Always wondered why.
For the same reason that Peanuts never showed any adult characters (nor their dialog): To ground it totally in the world of the children.
Because adults are EVIL! :mad:
Peanuts was what I thought of as well.
TV Tropes has a page on the topic, as one might expect. Surprisingly, though, there aren’t too many “pure” examples besides Peanuts and Muppet Babies. Most have occasional exceptions, or perhaps just an episode or two with no adults.
There must be another trope page for “why you only hear John Forsythe’s voice, but never see Charlie.” This whole mystery trope is a very cute, focusing cliche.
There was “Mammy Two Shoes” on Tom & Jerry. Her head and face were shown a few times, but mostly it was just knees down or neck down. Interestingly, in the 60s, for obvious reasons, MGM and Chuck Jones went back and “censored” many of the T&J shorts featuring her, rotoscoping over the old footage and replacing her with a white woman and rerecording her dialogue with an Irish accent. Also interestingly, the character was not entirely erased from the show, but even brought back as “Mrs. Two Shoes” with a lighter skin tone in Tom & Jerry Tales, produced from 2006-08.
It was also used a lot in Ren & Stimpy, but they were most likely doing it as parody of all of the above.
I feel like I remember a show where the mom and dad were literally only legs, as in it would show them simply cut off at the waist. Cow and Chicken?
Did anyone else assume that Nanny was wearing some kind of clown makeup? I think the striped stockings gave me that idea.
That sounds right to me…I seem to remember the Mom and Dad characters gesturing and carrying out other actions with their feet. I also remember the theme song:
- Mama had a chicken
Mama had a cow
Dad was proud
He didn’t care how *
At first they didn’t show the faces of the parents on The Loud House, but then they changed their minds. I wonder why?
Well…, hardly ever.
The May 16,23, and 30 1954 strips (but just legs or with indistinct faces)
There were also some strips in the mid 50s that had adults speaking (actual words) from “offstage”.
yeah, actually there was a cow and chicken episode or two that showed them as just a pair of legs as the ending joke …
edd ed and Eddy had a play of this where the smart ones parents never directly interacted with him and just left sticky notes all over the place
Eventually, the leader forged a bunch of them as a joke and had him doing all sorts of dumb stufff
And it seems to me that there might have been one episode of Peanuts that was a tribute to someone who’d just died, which showed him. But still, a mere handful of exceptions over the course of a fifty-year run is pretty safely described as “never”.
Because the establishment has no face, only rules…
The beginning of Who Framed Roger Rabbit was an interrupted short cartoon that showed the mother from the knees down (plus a hand and arm when she threatened Roger).
Now I’m wondering what the toon who played her looked like.
Now that I think about it, she must have been huge. Roger only went up to her thigh, if that. He went up to the chest of Jessica Rabbit, who was about average human height. That mother toon must have been 9 or 10 feet tall.
I remember after they yelled “cut” and pulled back on the set to reveal the cameramen and director that they were pair of prop legs used like stilts by a human character. Seen at 4:20 here
Great catch! I’ve seen that movie a bunch of times and I never caught that!
But her hand! Wasn’t her hand of a size to fit the legs?
Dammit. Now I have to watch it again. 
And Inspector Gadget never showed Dr. Claw, only his hand and the cat.