Top Nine Cartoons You’d Never Want Your Kids Watching

Cartoons – the shining, billowy beacon of innocence. For all the hopscotch, pigtails and conker fights, the one thing that typifies all our youths is those badly animated, sloppily dubbed 30 minute distractions your parents would literally have killed for.

But like a Mills to a McCartney, we adults quickly learn that just because something looks cute, doesn’t mean it can’t psychologically scar us for life.

So we’ve decided to run down the list of the cartoons that are guaranteed to traumatise your kids. Except the usual ‘list debate’ between everyone here got a little more heated than usual. Voices were raised, kettles were thrown, redundancies were issued (even if they don’t know it yet – Sorry Sally).

So we’re leaving this winner up to YOU. Here’s our own personal shortlists -  but it’s down to you to sound off below with your winner!

Now, over to Matt Risley’s choices…..

….WARNING: SOME OF THESE CLIPS CONTAIN GRAPHIC CARTOON VIOLENCE AND FOUL LANGUAGE….

Ah, Happy Tree Friends. Home to the cuddliest, wuddliest little woodland creatures since the Ewoks got it on with Smurfette (how else would you explain Sulley from Monsters Inc.?) And yes, that was Ewoks.

Plural.

What started as little more than a couple of demented flash-based internet shorts quickly gathered its own rabid fanbase and spawned a series of millions-selling DVDs that, on the face of it, couldn’t get any snugglier.

With a happy hardcore take on the Itchy and Scratchy theme tune, a score that consists of little more than giggly squeaks and a whole gaggle of doe-eyed, brightly coloured pandas, bears and squirrels, Happy Tree Friends harnesses the shock value of the WTF moment when each and every one of these walking cuddly toys is butchered in a number of elaborate and excessively graphic take downs.

Itchy and Scratchy have nothin’ on this. Absolutely brutal.

Ooh, Team America – Isn’t its puppetry great. Isn’t it clever. Aah, Wallace and Gromit – here, have a Bafta. Oh, and while we’re here, why not take an Oscar too. Plasticine stop-frame is so in this year.

Yet Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken, with over 5 years continuous output of meticulous stop-frame animation, is continually and almost universally ignored. Criminal in itself, until you realise that it’s all created using the coolest material known to man. Action figures, baby.

Appropriately enough originating from the brainchild of Dr Evil’s son himself, Seth Green, Robot Chicken rifles through every minor vestige of your childhood, exhuming anything that has somehow managed to remain virtuous and innocent before promptly defiling them straight in front of your eyes in an unrelenting scatter-shot procession of sketches.

Atreyu and Falcor from The Never Ending Story getting tanked up, Optimus Prime undone by the Transformer’s deadliest enemy ‘prostate cancer’, and arguably the greatest sketch of all – Mario and Luigi pootling off the traditional Mario Kart track on a rather unfortunate detour into Grand Theft Auto’s Vice City.

With STDs, hardcore drugs and heartbreak lurking just around the corner, it’s easy to forget that other debilitating, soul-crushing monster ready to pounce on your children the moment they head out into the big bad world.

Not Gary Glitter.

Lawyers.

One look at Ally McBeal’s skeletal gangliness and incessant schizophrenic delusional rantiness should be enough to scare them for life, but Adult Swim’s superhero barrister Harvey Birdman does his darndest to promote the cause.

While not as violent, gory or disgusting as half the entrants on this list, Birdman goes down the Robot Chicken route of subverting and criminalising those innocent, sweet cartoons of yore. As lawyer to many a Hanna-Barbera character, Birdman regularly has to deal with the less tasteful underbelly of these icons’ lives – Scooby Doo busted for marijuana (that gigglin’ woof has NEVER felt natural), Muttley’s tourettes and Fred Flintstone’s somewhat dodgy ‘business’ activities.

Kapeesh?

So that’s the first round over. Whaddya thunk? Now it’s Mac Mommy – Sally McIlhone’s chance to shine (and shock)…

Anyone who knows me only needs to mention the words “Head Pigeon Victim” to see me transformed into a paragon of Zim worship. My life changed the day I watched “Walk For Your Lives” – the episode that cultivated my obsessive Zim-love and the one that remains my favourite. In what other cartoon can you hear a small green alien, posing as a human, dressed as a woman, shouting “Dog with meat! Dog with meat!” as he plunges into an elephant-filled cess-pool.

Exactly.

For awesome lines and hair-brained characters, Zim is always a winner. Not only do you have Gir: the world’s stupidest Robot, fan of piggies and babies and protector of absolutely nothing, there is also the self-obsessed hero himself: Zim, a character with the most iconic cult voice since Darth Vader.

Let’s face it – the subliminal messages Invader Zim projects are hardly child friendly: Fry your friends! Replace their eyeballs with lasers, then harvest their organs and cross-breed them with a cow! Yeah! The show was even linked to the case of Scott Dyleski, who murdered his neighbours wife and denounced by US uber-Christian right wing scaremongerers- not exactly good publicity.

Still students and angsty teens everywhere have cottoned on to this cult phenomena and purchased DVDs and merchandise in abundance. I have Gir earring and shoelaces that I have never worn because I worry too much that they will break/dirty/be stolen by some jealous passer-by and even wrote a Zim tribute song called “Doomy Goodness”. I fear I’ve said too much…

Never has the partnership of feline and canine been so utterly mental as with Ren Höek and Stimpson J. Cat. As a child, I considered the watching of Ren and Stimpy as something akin to an Olympic event. It was painful, but I knew it was for my own good. Just try watching the clip below and tell me you’re not grimacing whilst simultaneously chuckling with inane glee.

Ren and Stimpy’s creator John Kricfalusi pioneered controversial cartoon-ography, even getting sacked for the high level of violence in the episode “Man’s Best Friend”. The show was also groundbreaking for featuring Stimpy’s First Fart – we are unsure whether it was the first animated fart ever, as we hear that Elmer Fudd had a touch of IBS and Foghorn Leghorn loved a good trump, but still it will always hold a special place in our hearts (and between our cheeks).

Ahh the harsh realities of life, what better way to tackle them than in a cartoon. Rape, incest, abortion, homophobia, racism, violence – don’t let it get you down. Laugh about it… or ummm… try to.

To say that Drawn Together pushes the boundaries of political correctness is somewhat of an understatement. DT dresses political correctness up in a gimp suit, beats it to within an inch of it’s life and then laughs in its puny little snot-nosed face. Toto, we are definitely not in South Park anymore. Drawn Together makes Cartman and the boys look like a choir of angels.

In this gloriously gratuitious display of viscious verbal diarrhoea, one may begin to understand just how extreme Drawn Together is (i.e. so extreme that Jack Osbourne would rather jump off a cliff in his soggy cr*p-filled panties than endure one episode).

And finally, it’s Jack McKay’s triumvirate of traumatising trailers……

“They fight, they fight, they fight, they fight, they fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight…”

The genius parody of Tom and Jerry from The Simpsons leaves me, I’m not afraid to say, in the same fits of hysterics as Bart and Lisa. I mean what’s not funny about a cartoon cat and mouse trying to kill each other in the most creative and horrible ways possible?

In my opinion, where Tom and Jerry didn’t go far enough, Itchy and Scratchy hop, skips and eviscerates past the taste line. Think Scratchy inadvertently eating his own stomach in ‘Oesophagus Now’ or being burned alive whilst hanging from his own entrails as in ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Lava?’. There seems to be no limit to the depths of sadism that the twisted mouse will inflict upon that unfortunate cat.

Apparently, behind the gore and pain there’s some subtle social commentary going on. Thankfully I’m always laughing too hard to see it.

Since bursting onto our screens in 1999 the fantastically offensive Family Guy has been cancelled not once but TWICE. But thanks to a legion of fans and massive DVD sales it was brought back both times by Fox.

Society will forever be indebted to the show that brought us an epic chicken fight, a barbershop quartet harmonising to inform a patient he has AIDS, and Peter’s obsession with the song “The Bird Is The Word.” Not to mention a twisted baby genius, a sex pest neighbour in the form of creepy “where’s my muscly armed paperboy?” paedo Herbert.

Not since South Park has a cartoon offended so many people so indiscriminately.

Given how impressionable kids are, you might want to hold off from introducing them to Beavis and Butthead – particularly their first ever episode ‘Frog Baseball’ – until they’ve fully grasped the concept of animal cruelty. There’s a reason why the diabolical duo became a hit among MTV-watching teens in the mid 90’s, and that’s because they are unbelievably obnoxious, sullen, nihilistic, crude, puerile, sexist and vulgar.

The pair spend most of their time trying (unsuccessfully) to score with chicks, berating musicians, trying to get high and occasionally becoming involved in capers that will invariably lead to one or the other being physically damaged.

Classic quotes include: “I like to blow up lizards”, “Eh heh heh, yeah”, and “I like to burn things”.

And, “Hammers are cool”. “Yeah, I like to take hammers, and just break stuff. Just break stuff.”

So there you go everyone…… Are we right? Are we wrong? More importantly, which of us is slightly more right than the others who are completely and utter off-base? Sound off below. And while we’re on the subject of abusing your childhood memories, make sure to check out the Top Five Family Animations That Have Caused Controversy. Or head to our review of HBO’s latest attempt at the adult animation crown The Life & Times of Tim.