Only ’90s kids will remember the great plethora of shows in the second age of golden entertainment we had to sear our eyes and rot our brains with from the likes of Johnny Bravo, Recess, Batman: The Animated Series, Ed, Edd, n Eddy, Dexter’s Laboratory, and more. For decades prior the American media was producing influential works such as Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, and Popeye, who all taught us the importance of eating spinach to kick ass.

Growing up at the turn of the 21st century I never had a dearth of cartoon antics as I tuned into favorites such as Nickelodeon’s Spongebob Squarepants and Cartoon Network’s squandered jewels Teen Titans, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and Courage the Cowardly Dog. The latter show, too short-lived (1999-2002), was not only the first animated show mastered in HDTV, but was also my personal gateway into the horror genre and the perfect union of the few types of media I can tolerate: horror and animation. I have grown to enjoy documentaries and on occasions some sci-fi/fantasy, like the shared mass consensus, but my love for animation has stayed with me since childhood. Animation has the capacity to coalesce many and all genres, with exceedingly vast creative freedom managing a balancing act to gather substantial viewership.

American cartoonist Matt Groening has mastered the formula with his lovable familial trope The Simpsons since 1989, and ten years after, the multi-talented Seth MacFarlane conspicuously gave us Family Guy. The two animators have since created Futurama (1999; 2023 reboot) and Disenchantment (2018), and American Dad! (2005) and The Cleveland Show (2009) that have all maintained their distinguished art styles, respectively. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad! (one of my favorite shows) hold several television longevity records, with The Simpsons at 745 episodes as of last month. Groening and MacFarlane’s comedic shows have warranted primetime programming slots under Fox, providing American families like mine a time to gather around the television well before the age of streaming.

The famed crossover episode, The Simpsons Guy (Family Guy Season 13, Episode 1)

This has been the paramount project of the wildly irreverent animation series South Park in their latest deal with MTV Entertainment Studios under Paramount+, sardonically titled The Streaming Wars. Since 1997, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have kept up with the most recent cultural developments, provoking and prodding all topics no matter how sensitive or off-limits they may seem. Their pilot episode “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe” was made using construction paper which laid the foundation for their unrivaled and crude animation style reflective of their raunchy and juvenile humor yet unpretentious social commentary. The simplicity of their style in the shapes of Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman is hardly conventional among its successful counterparts that are drawn frame-by-frame overseas, often in Korean animation studios. Off the coast of California in an intimate studio, changes to the animation of South Park have evolved to rely on CG, but even with advancing technological assets, the stylization of South Park remains rigid and deliberate. Despite its small production team, their lead time is incredibly short, providing a unique opportunity to parody and offend its audiences on current events in a matter of 6 days. For more than 25 years, South Park offers a rare quality of contemporaneous satire from the seeming lack of quality in its style, the artful epitome of Stylistic Suck.

Another subversive comedy I would personally convict to this stylistic choice is the infamous and much more recent series Rick and Morty. Debuted in 2013, Rick and Morty is animated using a vector-based 2D-puppet software, which implicates choosing from a myriad of formalistic permutations in order to execute proper flow and movement between frames. Despite its coarse style, any given sequence takes the animation studio weeks of conscious effort which likely yields to its relative episodic scarcity amongst the aforementioned programs it stands at the top with. The popular misadventures of Rick and Morty take place in bizarre worlds full of wickedly truculent and exceedingly grotesque demonstrations of all that could possibly happen. In addition to its expansive alien designs and the gruesome transfiguration of Pickle Rick, the humans of Rick and Morty are drawn intentionally strange, shedding traits of normality with asymmetry highlighted in their Style Guide. The tiny details within each character model express an overall eccentricity, if not already evident from its staunch brutality and bitter banter. Simple yet effective, the Rick and Morty style illustrates this precept and delivers its prevailing messages of postmodernism without the need for superfluous flair.

With the prodigious success of Rick and Morty came the even cruder pastiche Bushworld Adventures aired by programming parent (and big brother of Cartoon Network) Adult Swim on April Fool’s in 2018. The short featured the titular characters Reek and Mordi in Australia that confused, shocked, and horrified their cult following, some wondering if this was a fever dream or psychedelic trip out of its creator Michael Cusack. However, this is nothing out of the ordinary for Cusack, who went on to create another Adult Swim April Fool’s stunt with the premier of YOLO and critically acclaimed Smiling Friends in 2020. By popular demand, Smiling Friends released its first season in 2022 and shortly thereafter renewed for season 2 with its co-creator Zach Hadel. While Cusack’s deranged, self-taught art style is at the forefront of Bushworld Adventures and YOLO, the art direction of Smiling Friends is the half-and-half blend of Hadel and Cusack in their vision of celebrating the limitless possibilities of cartoons and animation. The duo primarily use Macromedia Flash to design each episode bordering on unadulterated nightmare fuel and horror, with apt 3D CGI and live action to effectively add another element of chaos and absurdity. The draw for many are Hadel’s (voice of cynical Charlie) and Cusack’s (voice of peppy Pim) artistic intent to simply “get out there and make someone smile” (The Boss, pilot episode) with a fun and colorful show. Each installment administers 11 minutes of slapstick shenanigans without relying heavily on satirical commentary on the “harsh reality of life” (Desmond, pilot episode) that much of episodic adult animation tries to accomplish. The Seinfeld no “hugging and learning” credo is vastly evident in the dark domain of Smiling Friends, despite its title. The jarring, contrasting cartoon styles from the two artists deviate from the benchmark productions of today, yet have much more to say about the world we live in brimming with both beauty and filth in one big incoherent mess. The unsettling scenery is reminiscent to the land of Salad Fingers, another childhood favorite made with Flash. The legendary 2004 web series follows the sinister stories of a green creature that made the Internet search for a meaning behind its videos, even when creator David Firth suggested there isn’t one. Firth, weary of the “bland culture”, wanted to break the mold and more importantly, keep creating under his own liberties. The audiences of Salad Fingers and Smiling Friends can take enjoyment in being administered a Rorschach test by attempting to dissect meaning and significance for all its deformity. Decidedly, the pith of all art is the evocation of emotion. In praise of “bad” or crude style, the quality of many of these late night delights has prompted genuine reactions of disgust, laughter, contempt, fear, and even inspiration for the artist and average enjoyer.

The Boss (left, Cusack’s style) shows Pim (right, Hadel’s style) the boundless forest of creative kindle (Smiling Friends Season 1, Episode 4)

Two weeks ago as per tradition, I watched Adult Swim’s 2023 April Fools Broadcast, leading the night with an announcement to let Artificial Intelligence take the reigns. For the first minute of the special, Smiling Friends returned to Adult Swim, allegedly created by AI, before being interrupted by the network’s trademark intermission captions explaining, “That got out of hand quickly”. Perhaps literally, art is now out of our hands with the emergence of Dall-E 2 and other deep learning models like ChatGPT. In the fourth episode of South Park’s latest season, Deep Learning was satirically co-written with “ChatGPT dude” to bring awareness to this technological revolution and its civic consequences in overt meta-humor. Stan’s culminating problem with abusing ChatGPT was resolved with ChatGPT itself, promptly arriving at a banal conclusion that felt contrived and incomplete from AI’s contribution. The basis of AI relies on the existing models prototyped by the human imagination, which as it stands, does not live up to the artistry and painstaking mental process to make meaningful (and also lack thereof) art. And in praise of “bad” art, originality and creativity remains a moonshot for AI focused primarily on mimicking “great works of art”, and making something beautiful from scratch is a distant frontier.

While the call to open AI is certainly a loud one, I am a traditionalist when it comes to my work. Personally, I’ve used Dall-E once (I was turned off by its limitations–I gave it a prompt involving nudity to imitate Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and given a warning) and I used ChatGPT for the first time after the South Park episode in another experimental manner to observe its restrictions. Anything worth doing is also hard, which is why Solaria Chip has never been tampered with AI, even for the clear advantage of editing its contents and wrangling with frontend web development. I am the amalgamation of all the cognitive information I’ve gathered by experiencing, reading, and watching, evident in this longer article about adult animation, with all its imperfections and badness.

And since this is entirely my article with pure creative freedom, I’m compelled to list more influential cartoons and honorable mentions that are a must-watch for your next brain rot. At the very least, these are a lot more appealing to the eye. ;)

Cartoon Network
✵ Adventure Time ✵ Regular Show ✵ The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy ✵ The Powerpuff Girls ✵ Justice League ✵ Xiaolin Showdown ✵ Totally Spies! ✵ Early seasons of Young Justice

Adult Swim
✵ Mike Tyson Mysteries ✵ The Boondocks ✵ Robot Chicken

Adult Swim’s Toonami
✵ Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood ✵ Death Note ✵ Attack on Titan ✵ Early seasons of Bleach

Netflix Originals
✵ Bojack Horseman ✵ The Midnight Gospel ✵ Castlevania ✵ Arcane ✵ Love, Death + Robots ✵ Inside Job

Nickelodeon
✵ Avatar: The Last Airbender ✵ The Legend of Korra ✵ Invader Zim ✵ Danny Phantom ✵ Rugrats

Disney
✵ Kim Possible ✵ House of Mouse ✵ Star Wars: Visions ✵ Madeline

DC Universe/HBO Max
✵ Harley Quinn

FX
✵ Early seasons of Archer

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