The Top 5 Greatest Nick Toons of the 90s

As a kid there were a lot of cartoons to be watched.  A lot of channels were explored.  Saturday morning cartoons on Fox.  Afternoon hours with Darkwing Duck and Batman on Disney.  Late night with Space Ghost on Comedy Central.  But one channel was the gold standard.  One channel delivered the animated gold day-in, day-out with no exceptions.  That channel was Nickelodeon.

This article will explore what are the definitive five greatest Nicktoons and, by extension, the greatest and most important cartoons of the 90s.  Yeah, I said it, deal with it.

*Spongebob Squarepants, which debuted in 1999, is also disqualified.  Never saw it, never will.

Honorable Mention

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

A mostly forgotten gem.  Monsters ran from 1994-1997 and helped to herald in the wave of non-humanoid (and more importantly, non-race specific) animated heroes that would become commonplace in the new century.  While not as dynamic or sharp as many of its runningmates, Monsters had fantastic orignality and just enough sickening sweetness to achieve "lovable romp" status even if it was largely set in a landfill and the sewers of New York City.

#5

Hey Arnold!

Another New York City based show, though this one was set (mostly) above ground.  A show that actually got its start in a round-about way on Pee Wee's Playhouse, Arnold quickly became one of the most memorable Nicktoons of the late 90s.  This show was everything Doug wishes it was.  It had stronger relatable characters, fun storylines, never aging characters, and of course the token black best friend.  Arnold was also one of the only cartoons I can ever remember that existed in a real place.  New York City was a character in the show, and even if you hate New York City you have to admit, seeing the big city through the eyes of a bunch of kids is pretty interesting.  Even the opening theme had Coltrane inspired smooth jazz overtones.  That alone is enough for classic status.

#4

KaBlam!

KaBlam! had a lot of great things going on.  "Prometheus and Bob", "Life with Loopy" but my strongest lasting memory of KaBlam! is "Action League: Now!" and how my dad thought it was just so hilarious that The Flesh was naked all the time.  It still holds up.

#3

Ren & Stimpy

I recently rewatched a few episodes of Ren & Stimpy to prepare for this article.  My findings?  Highly disturbing.  I know this show was controversial during its time on the air for being violent and crass and it is no mystery why.  Just watch this video of the show's signature song, "Happy Happy Joy Joy."  Yikes.

When this show wasn't traumatizing grown me with images I clearly had surpressed from my memory it was paving the way for some of the greatest satiric cartoons ever made.  Ren & Stimpy will never get an award for being the best acted or best animated cartoon of all time, but it certainly just may have been the most important.  Also, fascinating use of (possibly A Clockwork Orange inspired) classical music, The Incredible Toon Machine, anyone?

#2

Rugrats

The crown jewel of Nickelodeon's 90s cartoon arsenal.  Others came and went but Rugrats was ever lasting.  There was something just perpetually compelling about the lush imaginary world Tommy Pickles and his friends created for themselves week after week.  Tommy's dad, Stu, quite possibly set the stage for one of the greatest father figures in all of cartoon history (Randy of South Park) with his adult antics, amusingly incomprehensible not only to toddlers but other adults.

The all time great episode in my book will always be the great Passover episode in which Tommy assumes the roll of moses in liberating his fellow baby friends from the oppressive rule of Pharoah Angelica.

#1

Rocko's Modern Life

Ho, ho, ho, bet you didn't expect to see this one here.  But here it is.  The greatest Nicktoon of the 90s and most probably of all time.  This show was one of the few that was equally entertaining for both children and adults.  It's animation was creative, characters interesting, not afraid to be a little racy, and it took the very ordinary cartoon set up of odd assuming creature living in a town of weirdos and filled it with irreverant joy.  Now that I'm typing, I'm realizing it likely inspired the very similarly set up Spongebob Squarepants (It did).  Some might describe Rocko's Modern Life as The Simpsons with animal characters and more potty humor but it was so much more ambitious than that.  Rocko was an every man that stood up for what was right, and wasn't afraid of the consequences (unlike Doug) and for that he always came out on top.

You can take a look at some of the shows greatest adult friendly moments here but one of my personal favorites is the video below in which Rocko's best friend Heffer looks to get a meal after a long road trip.

Derek Jeter Commerical Giving Me the Feels

As the baseball season winds down this summer/fall so too winds down the career of Yankee (and all-around) great, Derek Jeter.

More on this coming soon from Rated Wrong, but in the meantime I feel it would be a disservice to the internet to not give a tip of my cap to the great Jeter inspired commericials that have cropped up this year.  By now, most everyone has seen the Jordan Brand, "RE2PECT" commerical.  Even Boston fans (who have always had something of a begrudged admiration for Jeter) approved.

Now Gatorade has set to the task of topping Jordan with their own ode to the Yankee captain.

First, lets state the obvious:  This is an incredible piece of advertising.  It's classy, emotional and understated.  The black & white, Jeter's cool demeanor, you see the excited faces of all those kids and it makes you almost forget about that gatorade cooler not-so-subtlely stashed in the background.  The use of Frank Sinatra puts it over the top in my opinion.  Hearing old blue eyes croon out "My Way" as Jeter mingles with genuine fans makes it difficult for even a casual fan of baseball to keep it together.

I don't want to get too carried away since I'm planning a whole "End of an Era" piece next week, but suffice it to say, Gatorade done good here.

Eating "The Leftovers"

Watching this show is kind of like punching a wall.

Grantland's Andy Greenwald posited a very insightful question in reviewing the first season of HBO's new series The Leftovers this past week: Has there been any indication that anyone has actually forgotten anything?

In that question is one of the great flaws of this ambitious show.

The Leftovers is hardly anyone's idea of a perfect show.  Most people I have talked to struggled to stay with it.  I repeatedly had to play catch-up deciding over and over to give it another chance.  The Leftovers is a show that is just good enough to keep you wondering, it will flounder for multiple episodes before putting together enough powerful scenes to pull you back in.

In that, is one of the show's redeeming qualities.  On the few occasions it manages to string together enough well written and coherent scenes for the audience to stop thinking "what the hell?" The Leftovers can evoke some strong emotional responses.

The experience of loss is a pretty universal and relatable theme to build a show around.  Everyone knows the desperation, the frustration, the anger.  It's in these moments that The Leftovers hooks people, gets them thinking.  But, the show has of yet failed to take the next step after these initial moments.  Nothing is explored beyond the surface, things are half-resolved in simplistic fashion with ham-handed imagery and metaphor.  In the world of the Leftovers, two percent of the world's population disappeared by an "Act of God" and the show's plot is heavily populated by the all powerful deus ex machina.

Need to wrap up a scene? Put a dog in it.

This band-aid solution is expertly demonstrated in the closing moments of the season finale when the oft tortured Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) seems to completely snap as she kisses two wax dolls vaguely resembling her family good night and prepares to drive off into the extremely ambiguous unknown.  Nora's character has always been that of one barely holding it together beneath a calm veneer.  So the snapping, while frustrating, is at least somewhat logical for the character.  What's not so logical, for the character or the audience, is that she is suddenly flung back to sanity by the mere sight of a bi-racial baby.  Yeah, sorry, not buying it.

Now, these existential problems of depth in the plot and characters are both very serious issues, but a show can get by with shallow characters and thin plot if its fun (see, 24).  But a show without a consistently engaging storyline littered with characters the audience hates, that show is dead in the water.

Storylines that you can't wait for?  Every show has them.  We've all fast forwarded through Bran to get to Arya Stark. I'm not sure where to find them on The Leftovers.  In episode 3, "Two Boats and a Helicopter", the preacher character (played by Chris Eccleston) is fascinating and complex.  But everything he does and feels seems to be completely forgotten just two episodes later.  Embattled police chief and central character, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), has the most consistent presence on the show, but even he is prone to stretches of fatigue (that absurdly stupid dream sequence in the finale, anyone?).

Characters you hate?  Oh, this show has got them.  I've never watched a show that had so many storylines I got violently angry at the sight of.  Too much goes unknown to make the audience invested and too little make sense for use to care (so, who the hell was Wayne?).  

Then, there is the Guilty Remnant.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you the most obnoxious, hypocritical, self righteous, stupid faced character in the history of television.

There is nothing interesting about watching insanity in a vacuum.  That is exactly what the audience is subjected to every time Liv Tyler's stupid face smoking a cigarette on screen.

I could believe that if an event like the one depicted in the show actually occurred a part of the population would lose it completely and go off and live in a silence vowed cult somewhere.  But that's not interesting enough for show runner Damon Lindelof, so the Guilty Remnant has to be a group with goals (yes, I know it's based on a book, I'm still not letting Lindelof off the hook on this one).  Those goals, according to them, are to make people remember.  Remember the event that absolutely no one on the show has been able to move on from, much less forget.

Here's the problem with the Guilty Remnant:  They're hypocrites and they're liars and no one seems to be aware of it.  They vow silence but then they talk.  They say they want people to remember but what they really want is for people to give up, to let their grief consume them and stop living.  In spite of these two very obvious issues, no one else on the show calls them out on it or even appears to notice.  Instead, the show's finale serves as validation for the GR.  They made the good townsfolk remember and they just couldn't handle it.

Ugh.

By the way, does anyone on this show ever, EVER lock their doors?  How is it the GR can just waltz all willy nilly into these houses over and over again?  Is this show set in New York or Pleasantville?

Show runner Damon Lindelof is not one to turn a blind eye to negative reviews.  When Lost tanked on its ending he heard the cries and he answered them.  Fairly or not, The Leftovers, have drawn a lot of comparisons to Lost, most of them disparaging.  I don't see many similarities between the two in the way of show structure but the connections between central characters and the tactic of using emotional triggers as a stand-in for actual resolution are all too familiar.

The music swells, someone cries, and everything is magically alright.

The Leftovers has already been renewed for another season, and I don't know where it will go from here.  The source material is supposedly exhausted so Lindelof will have quite a bit of latitude.  I hope he uses it well, but I probably won't stick around to find out.