mature and acclaimed for kids' television. It ran three seasons from 2005 to 2008 and spawned an enduring fandom.
The elephant king told his own childhood stories in this gentle, storybook-paced animated series that arrived on HBO in 1989. A quieter corner of the cartoon dial — orchestral, unhurried, and deeply comforting.
The moody, art-deco afternoon cartoon that gave a generation its definitive Batman — and its definitive Joker. Painted skies on black paper, a full orchestra, and stories that never talked down to the kids racing home to catch it.
Transformers that turned into animals instead of vehicles, backed by a groundbreaking all-CGI cartoon. Optimus Primal led the Maximals against a scheming Megatron who turned into a T-rex — and it quietly saved the whole franchise.
Three motorcycle-riding mice from Mars, Throttle, Modo and Vinnie, crash-land in Chicago and fight the Plutarkians, fish-like aliens out to strip Earth of its resources. It was Marvel's 1993 attempt at the next Ninja Turtles, and its voice cast reads like a Beverly Hills, 90210 cast list.
A live-action host talking directly to you from inside an animated storybook world, solving mysteries left behind by a blue-spotted puppy. Blue's Clues was built on research, tested with preschoolers before it aired, and the same episode played five days in a row so you could actually master it.
Howie Mandel's Saturday-morning cartoon about Bobby Generic, a four-year-old who took every grown-up figure of speech literally. A "traffic jam" became a sandwich spread of tiny cars, and a comedian's choking-on-cake voice became a Fox Kids fixture for nearly eight years.
A green rabbit captain, a four-armed duck gunner, and a boy from San Francisco fighting a Toad Empire run by a computer. The cartoon lasted 13 episodes in the fall of 1991, the Hasbro toys lasted one wave, and the Konami NES game outlived them both.
Richard Scarry's Busytown came to life in 1994, turning the picture-book world where everything was labeled and nothing was rushed into gentle television. Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm taught a generation of preschoolers how the everyday world actually worked.
When five kids from around the world got magic rings powered by earth, fire, wind, water, and heart, they could summon Captain Planet—a blue-skinned, green-mulleted eco-superhero bent on saving the planet from corporate villains and environmental destruction. Premiering in September 1990, the show became the unlikely flagship of early-90s kids' environmentalism, complete with a celebrity voice cast that included Whoopi Goldberg, LeVar Burton, and Jeff Goldblum hamming it up as cartoon bad guys. It was earnest, bright, and delightfully weird, with a catchphrase ("By your powers combined…") that felt genuinely powerful when you were nine.
Ten pastel bears with pictures on their tummies, beaming caring at the world hard enough to knock villains over. The Care Bears started as greeting-card art in 1981 and became a plush-toy empire, three theatrical movies, and a cartoon series — and for 90s kids, the hand-me-down bears and endless reruns that made an 80s franchise feel like their own.
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.
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.
Three kids get sucked into Cyberspace to defend Motherboard from the scheming Hacker — voiced with maximum ham by Christopher Lloyd — and the only weapon that ever works is math. PBS somehow made estimating and pattern-finding feel like saving the world.
A 14-year-old turns half-ghost in an accident with his parents' ghost portal, gets an alter ego, and starts protecting his town — all while his own ghost-hunting parents think he's the enemy. The theme song is one millennials still recite word for word.
"I am the terror that flaps in the night... Let's get dangerous." The Disney Afternoon's masked mallard fought crime across St. Canard with a giant ego, a gas gun, and a new self-introduction every episode — while trying to raise his adopted daughter Gosalyn on the side.
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.
A little Latina girl and her monkey friend Boots set out to solve puzzles and teach you Spanish — after pausing mid-episode to stare into the camera and wait for your answer. The franchise grew into a preschool juggernaut, but the real legacy is twofold: the little-sibling memory, and the meme of the Dora pause itself.
The banana-yellow-sweater-vest kid, his journal narration, his crush on Patti Mayonnaise, and his daydream alter-ego Quailman. One of the original three Nicktoons — it actually aired first.
![Video thumbnail — Dragon Tales (1999) - Opening Theme Song [4K]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Syz6J9izWzM/maxresdefault.jpg)
The magic rhyme you can still recite by heart. This Sesame Workshop gem brought five dragons to PBS preschool: Cassie, Ord, the squabbling twins Zak and Wheezie, and wise old Quetzal. Three seasons, ninety-four episodes, one eternal earworm.
Jason Alexander as the voice of a lewd, widowed private-eye duck in the USA Network's adult cartoon, animated by Klasky Csupo. It ran 70 episodes, earned three Emmy nominations, and ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved.
![Video thumbnail — Eek! the Cat Intro with Terrible Thunderlizards [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tebiMBJAI0A/maxresdefault.jpg)
The purple Fox Kids cat whose motto was "it never hurts to help," and whose every good deed ended with him screaming "Oh gosh, it hurts!" Halfway through the run it picked up a second act about dinosaur mercenaries, and the whole thing became Eek! Stravaganza.
Kids' WB's manic 1995 superhero: a computer bug turns nerdy teenager Dexter Douglas into Freakazoid, who knows everything on the Internet and has no self-control. It was the third Spielberg–Warner Bros. cartoon, after Tiny Toons and Animaniacs.
Disney's dark, Shakespeare-quoting cult classic: stone gargoyles who wake after a thousand years to protect modern Manhattan by night. Half the voice cast came straight from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
![Video thumbnail — Goof Troop Intro [HQ]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t5wNX_mIraA/maxresdefault.jpg)
Goofy as a single dad in the suburbs, his son Max trying to survive him, and Pete next door as the used-car salesman whose life Goofy keeps ruining. The Disney Afternoon sitcom ran just one season from 1992, but it rewrote Goofy for a generation and set up A Goofy Movie.
Football-headed Arnold navigating urban life with his boarding house family. Nickelodeon's unusually melancholy animated series about childhood loneliness, gentrification, and the quiet moments between the gags.
The bumbling cyborg inspector with a gadget for every situation, voiced by Get Smart's Don Adams, became a 90s institution through reruns that bracketed the decade. For most kids, Gadget wasn't a show from before their time — it was just always on.
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.
Nickelodeon's 1996 cartoon anthology, hosted from inside a comic book by Henry and June, where no two shorts looked alike: thrown action figures in Action League Now!, magnet-faced puppets in Life with Loopy, and a stop-motion alien videotaping lessons for a caveman.
The Disney Channel animated series about high-school cheerleader and part-time crime-fighter Kim Possible, her clumsy best-friend sidekick Ron Stoppable, and his naked mole rat Rufus, foiling villains like Dr. Drakken and Shego. Catchphrases 'What's the sitch?' and 'So not the drama' became part of the language; created by Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle.
Four preschoolers and their sentient red rocket ship blasted off every episode to a soundtrack of actual classical music. You remember the theme — "We're going on a trip in our favorite rocket ship" — and the way each mission smuggled a museum masterpiece and a classical movement into the adventure.
Nickelodeon's art-deco superhero cartoon about XJ-9 — 'Jenny,' please — a world-saving robot who would rather be at the mall. Rocket fists, gorgeous retro-futurist design, and the eternal struggle of being both Earth's protector and the weird new kid.
Saturday morning TV with its own zip code. Disney's One Saturday Morning was a two-hour kingdom of cartoons, weird interstitials, and a virtual set that made Saturday feel like a show inside a show. For five years it was the place to be before the rest of the house woke up.
"Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today!" Two stepbrothers build a roller coaster or get a band back together before lunch, their sister Candace fails to bust them, and their pet platypus slips off to fight Dr. Doofenshmirtz, whose latest invention erases the evidence just in time. Disney's 104-days-of-summer cartoon ran a song in nearly every episode and became one of the channel's biggest animated hits.
Two lab mice, one plan: try to take over the world. Every night. The Brain schemed, Pinky said 'Narf,' and a generation learned to answer 'Are you pondering what I'm pondering?' with something gloriously beside the point.
A whole city lived inside a computer, and every time the unseen User loaded a game, a giant cube dropped out of the sky and the heroes had to win it from the inside — or lose the neighborhood. ReBoot was one of the first all-CGI TV series, and its blocky polygonal world felt genuinely alien in 1994.
The elementary-school playground reimagined as its own nation — with a king, its own laws, and six kids just trying to survive until the bell. Recess made recess itself the whole point.
The unhinged Nicktoon about a psychotic chihuahua and a dim-witted cat — gross-out close-ups, surreal violence, and adult humor that sailed clean over kids' heads (and past a lot of censors). One of the original three Nicktoons, and the one that pushed hardest at the edges.
Four friends in a Southern California beach town who lived for surfing, skateboarding, and street hockey. Rocket Power bottled the turn-of-the-millennium extreme-sports craze — all attitude, boardshorts, and "friends before competition."
Rocko the wallaby and friends stumbled through suburban absurdism in a show that smuggled adult satire past Nickelodeon's censors. Crude, weird, and weirdly brilliant — the launching pad for future SpongeBob creators.
Nickelodeon's 1991 animated series gave the world the Pickles household — a group of talking babies narrating their daily adventures and misadventures with brilliant, absurdist humor. Rugrats proved that cartoons for kids didn't need to be dumbed down; the show's clever writing and wild imagination made it appointment TV for 90s kids and their parents.
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.
Mystery Inc. went live-action with a CGI Great Dane, a tropical haunted resort, and one performance nobody has ever stopped praising: Matthew Lillard simply became Shaggy. Critics shrugged, kids showed up in droves, and "like, zoinks" had its biggest summer ever.
![Video thumbnail — Arcade Longplay [117] The Simpsons Arcade Game](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/S9DE-KyZnLc/hqdefault.jpg)
Konami's 1991 four-player brawler let you play as Homer, Marge, Bart, or Lisa on a mission to rescue Maggie. The Simpsons Arcade captured the early cartoon's charmingly off-model animation style, placing you in Springfield with familiar locations and gag-filled bashing. Ported to home computers (Commodore 64 and MS-DOS) back in 1991, it later returned to modern consoles via a digital re-release in 2012.
The Saturday-morning web-slinger a whole generation still hears when they read a Spider-Man comic. Fox Kids' 1994 series gave Peter Parker an inner monologue, a rogues' gallery two decades of cartoons had skipped, and cliffhangers that made Monday recess a spoiler zone.
The absurdist sponge working the fry cook line at Bikini Bottom, living under the sea with his starfish best friend, and radiating genuine optimism. SpongeBob SquarePants premiered on Nickelodeon in May 1999 and became the network's biggest hit — a cultural juggernaut that turned early episodes into an endless meme quarry.
Four brothers gene-slammed into half-shark street fighters by a mad scientist, battling Dr. Piranoid in Fission City. It was a syndicated cartoon built to sell Mattel's chomping action figures, which a young Vin Diesel pitched to toy buyers.
Five episodes on Fox, a Kenner toy line with glow-in-the-dark eyes and rubbery slip-on "BioMasks," and a theme song that rewrote "Wild Thing" as "Swamp Thing! You are amazing!" The cartoon barely existed. The song never left.
Two disgraced fighter pilots, a jet built from scrapyard parts and a city of cats under attack from an undead sorcerer and a pair of robot gangsters. Hanna-Barbera's SWAT Kats was the top-rated syndicated cartoon of 1994 and then simply stopped, three episodes unfinished, which is why its fans have been trying to bring it back ever since.
Baloo from The Jungle Book, reimagined as a hotshot cargo pilot flying a seaplane out of Cape Suzette. Air pirates, a scheming Shere Khan in a business suit, and a theme song that has never once left your head.
Five animal buddies, one magical backyard, and a different musical genre every episode. Created by Janice Burgess for Nickelodeon in 2004, it should have been forgotten years ago — except the soundtrack went so unreasonably hard that TikTok rediscovered it in 2021 and refused to let go.
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.
A purple-clad hero who is a homeless man in the real world and the Leopard Queen's protector in another, with much of the animation drawn straight from Sam Kieth's comic panels. MTV aired it in 1995 under its Oddities label, in 13 short episodes.
Penny Proud, her embarrassing dad Oscar, and the one and only Suga Mama — the first animated series made exclusively for Disney Channel, and a landmark Black family cartoon. The theme song alone, sung by Solange with Destiny's Child, is an instant time machine.
Fox Kids' superhero parody: a huge, blue, nigh-invulnerable hero who isn't very bright, his sidekick Arthur, a former accountant in a moth suit, and a battle cry of "Spoon!" It was made for kids, and adults turned it into a cult hit.
A globe-trotting family of wildlife documentarians, and their 12-year-old daughter Eliza, who has a secret: she can talk to animals. Plus her chimp sidekick Darwin, a feral little brother, and a booming, big-nosed naturalist dad.
![Video thumbnail — Tiny Toon Adventures - Opening Theme Song [HD] [1080p]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3EiEX4tmCfY/maxresdefault.jpg)
Buster and Babs Bunny — no relation — headlined Steven Spielberg's class of next-generation Looney Tunes, studying under Bugs and Daffy at Acme Looniversity. It only produced new episodes for a couple of years, but those 98 episodes reran into the ground on after-school TV and burned the theme song into an entire generation. We're tiny, we're toony, we're all a little loony.
![Video thumbnail — Totally Spies (Ver. 1 Intro) [HD]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VBuAgPyFMCE/maxresdefault.jpg)
Three Beverly Hills teenagers in color-coded suits—red, green, yellow—moonlighting as secret agents for WOOHP between mall trips. A generation's first anime-adjacent obsession snuck in without anyone realizing.
Troma took the Toxic Avenger, the mop-swinging mutant from its gory 1984 cult film, and turned him into a kids' cartoon hero leading a squad of fellow mutants against alien polluters. Thirteen syndicated episodes aired in 1991, and Playmates, fresh off the Ninja Turtles, sold neon action figures with glow-in-the-dark accessories under the tagline "They're gross, but they still get girls!"
The anime-styled fairy-school cartoon that owned a girl generation: glittery transformation sequences, fashion-forward heroines, and serialized magic battles that took themselves seriously. Imported from Italy for Saturday mornings, it grew into one of Italian animation's biggest exports.
To a generation of Saturday-morning kids, this was the real X-Men: five seasons on Fox Kids, one impossibly urgent guitar theme, and stories lifted straight from the comics. Wolverine, Rogue, and Gambit were household names years before Hollywood caught up.
Four monks-in-training race a showboating boy genius and an ancient witch for magical artifacts, and every dispute is settled the same way: "I challenge you to a Xiaolin Showdown!" Kids' WB's kung-fu treasure hunt turned Saturday morning into a collect-them-all cosmic game show.