The '90s and 2000s Cartoons That Raised Us Were Kind of Unhinged
Billy & Mandy, Freakazoid!, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and more classic cartoons are ready to unlock some very specific childhood memories on Tubi.
There was nothing quite like the after-school cartoon era of the '90s and 2000s. Backpack dropped. Snack acquired. Remote secured. And for the next few hours, we were prepared to accept literally anything. Two kids enslaved the Grim Reaper through a limbo contest? Sounds reasonable. Three kindergarteners were responsible for protecting an entire city? Obviously. A pink dog was confronting unspeakable horrors in rural Kansas every week? Don't change the channel.
And we never stopped to ask why any of this was happening. That was the magic. Classic Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. cartoons could throw monsters, superheroes, secret laboratories, supernatural nightmares, and enough visual chaos to permanently alter a developing sense of humor at us, and we'd just sit there completely locked in waiting to see what happened next. Tubi's Cartoon Nostalgia collection has plenty of those wild, weird nostalgic cartoons ready for another round, including these seven shows that helped make the '90s and 2000s cartoon era feel like anything could happen once the theme song started.
Grab the good spot on the couch. Cartoons are on.
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy
Cartoon Network gave two children the Grim Reaper as a best friend and somehow Grim wasn't even the scariest person in the trio.
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy gave us Death himself walking around the neighborhood with two children like this was a completely normal after-school arrangement. Billy brought enough chaotic optimism to turn every supernatural threat into an opportunity to make things worse, Grim spent most episodes wondering how the literal ruler of death had ended up babysitting, and Mandy could terrify demons, monsters, and probably several adults watching at home with one expression.
And we ate it up. The Underworld was basically another field-trip destination. Ancient curses were minor inconveniences. Grim's scythe was apparently something children could be trusted around. The Cartoon Network favorite made the macabre feel hilariously ordinary, which may explain why an entire generation developed such a casual relationship with spooky things.
Freakazoid!
Long before “brain rot,” doomscrolling, and having 37 tabs open became part of the internet experience, there was Freakazoid.
The '90s animated series Freakazoid! transforms teenager Dexter Douglas after a computer accident uploads an overwhelming amount of internet information into his brain, creating a superhero with extraordinary abilities and the general energy of someone who has consumed every piece of content online simultaneously. Then the show just...runs with it.
Watching it decades later feels bizarrely prophetic. Freakazoid has information about everything, the attention span for almost none of it, and enough chaotic energy to make the average social-media feed look restrained. Somehow this 1990s cartoon understood internet brain before the rest of us had internet brain.
Dexter's Laboratory
Behind one completely ordinary bedroom sits an enormous secret laboratory filled with technology capable of changing the world. Unfortunately, Dexter has a sister.
Dexter's Laboratory turns sibling warfare into science fiction as boy genius Dexter spends his days building inventions that Dee Dee can somehow locate, touch, and catastrophically interfere with almost immediately. Dexter may have robots, lasers, and enough computing power to make NASA jealous, but none of it can defeat the natural curiosity of one older sister asking the most dangerous question in the known universe: “Ooooh, what does this button do?”
That's the beauty of the classic Cartoon Network series. Dexter can understand advanced science while remaining completely incapable of accepting that maybe, just maybe, his own ego contributes to the problem. Add Mandark, Dee Dee's interpretive chaos, and that completely unexplained accent everybody simply accepted, and the laboratory is officially reopened.
The Powerpuff Girls
“Sugar, spice, and everything nice” still sounds incomplete because an entire generation is waiting to yell: CHEMICAL X.
The Powerpuff Girls convinced us there was nothing unusual about Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup finishing kindergarten and immediately clocking into their second job as Townsville's entire superhero infrastructure. One minute they were fighting over something sisters fight about. The next the Mayor was calling because a 40-foot monster had arrived downtown.
And somehow we never worried about the labor laws involved. We were too busy deciding which Powerpuff Girl we were. Blossom people knew. Bubbles defenders were ready. Buttercup kids had already chosen violence. Then Mojo Jojo started monologuing, HIM floated onscreen being genuinely unsettling, and the girls went back to saving the world before bedtime. There's a reason this '90s Cartoon Network trio still has people picking their Powerpuff Girl decades later.
Courage the Cowardly Dog
At some point, we need to acknowledge the obvious: this was a children’s horror cartoon.
Courage the Cowardly Dog strands one very anxious pink dog in the Middle of Nowhere with sweet Muriel, perpetually irritated Eustace, and apparently every demon, monster, alien, ghost, and unexplained nightmare capable of locating their farmhouse. Courage is terrified approximately all the time, and honestly, have you seen what visits this family? Correct response, but he still throws himself into danger whenever Muriel needs him.
That's what makes the Cartoon Network cult favorite hit differently now. Courage isn't brave because he stops being scared. He's brave because he's absolutely terrified and does the thing anyway. Of course, realizing that emotional lesson required surviving King Ramses, Freaky Fred and several images that had no business appearing immediately before bedtime. For plenty of future horror fans, the gateway may have been one extremely stressed pink dog.
Ed, Edd n Eddy
Before “side hustle” entered the vocabulary, three boys in a cul-de-sac were already building an entrepreneurial empire. The empire was unsuccessful.
Ed, Edd n Eddy follows Ed, Double D, and Eddy through an endless series of schemes designed to achieve one incredibly important financial objective: buy jawbreakers. Every new business venture inevitably becomes more elaborate than the last, and every failure sends them right back to the drawing board while the rest of the neighborhood watches with varying levels of irritation.
There are no superpowers or secret identities here. The cul-de-sac is the whole universe, and somehow that's enough. Kevin is calling somebody a dork. Rolf is delivering another sentence nobody fully understands. Plank remains an icon. And the Eds are already planning the next scam because resilience apparently comes naturally when candy is involved. LinkedIn would've loved these boys.
Animaniacs
You laughed at Animaniacs as a kid. Then you watched it again as an adult and went: Wait. Was that joke always there? Yes. Yes, it was.
The classic '90s animated series unleashes Yakko, Wakko, and Dot across the Warner Bros. lot, where slapstick, songs, celebrity parodies, history lessons, and jokes aimed several tax brackets above the target audience somehow coexist. The Warner siblings can derail practically any situation they enter, while characters like Pinky and the Brain turn attempted world domination into another perfectly reasonable children's-cartoon subplot.
And we happily followed wherever they went. Kids got the chaos. Adults got another entire layer of references underneath it. And somewhere between the songs and nonsense, Yakko probably taught you geography. Educational television, technically.