10 Classic ’90s Nickelodeon Cartoons That Stand The Test Of Time

The ’90s were a golden age of animated kids’ television shows, and no network may have had as many hits as Nickelodeon​​​​​. Nickelodeon is synonymous with animation, and even decades after the golden age of the network, when live-action TV shows have taken up more airtime, it’s those animated shows that most people remember.

Cartoon Network may be the number one place for classic animated TV shows, but Nickelodeon is close behind. In the 1990s, Nickelodeon was the place to tune into for animated TV shows. It was pushing boundaries, playing with the form, scandalizing parents, and the series from the era still hold up.

CatDog (1998-2005)

CatDog wears its plot on its sleeve. The show follows the adventures of a cat named Cat and a dog named Dog who share a body but have very different personalities. Cat is self-serious and sophisticated, while Dog is much more of a child. Most of the humor of the series comes from their odd-couple-like relationship.

CatDog is a pretty caustic comedy, with Cat and Dog often suffering at the hands of an ensemble of rude, mean, and occasionally violent guests. There’s a lot of dark humor in the show, and it’s surprisingly gross-out despite coming out later in the ’90s when animated shows on Nickelodeon were moving away from that style.

Rocko’s Modern Life (1993-1996)

Rocko’s Modern Life feels like a halfway point between The Ren & Stimpy Show and something tamer like SpongeBob SquarePants. Rocko’s Modern Life also had a lot of innuendo and winks that only older viewers would catch, but the logic and storytelling were more comprehensible to younger audiences.

The series follows an Australian immigrant wallaby named Rocko who moves to the fictional American-set O-Town. There, he makes friends with a neurotic turtle named Filbert and an eccentric steer named Heffer, voiced by Tom Kenny of SpongeBob fame. Creative director Stephen Hillenburg would use this as a launching point for SpongeBob​​​​​​.

Doug (1991-1999)

Doug follows the titular Doug Funnie, an 11-year-old, insecure, shy boy who would like to just be another face in the crowd, but his vivid imagination and strong sense of morality often cause him to stand out more than he intended. Doug keeps a journal, which he often reads from, narrating the storyline of the episode.

Doug is joined by his friend Skeeter Valentine, his anthropomorphic bull terrier Porkchop, his love interest Patti Mayonnaise, and faces off against the school bully Roger M. Klotz. Doug is a quieter, more subdued show than other animated series of the era, which makes for a charming, grounded take on adolescence.

KaBlam! (1996-2000)

KaBlam! is a sketch comedy anthology TV series with each episode featuring a collection of short films, done in a variety of different art styles. The bridge between the stories is narrated by the traditionally animated Henry and June, who turn pages of a comic book to lead into the next short film.

The regular shorts include Sniz & Fondue, Action League Now!, Life with Loopy, and Prometheus and Bob. Other shorts are also interspersed throughout the series. There’s stop-motion, combinations of live-action and animation, metal and magnets, and more. It’s endlessly inventive, captivating, and very weird.

The Wild Thornberrys (1998-2004)

The Wild Thornberrys is a brilliant idea for a kids’ TV show. The series focuses on the Thornberry family, a group of nomadic, eccentric wildlife documentary filmmakers who travel all over capturing videos of exotic animals for educational purposes. On one of these trips, the youngest daughter, Eliza, gains the power to speak to animals.

Eliza primarily communicates with the family’s pet chimpanzee, Darwin, and together the pair meet an entire zoo’s worth of animals across the globe, learning the complexities of their lives and helping those in need. Every episode is fascinating with new characters and challenges while still keeping a humorous, intelligent tone.

Rocket Power (1999-2004)

The series that likely inspired a generation of kids to try out skateboarding, BMX, and other extreme sports, Rocket Power is a complete adolescent fantasy that is a blast to wrap yourself up in. The series revolves around four young friends who live in a beachside town in Southern California.

Reggie and her brother Otto, and their friends Twister and Squid, spend their free time playing all kinds of extreme sports, often getting into competitions, but eventually learning that friendship is more important. When the gang isn’t playing sports, they’re hanging out at Reggie and Otto’s dad’s burger shack. What a life.

Rugrats (1991-2004)

Rugrats, a term synonymous with mischievous toddlers, follows a group of young children, Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster, and Phil and Lil DeVille, going about their daily lives and having all the new life experiences that come with growing up. Considering they’re only toddlers, these kids have a funhouse perception of their world.

Swallowing a watermelon seed requires a Fantastic Voyage, a sleepwalking adult seems like he may be a robot, and imaginary friends are very real. Geared towards kids with the storylines, the jokes, animation, and eccentric adults will hook older viewers, too. It’s smarter than it looks with a sly eye for family dynamics.

Hey Arnold! (1996-2004)

Hey Arnold! is unique among animated TV shows for its modern, conventional, urban setting. The series stars Arnold, a fourth grader who lives with his elderly grandparents in a tenement home in Hillwood, Washington, an amalgam of a lot of cities, but with a distinctly Brooklyn, NY feel.

Arnold and his classmates get up to all sorts of hijinks in the city, encountering everything from broken-down subways to heatwaves to jewelry hustles on the sidewalk. Things definitely get exaggerated in Hey Arnold!, but for the most part, it’s a down-to-earth show filled with colorful and delightful characters.

The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991-1996)

A groundbreaking animated series that can only loosely be defined as “for kids”, The Ren & Stimpy Show used dark humor, innuendos, shock value, violence, and a surreal animation style to make something totally unique, impressively funny, and not a little bit disturbing. The series focuses on Ren the chihuahua and Stimpy the cat.

Ren is hot-tempered, bordering on psychotic, and Stimpy is dimwitted, happy to go along with whatever Ren says. The series is closer to Looney Tunes than anything, with violent slapstick and exaggerated drawings and expressions. The “grotesque” close-ups of SpongeBob SquarePants were popularized here.

SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-Present)

SpongeBob SquarePants

9/10

Release Date

May 1, 1999

Network

Nickelodeon

Showrunner

Vincent Waller, Marc Ceccarelli

Directors

Vincent Waller, Dave Cunningham, Stephen Hillenburg, Paul Tibbitt

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Though it came out towards the end of the 1990s, SpongeBob SquarePants is probably the defining animated series of the decade for Nickelodeon. The series is set in the underwater world of Bikini Bottom, where the living sponge, SpongeBob, lives and works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab.

SpongeBob encounters all sorts of undersea critters in his life and gets up to many adventures with his friends, Patrick Star and Sandy Cheeks. Every character is well-developed, the animation is fantastic, the music and atmosphere are engaging, and it is truly laugh-out-loud funny all these years later.