...oh, and
Pinky and the Brain. I never got into the habit of watching it regularly, but Pinky's pretty much what keeps me watching. I didn't think he'd have so much influence as to create an internet-wide love for the word "narf", but then I guess anything that is or derived from Animaniacs would have that sort of power.
Did I mention
Taz-Mania? ...Nope. Shame, I watched that show a lot, partly for Didgeri Dingo, and partly in hope that Mr. Thickley the kangaroo would show up. He's one of those rarely-seen characters (like Fifi from Tiny Toons), and even points it out in one episode. But if you watch Taz-Mania episodes on YouTube, he pops up every other episode you see, so who knows.
Rocket Power wasn't terrible (the characters weren't pretty to look at though. Too... Ahh Real Monsters-ish, you know), but it wasn't special either. Heh, I remember one episode where Sam marveled at a kid who had the fastest computer in the world, which had a 700 Mhz processor. Wow, the future, man. And the kid was only using that power for creating a catalog of the animal kingdom. The Wild Thornberries was slightly better, but I quickly got tired of it and I can't look Nigel directly in the eye anymore thanks to a certain Fungi Forums member.
Does anyone have a animated thing they liked because of the animation?
I guess "Sniz and Fondue" from Kablam. Thought the actual skits were lame, but at least the characters were halfway decent to look at. Considering all the other shows in Kablam, it was easily the best-looking of the bunch. Maybe I have a fondness for Sniz and Fondue because it was visually the most vibrant, and it had a neat theme song.
Well, there have certainly been animated shows that looked
good, but none come to mind where I preferred looking at it as opposed to caring about the characters. The characters always come first. Why do I think I watched Tiny Toons so much? To catch a glimpse at Fifi. I can't think of too many shows that look "bad", as a lot of it is just what kind of style it's going for. Rocko's Modern Life was particularly good about showing off well-drawn ugly characters, but Ren & Stimpy was the master at it. Maybe Doug qualifies as a badly-drawn show.
But as of recently I've found that Looney Tunes blows away cookie-cutter shows. If you ever pay close attention to some of them, they accounted for just about every little detail, like how Sylvester visibly breathes in (chest sucks in) before blowing into a harmonica. And the animation's so smooth. It's to be expected, these were originally theatrical shorts and done at, what, 22 or 24 frames per second? And they were able to make classical music cool. That's one heck of an accomplishment. Some of Disney's traditional-animated movies fall into the same camp of being immaculate in visuals and detail (Lion King springs to mind), since they probably had bazillions of dollars to get it right. Bambi in particular, for having a movie that looks that good way back in 1942.
...kill me for not having mentioned
Angry Beavers before now. I love Norbert and Daggett. While there's sadly only a few episodes of the show I actually liked (or remembered), the duo were always fun to watch when they were bickering or trying to one-up each other. Someone's uploading the episodes to YouTube now. A couple minor characters on that show I liked were Treeflower (before she had the multiple career changes) and the Bunnyguard (repeatedly kept yelling "GET DOWN!!!" and slamming the beavers into the floorboards). It's one of those shows I regret not having watched more of, because before I knew it it was cancelled and off the air.
It's too bad Weinerville doesn't count as animation. There's one show that keeps getting lost in memory, but standing out as one of those great-yet-risky shows back in Nickelodeon's heyday. Pretty much all I remember from it is Boney ("I'm Boney, I'm Boney, leave me alone-y!").
