The Worst Shows You Used to Watch When You Were a Kid - I.E. Childhood shows that make you cringe in retrospect.

[Captain Syrup]

Garfield finds him after realizing that he is rather bored without the annoying mutt

"In a strange way, you come to like your enemies rather better than your friends." - Gore Vidal

 

[Captain Marvelous]

For me that would be Transformers Energon.

That show was really weak, the animation was bad. I think it is the worst western show of the franchise (if we look over the weaknesses of the G1 show due to being a 1980s toy commercial) and the weakest link in the Unicron trilogy. Also the low budget anime humor didn't help either. Oh also Planet sized Optimus boxing with Unicron. Okay, wtf.

The designs were okay, and it was watchable as a teen. For staying on model the 3D was a good idea, but the implementation suffered due to a lack of budget. Sometimes they pulled hand drawn parts when they wanted to show off emotions, but that just shown how much everything would have looked like if it was animated like Armada was prior. At least Cybertron, the sequel to Energon improved a lot on the 3D and made it look better and more expressive.

It even had an interesting 3 way conflict, but the implementation could have been a lot better.

That's not even getting into all of the changes the dub made to the story.

 

[Blamo]

That's not even getting into all of the changes the dub made to the story.

The dub massacred it.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I didn't watch it as a kid and I only watched it because it WAS absolute trash, in my memory it ranks among the worst thing I have ever seen: The New Adventures of Robin Hood. I can't believe how bad that shitshow was. It also had Christopher Lee during his slump and I felt sorry for him.

Timestamped, just watch one minute of it, it's kind of funny.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

LAN Jam was godawful. Basically it was Let's Play before it was a thing, it was a gameshow where the contestants are a bunch of kids playing video games against each other. You could have the same experience by going round your mate's house and watching him playing on his console and ignoring you asking for a shot of it.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Not 100% convinced that even kids liked the Ninja Turtles cartoon. The characters, the theme song, the toys, the video games, other merchandise: sure, but not so much the actual cartoon. The 5-episode pilot is actually pretty good, then it kind of doddered along for a season or so before S&P turned it into a boring comedy where nobody got punched. Anybody who claims to remember a single episode from the "Mikey has a grappling hook" era (ie, most of the show's run) is probably within the clutches of the Mandela Effect. I'm pretty sure it's basically Candle Cove irl and if you buy the full DVD set, the last 9/10ths is static.

This is exactly it for me. I might have actually only seen parts of the first season when they first aired. I couldn't always watch it since it was a Saturday Morning show and not syndicated, so I had to compete with my parents for the TV (guess who usually lost). But I came back to checking it out again when I was going through what childhood shows I wanted to get discs for (I posted about this in another thread). Wow, the show absolutely did not hold up, unlike some others I watched. I think the 2003 series is what I thought I remembered, not something sanitized for 3 year olds.

 

[Pokemonquistador2]

I didn't watch it as a kid and I only watched it because it WAS absolute trash, in my memory it ranks among the worst thing I have ever seen: The New Adventures of Robin Hood. I can't believe how bad that shitshow was. It also had Christopher Lee during his slump and I felt sorry for him.

Timestamped, just watch one minute of it, it's kind of funny.

I take it this was one of those Hercules and Xena ripoffs that got popular in the 90s when CG finally got cheap enough for TV. It looks almost wholesome with its unabashed heterosexuality and its mostly white cast. And Christopher Lee's in it too? Sold!

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

At least Passions was successful. I watched Sunset Beach.

Here, Sunset Beach was on right before or right after something I watched, so I caught snippets of the former. The show seemed like it had too many subplots going on at once (unless that's expected for a soap opera, IDK). At the same time, the cops were oblivious that one of their own had kidnapped a co-worker's girl friend while some rich girl's boyfriend gets both her and her mom pregnant at roughly the same time. No wonder soaps are losing popularity.

Beetlejuice. They really wanted to capitalize on the popularity of this movie so badly, but the cartoon was hamfisted boring tripe. No wonder I liked it so much.

The only thing I liked about Beetlejuice was when he'd give his blood-curdling scream.

I agree with all this mostly. MASK... I think the mecha animation is still pretty impressive (it was outsourced to Japan.) The characters just seem so flat and utilitarian, especially the heroes. The villains are somewhat enjoyable given they can bicker with each other. But DIC really did the show a disservice by cheaping out on the voice acting. The had five Canucks do all the voices for the show and it showed. The "ethnic" characters are the most cringy to watch now.

Most of MASK's ethnic characters are a bit stereotypical, unfortunately. However, two of them seem to be the exception. Hondo McLain is a black history teacher by trade and MASK's weapons strategist if I recall. His knowledge usually proves useful and doesn't seem to be portrayed as the token black character. Dr. Julio Lopez is used for his medical skill on at least one mission. I'm not sure if he ever used his knowledge of cryptography, but I don't remeber him being tokenized as much as Jacques LaFluer or (racing characters) Nevada Rushmore and Boris Bushkin. The latter I can understand being stereotypical since US/Russia relations hadn't quite thawed yet.

Speaking of which, the racing series added Israeli-British actor Brian George as both Lester Sludge and Ali Bombay -- an interesting combination of opposites to voice.

Another show I watched when it was airing in the late 80s that I want to check out again is COPS, which had a funny Edward G Robinson imitating bad guy which is still a meme between myself and one friend I still have from those days. But maybe it won't hold up like so many of the others.

COPS always reminded me of an animated Dragnet for kids, except that the villains were more bumbling and incompetent in keeping with the 80s theme of minimal cartoon violence.

Edited to add: The one thing that I didn't like about COPS was Dr. Badvibes' physical appearance. Although I knew it was a cartoon set in a cybernetic-enhanced future, his oversized brain being enclosed in a see-through dome just looked creepy and uncomfortable, if not wrong on some sort of level. Him having a literal brainstorm inside that dome on at least one occasion (if not more) was more cringe than gimmick to watch when it took place.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Here, Sunset Beach was on right before or right after something I watched, so I caught snippets of the former. The show seemed like it had too many subplots going on at once

You're not wrong. Time that should have been spent building up the core 'families' was wasted on a carnival of teen actors, most of them useless. Certainly the guy playing "Sean" only got the gig due to nepotism. They must've dug up Kam Heskin waiting tables at Olive Garden.

Lesley-Anne Down (British actress) tore it up on SB. One of my earliest celeb crushes. That was before she went under the knife, so she looked great. (She should sue her plastic surgeon.) Also had a modest film career:

 

[Calandrino]

Yeah, I vaguely remember the controversy. They had weapons, but only used them on robots. Ebert still trashed them for promoting violence and whatnot. (You know, looking back, he was a moralizing pain in the ass.)

I'm not plugged into TMNT. It produced some good games, that's all I know. And the Technodrome theme is lit.

Well, using weapons on robots is where they started. They quickly moved on to not using weapons on robots, and then not even really fighting at all. iirc the 90s Spider-man cartoon, among others, was under an edict to never show anybody getting hit, so Spider-man could only tie people up and stuff. TMNT probably fell under similar restrictions. It was, no lie, less violent than Animaniacs or Spongebob, where characters could still get hit with mallets or have anvils dropped on their heads.

It was a big deal for characters to not do anything dangerous for kids to imitate. Since kids regularly smack each other with nunchakus, Michelangelo's nunchakus were removed from the show and he used a grappling hook instead. Of course children seldom hit each other with sticks or endanger themselves with blades, so staffs and swords were ok. In the UK, the title was censored to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, because of the n-word's problematic history in feudal Japan, and the turtles were stated to be devout Muslims who resisted Shredder's racist "Dimension X first" policies.

Writing duties were handed over to soccer moms in focus groups, and this how they did fight scenes (timestamped):

The action cartoon about mutant turtles fighting Shredder's robot ninjas that millennials think they remember lasted like 15 episodes, maybe. As a fad, TMNT was spent before the mid 90s. The show ran for 10 seasons, ending in 1996. At the time, popular culture wasn't a shambling husk running entirely on the fumes of decades-old IPs and fashions changed regularly, so that's even longer than it sounds, on the shortlist of longest-running cartoons up to that date. By the end, the cartoon was completely retooled in response to the success of 1) Power Rangers and 2) Batman: The Animated Series. No one has ever watched an episode of that to confirm if it's as dumb as it sounds.

I didn't watch it as a kid and I only watched it because it WAS absolute trash, in my memory it ranks among the worst thing I have ever seen: The New Adventures of Robin Hood. I can't believe how bad that shitshow was. It also had Christopher Lee during his slump and I felt sorry for him.

Timestamped, just watch one minute of it, it's kind of funny.

That intro narration is something. "Hundreds of years ago in England, the new adventures of Robin Hood happened," says a guy with an American accent.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Writing duties were handed over to soccer moms in focus groups, and this how they did fight scenes (timestamped):

The action cartoon about mutant turtles fighting Shredder's robot ninjas that millennials think they remember lasted like 15 episodes, maybe. As a fad, TMNT was spent before the mid 90s. The show ran for 10 seasons, ending in 1996. At the time, popular culture wasn't a shambling husk running entirely on the fumes of decades-old IPs and fashions changed regularly, so that's even longer than it sounds, on the shortlist of longest-running cartoons up to that date. By the end, the cartoon was completely retooled in response to the success of 1) Power Rangers and 2) Batman: The Animated Series. No one has ever watched an episode of that to confirm if it's as dumb as it sounds.

Wow that is bad. Way worse than I remembered. When I did my test rewatch, I last maybe 5-6 episodes and decided 'nope'. I shudder to think what they forced on kids unlucky enough to see it in the later seasons.

One of the shows that I decided that did hold up was Real Ghostbusters, but only up to the 2nd season. Amazingly, the exact same thing that happened to Real Ghostbusters as TMNT (which started off bad, unlike Real Ghostbusters, but at least there was some fighting) - they toned down the sassyness of their secretary Janine, the ghosts they were busted stopped being mentioned as dead people (instead they were more generic otherwordly monsters), Slimer became more of a pet instead of a curiosity, Peter Venkman stopped being a womanizer, etc.

But just like with TMNT, I never knew anyone who saw Real Ghostbusters after the 2nd, syndicated season. I assumed it had gone off the air, a treasured show from my childhood. I had no idea it limped along as a crippled S&P product until 1991.

 

[Travoltron]

Most of MASK's ethnic characters are a bit stereotypical, unfortunately. However, two of them seem to be the exception.

I don't find most of them stereotypical on paper. Like Bruce Sato wasn't the karate guy, Gloria Baker was.

But when Bruce Sato was given a voice, he was spouting Oriental wisdom in a sing-songy "Ah soooooo"-like falsetto. I'll have to watch it again to see if the other ethnic characters are as cringe or not. I remember Nevada Rushmore sounded like Tonto.

I'm not sure what ethnicity Ali Bombay was supposed to be. "Ali" is Arabic, Bombay is an exonym for Mumbai. And then he wore a turban like a Sikh.

When it comes to Real Ghostbusters, Phelous actually did some good retrospectives of the series. Here's the one on how and why ABC fucked up the show.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

As Told by Ginger. Creepy as fuck energy behind it.

 

[UncleFezziesPantsPuppet]

One that comes to mind is Wings. I used to enjoy it when I was younger. I tried watching it again, and couldn’t get through one episode without turning it off. The later seasons of Night Court as well.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

I don't find most of them stereotypical on paper. Like Bruce Sato wasn't the karate guy, Gloria Baker was.

But when Bruce Sato was given a voice, he was spouting Oriental wisdom in a sing-songy "Ah soooooo"-like falsetto. I'll have to watch it again to see if the other ethnic characters are as cringe or not. I remember Nevada Rushmore sounded like Tonto.

I'm not sure what ethnicity Ali Bombay was supposed to be. "Ali" is Arabic, Bombay is an exonym for Mumbai. And then he wore a turban like a Sikh.

Good point about Bruce. He may not have been the karate guy; however, he was shown to be an engineer during a time when the Japanese were stereotypically seen as engineering experts. It also didn't help that he seemed to quote at least one Confucius-like cryptic saying any time he was part of a mission and that his Satoisms usually left his colleagues more confused than before he said it.

In one of the racing episodes, Ali Bombay is shown to originate from Kandukur, India as seen in the episode "Homeward Bound" (S2E3). Considering the show's writers were dumb enough to show Wichita, Kansas having mountains, I wouldn't be too confident that they even knew whether Ali was Hindu or Sikh.

 

[The Cunting Death]

I'm pretty sure the Raccoons was a legitimate attempt to turn kids into furries:

I cant hate a show with a theme song that fucking good.

 

[MysticMisty]

That intro narration is something. "Hundreds of years ago in England, the new adventures of Robin Hood happened," says a guy with an American accent.

I thought research determined that the modern British accent didn't appear until the 1800's and only as a "fuck you" to America?

 

[Woke Blue Muttlema]

I have two entries of weird shows I watched when I was but a wee aon. They weren't any good and I just remembered they existed today but I feel like honoring them by telling you about them.

Let us start with the least noteworthy: Casper's Scare School. You know Casper, The Friendly Ghost, right? Just a fine old chap minding his business and being the best spooky bruv you could encounter while dating Wednesday Addams in that weird movie. Over a decade ago some madmen decided to bring the cum rag back to the realm of the living in the form of a Canadian 3D animated TV movie. If you were a kid back then I might have triggered some memories of tunning to Cartoon Network and watching weird 3D Canadian cartoons that were very out there. Scare School wasn't the exception. It was bland and that was the main reason when I was preparing to go to primary I either had to watch this or Johnny Test. The plot was that Casper has to prove he can scare people or he will be banished to the Shadow Realm, where he befriends a strong independent zombie and a pretty chill mummy. Think Cory in the House but with monsters and more world domination. Most of what I remember about this show is that the characters moved very funny (like they were running against the wind) and that I once owned a bucket of it for Halloween.
Casper's Scare School spawned a series with two seasons and managed to not keep a single voice actor consistent between them and the movie, kind of like George of the Jungle but instead of a decade between seasons, it was only three years and the series itself started three years after the movie. If you are an animation buff like me you might notice right off the bad that some Indian studio got their hands on this for lack of funding. It is in Prime but you can watch the whole TV movie on YouTube.

Next one is The Garfield Show. God, I fucking hated this one. I don't have any attachment to Garfield whatsoever but even for me, this show felt insulting. Is like having modern Garfield strips being read to you by a senile woman. The show itself is supposed to be a skit show of sorts protagonised by your father's favourite orange cat. The show is boring as fuck and I think I only watched it because Nickelodeon was even worse back then. Despite a good voice cast, the stories didn't register and most of the value of this show is the memes about it.
It has however some historical significance in being the show that was supposed to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the strip and had the crew of Garfield and Friends returning and it was supposed to integrate an animation technique called cell shading, which is 3D replicating a 2D feel. The animation was done by Arguad Inc., a French company that holds the rights for a bunch of French animation and distribution ranging from classics like Tintin, Lucky Luke, and Bafar to more recent properties like Hero: 108 and Code Lyoko. Suffice to say, no one was satisfied with Arguad's work and look almost as lifeless as the TV movies Paws Inc managed to do on their own. You can watch the whole show for free on YouTube in almost any language and it is in Prime and Boomerang.

 

[Calandrino]

Wow that is bad. Way worse than I remembered. When I did my test rewatch, I last maybe 5-6 episodes and decided 'nope'. I shudder to think what they forced on kids unlucky enough to see it in the later seasons.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear. The 1987 Turtles are back, and they're coming to Nintendo Switch! Conspicuously, the announcement trailer is mostly remade content from the two arcade games. I think they know nobody remembers the actual cartoon. It's crazy when I think about it. If e.g. Optimus Prime wore a cowboy hat for 5 seconds in Transformers S27E46 the fanboys will want that as a toy and an alt skin in the new video game, but the ten seasons of TMNT '87 are a hole in space-time that nobody can account for.

I'm pretty sure the Raccoons was a legitimate attempt to turn kids into furries:

I cant hate a show with a theme song that fucking good.

There's no room for doubt that The Raccoons was furry homo trans brainwashing.

Spoiler: lyrics

When darkness falls
Leaving shadows in the night
Don't be afraid
Wipe that fear from your eyes
If a desperate love
Keeps on driving you wrong
Don't be afraid
You're not alone

You can run with us
We've got everything you need
Run with us
We are free
Come with us
I see passion in your eyes
Run with us

When the cold wind blows
Turn your collar to the cold
Don't be ashamed
If you need someone to hold
If you're sinking in quicksand
And it's dragging you down
And you feel you're going under
We'll be around

You can run with us
We've got everything you need
Run with us
We are free
Come with us
I see passion in your eyes
Run with us

When you're behind closed doors
All alone by yourself
And you're longing inside
To be somebody else
You pick up the telephone
And there's no one on the line
Don't be afraid
'Cause there's still time

You can run with us
We've got everything you need
Run with us
We are free
Come with us
I see passion in your eyes
Run with us

Oh-oh-oh, run with us
We've got everything you need
Run with us
We are free
Come with us
I see passion in your eyes
Run with us

Oh-oh-oh, run with us

"Are you emotionally vulnerable, goy? Come with us, your new best friends, and yiff in public bathrooms, you'll feel normal then." If Canada's existence has left you shocked and desperately looking for answers, some kind of an explanation, I think this song is a key part of the puzzle.

 

[Jeff Boomhauer]

As Told by Ginger. Creepy as fuck energy behind it.

I always thought it was boring, then tried to watch it again later as a teenager. I'm assuming it was made to coincide with all the live action Nick shows, because I don't know why anyone would want to watch it. The character designs are awful, even by Klasky-Csupo's standards.

On another note, I stopped watching Rugrats a lot earlier than most people (as in, around age 6 or 7). I dunno, it just grossed me out easily.