On October 1, 1992, Cartoon Network officially launched. Though the cable network is now known for the countless original shows and distinct characters that it has produced over the decades, its humble beginnings were simply as a place for syndicated classics to air on television when they had no place left to do so. Turner Broadcasting, which owned Cartoon Network initially, had access to the library of Hanna-Barbera, meaning they could put The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo in constant rotation, alongside other classics like Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. Though fans enjoyed revisiting these shows or discovering them for the first time, it wouldn’t be what put Cartoon Network on the map.
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What eventually would succeed in bringing Cartoon Network to prominence began today, over thirty years ago. On February 20, 1995, the first episode of What a Cartoon! premiered on Cartoon Network during an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast that was branded as the “World Premiere Toon-In.” This episode kick-started an anthology series of all-new, original cartoons that would quickly become the bedrock of Cartoon Network’s entire library, bringing fan-favorites to life for the first time and starting all-new shows, even with its failures.
What a Cartoon! Gave Cartoon Network All Its Best Shows
The very first short that was broadcast as part of what would become What a Cartoon! was “Meat Fuzzy Lumkins” by Craig McCracken, the cartoon that would mark the world premiere of both the titular villain, but, more importantly, the Powerpuff Girls. New shorts would premiere every Sunday after this, with the second being Genndy Tartakovsky’s “Dexter’s Laboratory.”
As fans of classic Cartoon Network shows can already surmise, the shorts developed for this series would go on to be incredibly influential. A fan vote was even held after the premiere of the original run, with viewers voting on which short should become its own series, with the first winner being Dexter’s Laboratory, which would go on to run for four seasons on Cartoon Network. It was followed by not only The Powerpuff Girls but Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Cow and Chicken (which had its own spinoff series, I.M. Weasel).
Initially, 48 shorts were produced for the initial run of What A Cartoon!, and it gave birth to seven total animated shows with hundreds of episodes each. In an interview with AWN in 2003, What a Cartoon! creator Fred Seibert revealed that “any one” of the shows that spun out of the anthology series “earned enough money for the company to pay for the whole program.”
There’s another contribution that What A Cartoon! made to animation and culture that has been somewhat forgotten over time, though, and it’s in one of the shows that failed to make it past the initial short stage. One of the final shorts to premiere in the initial run of the series was called “Larry and Steve,” an animated short by a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, Seth MacFarlane. In “Larry and Steve,” a bumbling dolt of a man named Larry adopts a talking, intelligent dog, Steve, both of whom are voiced by MacFarlane. The short was a rework of MacFarlane’s thesis film from college, and in case it’s unclear where this is headed, it would become the source material that would inspire the hit series, Family Guy.
It’s clear from watching Larry & Steve that the bones for Family Guy were already in MacFarlane’s mind. Not only do both title characters have nearly identical voices to Peter Griffen and Brian the dog, but it also features cutaway gags that take just seconds of airtime to get a laugh out of the audience. Even wilder than the fact that the short was the prototype for Family Guy is that it was one of the originals produced for What A Cartoon! that went nowhere…at least at the time. As of this writing, Family Guy is still on the air, outlasting every other series from What A Cartoon! by over a decade, and never winning a fan vote initially.
What a Cartoon! Evolved and Continued to Give Us More
When the initial run of shorts produced for What A Cartoon! was completed, the series wrapped up, but Cartoon Network wanted to keep the premise going. As a result, The Cartoon Cartoon Show premiered in 1998, and would eventually release the pilots that would be voted on by fans and go on to become more classic Cartoon Network shows, including Mike, Lu & Og, Sheep in the Big City, Whatever Happened to… Robot Jones?, Codename: Kids Next Door, and, perhaps the biggest, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.
Though The Cartoon Cartoon Show was eventually concluded in 2002, the series would return in 2005, having spawned so many spinoffs and new shows that it could repackage segments from those series as full episodes of the flagship show, wrapping up in 2008. To pay tribute to the importance of the show in their history, Cartoon Network brought back The Cartoon Cartoon Show in 2024.
And here we are over thirty years later, on a day that marked a major change for Cartoon Network and allowed it to become more than just a syndication channel. It could be argued that there are perhaps three choices made for the cable channel that officially made it what it is, including: the premiere of Adult Swim, with its programming for adults; the debut of the Toonami block, that brought anime to American audiences; and the debut of What A Cartoon!, that gave fans characters that they still quote today.
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Image courtesy of Tor Books/Macmillan -
Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme
