Anyway, the answer isIndisputably Jonny Quest…what an example of good parenting…putting your son in all manner of dangerous situations. Not to mention, did Race Bannon do any kind of decent job guarding the kid?
Honorable mention…Scooby Doo. A lot of people might have an issue with this one, as I know it was popular…but that show never appealed to me (except the voice of Daphne…who recently passed, I believe).
Any cartoon that had a laugh track (a lot of Hannah-Barbera’s stuff) were way worse than Jonny Quest. They made my 8-year old head hurt. Jonny Quest made me want to go meet a living mummy.
I think maybe we’re using different criteria, but I was gonna nominate Trash Talking (link spoiled for NSFW language and bizarre, incomprehensible content)Trash Talking the 2006 movie by Paper Rad, an art collective with, um, a unique vision, aesthetic and, um, interpretation of what things like narrative, characters and coherence are. Or aren’t.
A cynical, alternative explanation is that this was made by crazy people who are crazy.
An even more alternative explanation is that it was made by aliens who simply don’t understand humans very well.
But like I said, I’m pretty sure that we’re using different criteria here.
That was Clutch Cargo, I believe. I remember it being on in the afternoons when I got home from school in the first grade. Even then, I knew there was something odd about it (the superimposed human mouths), but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
It was never meant to be a guide to parenting. It was a ten-year-old boy’s fantasy of traveling around the world and having fantastic adventures. Sure struck a chord with me at that age.
Space Patrol- run in the U.S. as Planet Patrol because of an earlier series called Space Patrol - was a 1963 British sf show about the intrepid United Galactic Organization, all marionettes. Wearing space helmets. The Neptunians hate robots, we find out. They crammed a full three minutes of action into every half-hour episode.
Is a marionette show a cartoon? Well, it ain’t live.
Probably the worst official nicktoon ever, “The Brothers Flub” is best described as Ren and Stimpy meets Futurama. Two brothers (one the fat cheerful stupid one and the other the skinny uptight jerk) work as delivery boys for an intergalactic courier and every episode they drop off a package to a new planet and go on zany adventures on that new planet. However the show is best described as very low energy, it lacked the frantic back and forth humor between the two brothers of Ren and Stimpy or Angry Beavers and the planets they visited were more 60’s Star Trek inspired where everybody had a single boring gimmick as opposed to the crazy fun new worlds of Futurama. Probably the only Nicktoon to get cancelled after a single season.
You know a cartoon is bad when there’s an official Brothers Flub Youtube channel that has put every single episode of the series online for free and the comments for all the episodes are people talking about how much the shows sucks and who could possibly like it.
This comment sums it up.
It’s not even just the song that makes this show bad. There’s just no appeal to it. The character designs are lame, the characters aren’t interesting, and the writing is dumb. When I was a little boy, I hardly watched it and I remember it didn’t last on Nick very long. This show died HARD.
Aliens must Register January of every year
It was a “Public Service” announcement that they ran on TV, generally early in the morning. I saw it countless times as a kid, sandwiched between the early morning episodes of The Modern Farmer, which ran before the cartoons on Saturdays (“This is the real value of sorghum silage”)
The animation was REALLY crude and cheap, because, I guess, the US government department didn’t have much in the way of discretionary spending, but they wanted to make their message an eye-catching one. The image of the Alien being addressed was a weird semihuman, angular construction. When I was a kid, I didn’t know that “alien” really meant someone from outside the country – to me an “alien” was an intelligent being from another planet that Superman or Batman was always fighting. Certainly the Alien Registering in January at the Post Office didn’t look like a Human Being.
After the Alien filled out his registration form, he walked over to the window at the Post Office, using that up-and-down Muppet Gait, and gave the form to the shadowy figure of the Post Office Worker (who looked like some variety of extraterrestrial, as well), leaving it on the shelf of the PO window. The Postal Clerk then grabbed the form, apparently without using his hands, because the sheet was sort of sucked automatically into the window, with no obvious appendages involved.
Anyway, one of the worst cartoons I’ve seen, in terms of design and animation quality. And it’s stuck in my mind all these years. As I noted in this thread from 2008, I’ve looked for it on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet, but haven’t been able to find it anywhere.
Depends on your definition of “bad.” Clutch Cargo looked weird, but had good storytelling. Space Angel, which used the same technique, had very good art (if you ignored the weird lips), drawn by comics great Alex Toth.
Scooby Doo was not particularly good, but I was in high school when it came out. It’s is, however, a perfect exemplar of Roger Ebert’s Law of Conservation of Characters: every episode had someone introduced in the beginning who was barely shown before it was revealed he was the villain.
Hannah Barbera did a plethora of mediocre cartoons that few talk about: Magilla Gorilla, Ricochet Rabbit, Wally Gator, Lippy the Lion & Hardy Har Har, Touche Turtle & Dum Dum, Peter Potamus, Yippee, Yappee & Yahooey. They were all weak ideas to hook a catchy theme song on, and all had the same plot every week.
Even worse than HB was Total Television. Tennessee Tuxedo was pretty dire but more impressive than King Leonardo, Tooter Turtle, and the Hunter. Their best-known character, Underdog, is a gem, though.
As I recall from Wikipedia (deleted now,) The Oblongs was pulled from TV in Australia mid-run of the pilot – station manager couldn’t handle it. Now, I watched all the episodes, and enjoyed it well enough, but I can relate to some people having a limit to gross-out, politically incorrect humor, and you can’t argue with someone who’ll pull a show mid-run.
In 1983, CBS afflicted us kids with the Saturday Supercade, a collection of cartoon shows based on the video games Pitfall, Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Pole Position and Frogger (unless I forgot any). They were all just amazingly awful. If you think “half hour toy commercials” are bad, “half hour arcade game commercials” are even worse especially when the entire plot of the game is “guy jumps around on a ziggurat and swears when he dies”
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