Kids Box Mr Star Funny Elephant Cartoon
These shows fall into the uncanny valley of kids shows: plots and images that are so frightening, it'due south shocking they were ever made, let alone targeted at children.
The Kitchen Casanova
Part of Cartoon Network'due south What A Cartoon! series, "The Kitchen Casanova" is not but disgusting, but deeply unsettling. In the cartoon, a man is nervously preparing dinner for his date… and then information technology all goes straight to the ninth circle of hell. As he hurriedly prepares dinner, he accidentally switches from recipe-to-horrible-recipe, creating a hodgepodge of nasty ingredients. Then, the Casanova presents a covered serving tray to his date.
He uncovers the dinner, and reveals an prototype that has been seared into the brains of thousands of children: an eerily detailed drawing of a rolled upwardly tongue, an eyeball (with lower lid all the same attached), bloody bones, and a severed foot. As Casanova and his horrified appointment examine the meal, the tongue slowly unfurls, and twitches as he quickly slams the comprehend back onto the tray. If only the cartoon ended there. Instead, they begin to ravenously eat the pile of disgusting offal, amidst disgusting smacking, slurping, and giggling noises, leaving children haunted and questioning whether this cartoon actually happened, or was but a bizarre fever dream.
Oh Yeah Cartoons
Similar to What A Cartoon!, Oh Yeah Cartoons is an album of blithe shorts. This version of the series, however, was even more chock full of disturbing cartoons. "A Kids Life" features a bunch of dancing, singing pimples, with a repetitive song well-nigh how they brand kids lives' miserable and tin't be stopped.
This disgusting and fatalistic bear witness melody that ends with a creepy, life-sized talking rabbit toy with a Donnie Darko -esque vibe. Not to be outdone, "Kenny and the Chimp" (an animated curt that served as a forerunner to The Kids Adjacent Door ), features a kid who unleashes and gets infected past a variety of mortiferous diseases, 1 of which causes his head to plough into a pig (which runs away at the sound of burning bacon).
SIniecko
In terms of pure, psychotic energy, Slniečko wins the prize. Starring a bizarre, long-armed puppet that looks like it was scrapped together using junk found in a haunted asylum's dumpster, this child's evidence ran in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. The puppet (named Raťafák Plachta, which translates to "big nose coating") is made up of two men under a canvass, and a puppet head that looks like the last feverish image that might flash earlier your eyes before dying of rabies.
His gasping, frenetic voice sounds similar a serial killer vacillating between laughing and crying as he recounts gruesome crimes. Perhaps the creepiest role is that the puppet is intentionally freaky: the puppet's creator said, "He is an eyesore, he'southward ugly. I think the TV station was avant-garde in a style because they were not afraid to evidence [an] unlikable (in looks), not pretty puppet on screen." In this context, "avant-garde" ways "a seven-foot-tall terror-boob."
Jan Svankmajer'due south Alice
Hey, Czechoslovakia? Are yous doing okay? Because here'south another Czech film that is concentrated nightmare jet-fuel. It's non clear whether this 1988 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is really child-advisable, which the film itself coyly hints at with the ominous narration, "Alice idea to herself...Now you volition see a motion picture...Fabricated for children...Perhaps." The surrealist film combines cease motion with a alive action child-role player in a manner that is deeply, primally disturbing.
Most of the stop movement puppets are real taxidermied animals, with bulging eyes and fixed, startled expressions. Dead birds with fox skulls for heads make an advent, skulls hatch from eggs, a piece of meat moves of its ain accord, Alice turns into a creepy porcelain doll… and the sound design is just equally viscerally disturbing as the visuals. It's an indescribably trippy and horrifying film, and the feel of watching it could be most closely compared to getting loftier in a taxidermist's workshop.
Mr. Potato Head Show
Remember the 1999 Mr. White potato Head Show movie? If yous don't, yous may accept blocked out the memory. Pixar's version of Mr. Potato head is loveable and goofy, whereas the Mr. Potato Caput Prove is… something else. What began every bit a TV show featuring a live action puppet of Mr. White potato Head, the spinoff film'southward entire plot is a lamentation of how the Mr. Potato Head Testify was cancelled.
This weird meta-commentary might be funnier if the movie wasn't a Frankenstein of clips and muddled one-half-baked ideas that amount to the crazed rantings of the show's scorned creators. There are weird animations with alive-action human lips, a half-eaten heavily-pierced anthropomorphic apple, a puppet who appears to be a pile of assorted intestines, a one-half-ham-one-half-lobster abomination, a fruitcake with human being teeth, aliens… watching this movie feels like pouring Drano into your ears and waiting for your brains to liquify.
Catdog
CatDog was a creative ninety's Nickelodeon cartoon featuring a half-cat-one-half-dog creature who gets into wacky hijinks, as its prissy cat-half and rambunctious dog-one-half are ever at odds. But the weird premise is not what makes this drawing creepy, rather a handful of episodes that decided, "Spiral it, let'southward send some kids to therapy."
In one, "Cat" attempts to sneakily brush "Domestic dog's" teeth… by crawling inside his own rima oris, traveling upwards through its body towards the Dog half, and exiting dog'due south rima oris. At this point, True cat is somehow inside-out, with expose musculus, vein, and eye tissue, that is both medically infeasible and Hellraiser levels of agonizing. Thanks, CatDog for making ten-year-olds contemplate the frailty of the man listen.
Help! I'm a Fish
Help! I'thou a Fish is a Danish children's movie that was adapted to English, even acquiring the vox talents of Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul (earlier he was famous), and Terry Jones. The picture show is about a grouping of kids who accidentally drink a potion that turns them into fish, and being stupid children, they lose the "antidote" that would plough them dorsum into humans. Information technology would exist a mostly lackluster, forgettable children's moving-picture show, if not for the villain: Joe, a fish who got a gustation of the antidote potion, which apparently has the ability to give fish homo-similar characteristics every bit well.
Joe starts out equally rather frightening, with a black and white face that looks more juggalo than fish, and a sinister voice (courtesy of the wonderfully dark Alan Rickman). After the typical villainous arc, Joe greedily tries to consume every bit much of the antidote every bit possible to become fully human. Instead, he becomes an uncanny fish-human being hybrid, his peel tearing apart similar Jeff Goldblum in The Fly . He subsequently drowns, since he makes the error of drinking the human-potion while underwater (it can't be overemphasized how many bad decisions the characters in this picture make).
O Canada
O Canada was a 90's Canadian-American kid's Telly testify that aired on Drawing Network. Information technology featured a serial of Canadian blithe shorts straight out a LSD-fueled horrorscape. In "To Be," a woman questions her own existence, visits a wacky scientist who has invented a "transporter" which, in reality, clones the subjects and kills the original re-create (the plot of The Prestige , but for kids!).
The scientist "transports" himself, but the original isn't killed, leading to a showdown where the woman must decide if she should kill one of the scientist doubles… and she does. Then, wracked with guilt, she kills herself by stepping into the transporter, allowing herself to exist vaporized equally her clone walks guilt-free. Is it really a kid's cartoon's place to make us question the nature of our beingness? Evidently, it is in Canada!
Peter Rabbit & Friends: The Royal Ballet
What more must be said than, "Live action people dressed as Beatrix Potter animals doing ballet?" Peter Rabbit & Friends: The Royal Ballet is exactly that. Though the plot is by and large kid friendly, the hyper-realistic false creature heads (with unblinking eyes, don't forget those) atop the muscular, leotard-clad bodies of live dancers is just slightly uncanny.
The ballet is pretty well-choreographed, the costumes (though creepy) are weirdly similar to the classic Beatrix Potter illustrations, and other than giving children nightmares for the rest of their lives, information technology's a pretty beautiful production.
Gerry Anderson'due south Hoppity
What is it about puppets? Their creepy smiles? Their dead, shark-like eyes? The idea that they may suddenly spring to life and rise up against their human masters? Hoppity unwittingly goes full-throttle on the creepy puppet tropes. Created past Gerry Anderson (future creator of boob Idiot box prove Thunderbirds ), Hoppity is about a magical toy from the "goblin market" who can motility on his own and communicates by shrieking "Teedily-tummy! Deedily dum!"
His hapless human owner, a little daughter, is commanded to do "naughty" acts, constantly getting in trouble. In tears, she explains she's heeding Hoppity'due south orders, but none of the adults believe her. It ends with her beingness sent to bed without supper, while Hoppity complains that he is hungry.
Emmet Freedy
Ant Freedy was a 1990'due south Nicktoon, with an artstyle best described every bit "Boschian horror-vomit." Using stop motility (a form of animation that often trips into the uncanny valley), its horribly designed newspaper-maché characters look like something out of a college student'southward creepy art installation.
The stop move is stilted and unsettling, the voices sound similar ambien-induced auditory hallucinations, the grapheme'due south lips, noses, and faces are grotesquely out of proportion, and the teeth… at that place's simply style too many teeth. No child should be subjected to this cartoon, and those who were unfortunate enough to watch this anathema should receive a lawsuit settlement to pay for their therapy.
Pingu
Pingu is a 1990's Swiss claymation near an ambrosial baby penguin. So why does information technology make the cut for creepiest children's shows? Pingu lulls its audience into a simulated sense of wholesome security, only to rip the rug out from nether you with a freaky, giant, maniacal walrus.
This monstrosity sticks out not merely because of its inexplicable human teeth, but due to how incongruous the weirdly detailed walrus is with Pingu's unremarkably cute, cartoonish art style. To make matters worse, the walrus has a creepy, full-throated, homicidal laugh. As a result, a whole generation of Swiss children take grown upwards to fear the Antarctic.
Ringing Bell
Don't be fooled past this 1978 movie's ambrosial lamb VHS embrace-art. Ringing Bell begins as a movie about a cute, chubby-cheeked lamb, then it decides to become GWAR on us. A wolf kills the lamb's female parent, and the lamb decides to seek revenge by getting the wolf to train him, so that he can grow upwardly to kill the wolf. The wolf agrees to the terms, and turns the adorable lamb into a demonic, wolf-killing ram.
The lamb'southward final grade looks similar some sort of sharp-horned, shadowy, satanic animate being. The lamb ends up killing his adoptive-wolf-dad, and at the stop of the movie is left alone and miserable. The movie is ostensibly making a point near the futility of revenge, but here's an idea: maybe don't sell a story almost lamb-on-wolf-patricide to children?
Mike Huckabee's Learn Our History
Did y'all know Mike Huckabee helped create a children's show? And did you lot know that children's show is a weirdly on-the-nose series of political indoctrination? And that it decided to ham-fistedly teach kids about 9/11? Well, as information technology turns out, all those things inexplicably happen to exist true.
The Learn Our History series teaches kids nearly 9/11 by tactlessly animating a plane crashing into the twin towers, every bit an onlooker cries out (without much enthusiasm), "No!" Another onlooker says, woodenly, "Who would do something like this?" We'd similar to ask the same question of this "kid's" show's creators.
Shining Time Station
Shining Time Station was an adorable 1990's PBS show that featured Thomas the Tank Engine and his man friends at the train station, including a tiny usher played by George Carlin. The kids would go along imagination journeys through the train tunnels, during which the audience would exist subjected to some pretty weird animations.
In i, a little boy goes through a museum of creepy looking paintings, which stick their tongues out and accident raspberries at him. The thought of sentient paintings sneakily mocking you, sticking out their man tongues, was an unexpected source of nightmares. The series also regularly featured puppets who lived inside a jukebox, whose heavy-lidded decease mask-like faces occasionally pop up to haunt our dreams.
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Hazard
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure is a 1977 kid's movie, with beautiful illustrations and lavish animation. Unfortunately, its particular simply serves to further the creep-factor during some utterly chilling sequences. Raggedy Ann & Andy, a pair of floppy fabric dolls, run abroad.
Within a pit filled with some sort of brown taffy, they encounter "The Greedy," a garish, sentient pile of candy, taffy, and bubbling fluids. It's constantly hungry and can never be sated, eating itself over and over in a psychedelic animated sequence. Information technology eventually decides the only way to cure its hunger is to eat Raggedy Ann'south center.
Weinerville
Weinerville was a live 1990's kids variety/comedy prove that aired on Nickelodeon, hosted by Marc Weiner. It sticks in our heads equally unsettling not only due to "Boney," the skeletal mascot/hand puppet, but also due to the "Weinerizer," a automobile that "shrinks" audience members' bodies, putting their disproportionately-big heads on puppet bodies.
It was a pretty unproblematic trick (their real bodies were hiding behind the puppet stage), but to young viewers' optics, it was an act of creepy sourcery. Additionally, there were a litany of weird characters, including "Socko," a boob with a high-pitched voice and penchant for kicking people, and Marc Weiner's man-head combined with a diversity of different puppets, which was at times funny, and at other times, unsettling.
Unico In The Isle of Magic
Unico In The Island of Magic is a 1983 children's anime nigh a cute Unicorn-puppy-bear looking animal with pink hair and a cheerful spirit. What could become wrong? Evil puppets, that's what. In the movie, "Kukuruku" is an abandoned boob come up to life. Instead of having some playful Toy Story -esque adventures, Kukuruku decides to seek revenge on the human race by turning every living creature into freaky, moaning wooden zombies.
He uses these blank-faced human puppets as edifice blocks in his behemothic evil tower. And Kukuruku himself is a freaky, enormous boob who eats Unico and a picayune girl. We guess mentally scarring children builds character?
Black Beauty
Black Dazzler was 1994 live-action picture show adaptation of a book by the same name. It's a motion-picture show well-nigh the adventures of a cute black stallion, which is some other way of maxim get gear up for some expressionless horses! In the movie, Black Dazzler and his best friend Ginger go through all sorts of adventures together including: well-nigh drowning, nearly dying of pneumonia, being enslaved by evil humans, becoming deeply depressed, and dying.
That's right, at one betoken Ginger is bought past wicked masters, who shell her and abuse her that her spirit is somewhen completely broken. Blackness Beauty must watch every bit they cart of her limp, hobbling, lifeless body. At least she'due south free from pain, Blackness Beauty muses. What a neat movie for kids.
4 Foursquare
We become it, kids like bright, colorful, surreal world, with frenetic energy and charismatic people. But 4 Foursquare, a Canadian kids show that aired from 2003-2015, tried to go with this formula, and somehow came up with a show that feels similar a cultist's brainwashing video.
Three adults, all wearing identical bright-blue spandex unitards (which, on the men, leaves… little to be imagined below the waist), are commanded by a fourth adult in a bright-blue spanex unitard to exercise a multifariousness of "exercises." "Spread the cheeks!" she commands, and they dutifully do so. Thankfully, she means the face cheeks, otherwise we'd be leaving a tip for the FBI.
Salute Your Shorts
Salute Your Shorts is a 1990's Nickelodeon TV show that follows the alive-action adventures of a summertime camp and its wacky attendees. Unfortunately, it takes a plough towards Texas Chainsaw Massacre after the introduction of a spooky camp legend, "Zeke the Plumber." He's the ghost of a noseless plumber who died in a gas leak (no olfactory organ—he couldn't smell information technology).
Zeke haunts the army camp, wearing a creepy, misshapen mask, with a encarmine patch where his nose should be. According to the camp legend, if you bear on his cursed plunger, he volition haunt your dreams. Thanks for the alert, but we didn't bear on any forbidden plungers and he'due south still haunting united states of america to this day.
Reboot
ReBoot is a Canadian (oh hello again Canada, yous weirdos) 3D-blithe cartoon that aired from 1994-2001. Information technology stars a bunch of fun digital characters who live inside the "mainframe" of the estimator. They're constantly battling viruses and protecting the digital citizens of their town. And sure, Hexadecimal is a pretty creepy antagonist, with a diverseness of motionless masks that displayed her expression. But the truthful horror comes in the form of "game cubes."
Whenever a user decides to play a game, a giant purple cube descends upon the urban center. It traps whatever digital people inside and forcefulness them to play a game against the "user." If the digital people lose, they are "nulled," aka, wiped make clean from existence. Ane of the characters (a child, no less) appears to die in one of the game cubes, but to come back later as adult - he survived nullification merely spent decades being tortured past video games. It fabricated the states rethink the way nosotros treated our Sims.
Long Agone and Far Away
Long Agone and Far Away aired on PBS from 1989-1992. It's an album show of bedtime stories for children. Hosted by James Earl Jones, vox of Darth Vader, Mufasa, and probably God, it is a solid children's bear witness. However, a few episodes stick in our minds as creepy. "Rarg" spins an animated tale near a earth inhabited by strange looking citizens, superintelligent babies, and a mayor with artillery growing out of his head.
The science babies discover their entire world is just a random human's dream, and they'll all die when he wakes up. So they build a bridge to the waking earth, kidnap the man, and trap him within his ain dream forever. Gee, way to help kids feel safe falling comatose.
Moomin
Moomin are adorable characters created past a Finnish artist, that were turned into an Japanese/Dutch anime in 1990. Information technology follows the adventures of the Moomin family, a group of cow-hippo-dog type creatures. The cuteness all of a sudden evaporates as soon as the Groke makes an appearance.
A huge, grimacing, ghost-like brute, the Groke haunts the Moomin valley, freezing and killing every living thing she stands upon. Her appearances in the anime are coupled with os-chilling death rattles and a menacing musical score. And good news! The Moomin have been reimagined in a 2019 3D-animated series chosen, Moominvalley. And is that a Groke in the trailer? Yep, yes it is.
Vintage Sesame Street
In that location'south cipher more pure in this world than Sesame Street , correct? In the 90's, among the adorable puppets, sesame street featured cursory segments, either cartoons or playful shorts. One of which was "William Wegman'south Weimaraners." Weimaraners are a stately breed of dogs with soulful, somber optics. Dogs are cute, but not when yous give them man torsos.
William Wegman is an photographer famous for propping his dogs up on a human being actor, making it announced like a person who has a dog's head. The photographs themselves are a little weird, just in live action the creep-gene is multiplied. The dogs stare woefully ahead as adult actors gesticulate wildly. The dogs? Cute. The half-canis familiaris-half-man monstrosities? Not beautiful.
The Brave Little Toaster
The Brave Little Toaster is an underappreciated 1989 animated children's motion-picture show, and despite its loftier quality and creative premise, male child oh boy does it accept some unsettling moments. Starring personified household items such as Toaster (who is brave), Radio, Lamp, Blankie, and Kirby (a grumpy vacuum), they set out from an abandoned holiday abode to seek their long-lost human being master. Forth the way they come across terrifying moments such as being kidnapped by a man tinkerer, who traps (fully sentient and aware) electronics in a vice and rips them apart, harvesting their oil-stained inner parts.
He also likes to create "inventions:" electronic devices that have been Frankensteined-together, who are simply as well aware of their horribly mutilated existence. Toaster & gang likewise wind up in a junkyard, as old, used-up cars sing a pitiful chant about being resigned to their fate (of existence crushed and killed by a auto compactor). Hey, but Toaster makes toast in the end, so hurray!
Zig-Zag
Zig Zag is a 1979-1988 Canadian kids evidence. Canada, seriously, what the heck is going on with you lot guys? This prove starts a bearded, bespectacled host whose humor feels more like unhinged rantings and ravings than comedy. In one instance, he plays some sort of "tough guy character," staring in a camera closeup that is far too shut for comfort.
"Yous know me… Lemon's the proper noun," he says, in an ominous phonation more conforming of Twin Peaks than a kid'south show. "You know what fourth dimension information technology is… no, it'south not bathroom fourth dimension. It's Zig Zag time. So stay tuned kids! I'g comin' back a little afterward. And remember… whatever you do… don't… brand… me… mad…" Cue the jazzy 80's music and thousands of kids soiling their overalls.
Jim Henson's The Storyteller
Jim Henson'southward The Storyteller is some other underrated gem of a TV testify. It'southward hosted past the inimitable John Hurt, features a potpourri of impressive Henson puppets, and tells a series of European fairy-tale classics. Despite this, it'southward yet manages to be incredibly nighttime,
Some of the creepier stories include a soldier whose actions leave him forever stuck between the gates of sky and hell, a hedgehog-homo hybrid, and a princess who is going to exist married off to her ain begetter in a bizarre ritual. Needless to say, these themes are a bit mature for children. Don't even get us started on the spinoff series The Storyteller: Greek Myths that aired in 1990. Yikes.
Darby O'Gill & The Little People
This little-known 1959 live-action Disney flick is an Irish tale featuring leprechauns and Sean Connery. This formula should be foolproof, but oh god, the banshee. Amid the impish hijinks of the Leprechaun male monarch and an crumbling Darby O'Gill (played past the very Irish gaelic Albert Sharpe), there are startlingly horrifying elements, such as did we mention the banshee?!
The banshee, a ghoulish wailing specter with unpleasantly long fingers and a hollow former woman'southward face, kills the protagonist's daughter, and calls upon a spectral wagon drawn by black horses: decease. Equally kids, it made us spit out our Lucky Charms.
Strawinsky and the Mysterious House
What happens when you requite an alien masquerading as a human being a apprehensive animation upkeep and the directive to brand a picture show for kids? Y'all get any Strawinsky and the Mysterious House (2013) is supposed to exist. With horrendously ugly 3D grapheme models, as terrible blitheness, and soulless phonation acting, this movie is an abomination of sight and sound that should exist locked into a vault and hidden abroad in a vast warehouse.
Worst of all is the scene featuring the psychotically-named, "Globglogabgalab," a sort of one-half-man, half-Jabba-the-Hutt, melted slug like animal. The Globglogabgalab undulates his sickeningly turd-similar body, and sings (poorly) nearly how much he loves books. "I am the Globglogabgalab, the shwabble fiddle wubble flaba blaba blubber, I'm full of shwimble glibmer-kind, I am the yeast of thoughts and mind," he rambles incoherently. This movie gets five/five stars for traumatizing your children.
Source: https://collider.com/galleries/30-creepiest-kids-tv-shows/