http://www.heavy.com/post...toons-4395

The 20 Worst Saturday Morning Cartoons


You know, it's easy to look back at the past through rose-colored glasses and claim that everything was better when we were kids, but guess what: it wasn't. In fact, things were objectively worse in a lot of ways (are you really going to tell me that a broken-down Nintendo Entertainment System is better than an Xbox 360?). But one thing will always be true: Saturday morning cartoons suck. For every masterpiece like a Ren & Stimpy, there's 20 completely abysmal abortions that kids watch because kids are stupid. In fact, here's the 20 worst Saturday morning cartoons now!



The Rosey And Buddy Show - America's television geniuses tried to make a cartoon about a young Roseanne Barr not once but twice. Seriously, this reads like somebody lost a bet- "Man, I dare you to either drink this entire bottle of Tabasco sauce without throwing up or produce a full-length cartoon about Roseanne and Tom Arnold as kids." Watch this clip and you'll wish he'd taken the Tabasco.



Rickety Rocket - What could possibly be offensive about an African-American family that traveled through space in a barely functional brown rocket with gigantic lips? I'm surprised the sensitivity geniuses at Ruby-Spears didn't make the damn thing run on watermelon juice.



Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos - Hey, Internet? Shut up about Chuck Norris. He's just a dude with some good facial hair who did OK at karate and starred in some bad movies. He's not the second coming of Bill Brasky or anything. Especially with this atrocious 80s cartoon, which paired him up with some racially diverse stereotypes to clumsily combat international terrorism.


Rubik The Amazing Cube - How do you cash in on a plastic puzzle with no visible personality at all? Make him a magical alien elf with no arms that lives with an indiscriminately Hispanic family and grants wishes! Surprisingly it's worse than that description would make it seem.


Lazer Tag Academy - Lazer Tag ruled, FUIUD. Running around blasting your friends in the chest sensor, weird hillbillies opening up "Lazer Tag Arenas" in abandoned warehouses with lots of blacklights and sheet metal, it was awesome. So why did the Lazer Tag cartoon not feature ass-blasting cyborg soldiers but instead a magical girl from the future who uses a lazer wand to manipulate matter? That's like if My Little Pony was about savage hoof-on-skull accidents.


Laverne And Shirley Join The Army - Okay, when America's defense is contingent on two homely broads from Milwaukee and a talking pig, we might as well just roll out the red carpet and let Osama Bin Laden host the Oscars. What's next, Laverne And Shirley Cure Cancer?


ProStars - Three of the greatest athletes in the world team up to fight crime! But because this is Saturday morning cartoons, Bo Jackson is reduced to a mongoloid Hulk, Wayne Gretzky is a mullet with an eating disorder and Michael Jordan uses technological gadgets instead of, oh, being a million feet tall.


Highlander: The Animated Series - How exactly do you adapt a cult classic movie about cutting people's heads off to gain their powers into an all-ages cartoon? Not like this. Instead of beheading his foes to gain their Quickening, Quentin McLeod... shares with them. Yes. Forget all the lightning-shooting sword badassery, let's share.


Hammerman - By the time this was on the air, MC Hammer had already passed through the world of one-hit wonderdom into being a cultural footnote at best, so releasing a cartoon series that was seemingly animated by spastics wasn't a career-saver.


Johnny Test - Why, yes, I was looking for a soulless, horribly-animated Dexter's Laboratory rip-off with all of the style and humor torn out with a pair of rusty pliers. Thanks, Canada, for making that happen.


Street Sharks - In the beginning, there were Ninja Turtles. And God looked down on the Ninja Turtles and saw that lo, they made a pile of money, and it was good. And then Satan created about six million rip-off cartoons with talking, fighting animals, and picking the worst of the lot is like picking what kind of cancer you want to die of (the kind that gives you a permanent boner). Street Sharks wins because it was the loudest and ugliest of the lot.


Turbo Teen - On the surface, this ain't so bad - a kid can turn into a car! Screw riding the bus, Mom, I'm going to turn myself into a car and not even go to school, because I'm a car! Unfortunately, Turbo Teen's life kind of sucked because he couldn't control his automorphosis, changing form whenever he got too hot and shifting back whenever his car form got too cold. Worst (and most fatal) ski vacation ever.


Loonatics Unleashed - You know what kids love? They love it when things are extreme! How else to explain Loonatics Unleashed, a hideous nightmare that took classic WB characters like Bugs Bunny and recast them as far-future crimefighters with lots of sharp angles. Did the world really need "Tech E. Coyote?" The world did not.


Butt-Ugly Martians - Okay, there was a period there when animation studios could do CGI and it was sort of affordable, but everything looked like a lumpy PlayStation cutscene. Butt-Ugly Martians sums that era up in a nutshell. Three blue heaps from space come to Earth and wow! Hamburgers! Combining every dull 00s cliche into a steaming turd of aggressive pain.


Rambo - If you watched First Blood Part 2 as a kid without your parents knowing, you saw like six million people get killed. And if your only exposure to the death machine that is John Rambo was this bizarre cartoon, you probably didn't see it coming. Unfortunately, Rambo's battles against ninjas, robots and ninja robots weren't considered canon for the later films.


Waynehead - So with every crime the Wayans Brothers have done to the art of film, why would you get one of them to make a cartoon for children? Waynehead was the brainchild of Damon Wayans, who figured that what America really needed was a hydrocephalic inner-city youth with a clubfoot to make us feel better in post-Kurt Cobain America. It didn't work.


Beverly Hills Teens - Before Laguna Beach was a glimmer in some asshole's eye, there was this animated portrait of rich wastrels living in th' 90210. Unfortunately, a space-time warp resulted in the creation of Spencer Pratt in this universe, and the show was cancelled before any more such creatures could leak out.


Bakugan - So first there was Pokemon, and while it didn't make a lot of sense at least it was sort of inoffensive and had that one monster that looked like three dongs coming out of a hole in the ground. And then there was Yu-Gi-Oh, which was like Pokemon with bigger hair and more screaming and less comprehension, and now for the monstrous brainlords of the 2010s there's Bakugan, which is like an explosion of dictionaries in a hairspray factory.


Yo Yogi! - "There's no way today's youth-drones could appreciate the whimsy of classic Yogi Bear," quoth a hopefully now dead Hanna-Barbera programming executive, "so let's make him a teenager, put him in a mall and have him solve mysteries." Then they gave Yogi a blazer with the sleeves rolled up and 90s Cliche Bingo was achieved.


The Gary Coleman Show - Everybody's favorite genetic mistake, long after Diff'rent Strokes ended, couldn't even get work in live action, so Hanna-Barbera decided to toss him in this bizarre animated show where he played an angel sent to earn his wings by helping children against the machinations of Satan - uh, I mean, Hornswoggle. God: pretty weird sense of humor, dude.

----

I vaguely remember this one....

Turbo Teen and Beverly Hills Teens don't belong on that list. I haven't seen Lazer Tag Academy or Rubik since they initially aired. I remember thinking they were only OK, so they must have sucked.

Uggh... I remember several of these.

I'm surprised, though, that Mr. T wasn't mentioned. T as coach traveling the world -- by bus -- to fight crime with a team of itinerant competitive gymnast children has to be one of the weirdest premises I've ever seen.
[Edited 3/18/10 3:09am]

Pro Stars? on the bad list? seriously? I used to LOVE Pro Stars. It used to be in the same lineup with Wish Kid.

Michael says it's slam time, Pro Stars-All stars. Wayne's hot, slap shot. Bo knows where to go. Prooo-Stars- Allll-Stars. Pro-Stars. One of the best cartoon themes ever.

bboy87 said:

Yep....used to be on CBS, I think w/ Where's Waldo.

Man you forgot Streetfrogs, I remember watching it about 1989, and it was clearly based around Black ghetto stereotypes, and ridiculous cliches "Hey man stop lillypaddin around".

I looked up "Rickety Rocket and nearly died of laughter, that was some stereotypical shit there, now I know what Jimmie Walker did after he left good times. All the episodes are about Voodoo Machines and Zombies, I get the drift already.

Wait....no, that was the other Rosanne cartoon that I'm thinking of.

Lammastide said:

If you say something bad about Mr. T's show, I'll have to jump through the internet and cut you.

I haven't seen that show since it aired, but when I looked this up I was singing and humming along:

Huggiebear said:

Yeah, but at least it inspired this line:

"Rickety Rocket was my favorite cartoon,
After marriage, the honeymoon,
I'll be damned, gag me with a spoon,
Who loves Popeye? Alice the Goon!"

AlexdeParis said:

Man, I used to LOVE that show! I'd forgotten it for years, and somehow it came up in a conversation I had with my wife and brother-in-law. We must've laughed for an hour at how silly it all was.

AnckSuNamun said:

Little Rosie!

Ok first off Waynehead was the shit.
Second.... Laverne and Shirley had a cartoon?

DanceWme said:

Yep

Back when in '95 and '96, Cartoon Network had this block called "Cartoonpalooza" which was on from Friday 10pm to Saturday morning and they would show all that shit That's how I learned about The Gary Coleman Show

bboy87 said:

i LOVE Johnny Test!!!

I would add Fat Albert too, I used to love it back in the day, but watched an episode now, and it was terrible, feel good style nonsense and the cartoons were walking stereotypes, Rudy the 15 year old pimp wannabe and Fat Albert who loks at least 20 (They make him out to be about 13 or 14 I think), and then theres the fact they all look really ugly (Come on those lips are beyond belief especially Mushmouth, the dude has a hat covering his lips with eyeholes, and Alberts own very Juju sized lips, meaning he speaks like Barry White). The cartooning was cheap and nasty and Bill Cosby came across as a preening Uncle Tom. The cartoon was a bad series of feel good stereotypes (Having a gang house in a rubbish tip?, pink buildings, the ghetto, black slang and the sense that all of the cosby kids sans maybe Bill and weird Harold are buffoons).

How is MC Hammer's cartoon not on this list?

Captain Planet

maybe I'm getting old but most of the stuff now

Most of the so-called saturday morning cartoons of today are the worse

StonedImmaculate said:

But it is, it was called Hammerman, the Rapoleon episode is pretty funny.

bboy87 said:

x 100

DanceWme said:

Damn I miss Waynehead.

Lammastide said:

Stop. Right. There. Mr.T pities anyone that doesn't see his superior awesomeNESS, sucka!
[Edited 4/4/10 17:52pm]

DanceWme said:

Waynehead wasn't so bad, but it was kind of boring at times, the theme song was the shit!!!!!

bboy87 said:

I always liked the part with the homeless dude clucking like a chicken!

I used to watch Hammer man all the time when I was at university.
Wasn't the worst cartoon I've ever seen.
[Edited 4/5/10 2:55am]

Roger Ramjet with that horrible themesong, you used to hear thousand times each saturday morning.

new kids on the block cartoon, mostly because it's about the new kids on the block (now they are middle age men on a boat)

Ommigod Mr T was the shiznit!!!