Yet another show with Tara Strong in a big role! >_>
(Guess who one of Neko’s favourite voice actors is. >_>)
I recently caught an episode of The Super Hero Squad Show and couldn’t stop laughing. Marvel does self-parody remarkably well.
And I’ve only seen Adventure Time on flights, but it is sheer genius.
No argument from me, I’m constantly singing her praises. Hyndyn Walch, Jim Cummings, and Johnny Young Bosch are also favorites. I still can’t get over every time I hear Hyndyn’s Starfire voice in another body, though. Curse you Adventure Time!
ETA: Speaking of Hyndyn Walch and Ben 10, another great Man of Action cartoon is Generator Rex.
ETAETA: Though my favorite voice ever is Michelle Ruff, her Rita voicework in Tales of Vesperia makes me happier than it should.
I’d like to second Samurai Jack as a truly excellent cartoon. Some of the episodes are true pieces of art. Genndy Tartakovsky also did Dexter’s Laboratry and Star Wars: Clone Wars (a cartoon, not the CGI thing that’s running today), which are both extremely excellent.
Lots of other great examples in here. I’m also a big fan of Fairly Oddparents and Kim Possible.
I feel so old because no one has mentioned Gargoyles or Batman: The Animated Series yet. 90’s cartoons at their audience-age-spanning finest.
Also 2nd or 3rding the Powerpuff Girls and Phineas and Ferb.
Wow, good call on Gargoyles. That show actually got way better as it went on, with some really cool plot arcs.
Batman: The Animated Series also puts me in mind of the Justice League cartoon that ran 2001-2004 on cartoon network, and was done with a similar animated style.
Another plug for Phineas & Ferb. I love the show as much as our kids do. They have many catchy tunes, and there are humorous bits that are over the heads of kids. I’ve seen references to Star Wars, James Bond and Halloween along with jokes about algebra, chemistry, and physics.
I’m not too up on current toons but I agree with the Powerpuff Girls, Freakazoid and Animaniacs, and I’ll add *Dexter’s Laboratory *and Pinky and the Brain.
There’s got to be some place online you can find these.
Wait, really? Holy hell how did we get that far without Batman:TAS? I think I didn’t mention it because I thought it already had been! Gargoyles was good, I never got into it, but objectively it’s good.
Also, I’ve officially fallen in love with the modern Batman: The Brave and the Bold solely because of this scene:
ETA: Hey, is that Tara Strong as The Huntress? I think it is!
Oh, I missed Batman:TAS too! I loved that show, with it’s gothic style and everything. The X-Men cartoon that was on around the same time was good too.
Also, it invented Harley Quinn. By far the best Batman villain.
Samurai Jack a big yes. I have not seen Sym-Bionic Titan but the fact that it is another Genndy Tartakovsky creation (along with SJ and Dexter’s Laboratory) has been calling me to it.
I heard it got cancelled mid-season and never finished. I saw it on CN until the Season 1 finale and it was excellent, but avoided it after that because I thought I’d get a clearly unfinished story.
Samurai Jack is SO GOOD.
There are a couple of episodes that outright make me CRY.
Teen Titans is/was pretty darn good too.
Lots of anime for kids is pretty smart stuff too, but I’ll play it safe and just limit myself to Akazukin Chacha and CardCaptor Sakura.
From the late 90’s:
Cow and Chicken (with I.M. Weasel)
Two Stupid Dogs
Johnny Bravo (which, curiously, Johnny Bravo did not mention)
I have to ask about Teen TItans. I caught an episode in a hotel room a while back and I thought it was pretty cool. So I decided to get the DVDs via Netflix and start from the beginning. But those first episodes just seemed juvenile and predictable - certainly not as good as I thought I was gonna get. Does the show get better and if so when?
I highly seconded Samurai Jack. I liked it so much I bought all the seasons so I could see the whole show.
All the incarnations of Ben 10 are excellent too.
I would place Samurai Jack among the best animated shows ever made. It’s wonderful in so many ways.
There are goofy episodes throughout most of the run of the show, but overall it gets deeper, more serious, and generally better right through to the end. (Though early episodes like “Nevermore” lay the groundwork for much darker episodes later on.) It’s hard to mark a point at which it “gets better” because the tone of the series is generally cyclic; it alternates between serious and silly episodes fairly regularly through a season, then finishes with a serious finale. Even perennial comic relief Beast Boy gets serious episodes occasionally–and those are among my favorites.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the silly episodes; many of them are quite entertaining. I particularly like the Mad Mod episodes.
There’s a new cartoon on Disney called “Gravity Falls.” It’s awesome and hilarious. Watch it. Go watch it now!
It’s so good I’ve been thinking about starting a thread on it. It’s about a pair of twelve-year-old twins (Dipper and Mabel,) who are sent to live with their Great Uncle (Grunkle Stan) in Gravity Falls, Oregon for the summer. As it turns out, the town is full of gnomes, minotaurs, lake monsters, ghosts, zombies, etc…
In addition to just being funny, there is a bit of an over-arching plot. Small little clues are inserted into almost every episode: hidden messages, “freeze-frame” secrets, etc…It’s also beautifully animated, and the voice acting is great (Kristen Schaal voices Mabel, so if that doesn’t get you excited, then I don’t know what will.)
I know the pilot episode was free on iTunes a few weeks ago when the show debuted, but I don’t know if it still is.
The Amazing World Of Gumball.