Worst Animated Series Meme (UPDATED)

(UPDATE: Due to recent revelations and so forth regarding Book 2 of The Legend of Korra, I am changing the rankings of my picks for the worst animated shows. I am switching out Camp Lazlo which is now #12 and now ranking The Legend of Korra at #4.)

Hiya folks! Had some time to kill this week, so while I'm busy writing and drawing again and prepping on the reviews and stuff I owe people, I thought I'd use some of my time to throw out another meme just for the heck of it. This time, after watching a few fan reviews of some of the new animated shows out on the air recently, I thought I'd take a few jabs at some of the animated shows I don't remember quite as fondly as some of the others I regularly talk about, and luckily enough I found a meme that lets me do just that.

There's been quite a few cartoons and animated shows that I simply did not find funny or exciting in the times that they were popular. Given some of the more recent shows I've disapproved of, I've decided to take a shot at the cartoons I remember being the most obnoxious, unfunny, poorly-animated, or just straight up disappointing shows I've had to put up with on TV, something that seems more creatively bankrupt every year with only a few exceptions. That said, I'm gonna give some of these more recent disasters a quick piece of my mind while also taking a stab at the old ones I still am trying hard to forget.

That being said, just a few reminders:

1) This is NOT a personal attack on the fans who like these shows. If you like any of these, good for you, but understand this is me giving my own opinion on them from my experience watching them. This is not meant to offend anyone so please, don't take it personally.

2) Although there are 12 slots, this isn't the precise order in which I hate these shows. Some I hate a lot more than others on this list and some I can actually find something good in while others just have absolutely nothing to them whatsoever.

12) (NOW #4) Avatar: The Legend of Korra

Taking the first spot on my list is the truly disappointing and so far lackluster sequel to my favorite series Avatar: The Last Airbender. While I am still a huge fan of the original series and was initially stoked at the idea of more Avatar, almost immediately after it was finally confirmed my excitement began to die out pretty quickly. Between the unsettling announcement that most of the Gaang would be gone and therefore passed on despite the fact that most of us fans were already anticipating a new cast to take their place, and the SDCC trailer in 2011 showing how heavily modernized the Avatarverse had become to the point where it did not even feel like the same world we grew up with, I just felt alienated and began dreading the series.

What we ultimately got when the first season came out last year was an insanely rushed plot owing to the ridiculously short twelve-episode count, a lack of focus on the Antibending revolution, some very unlikable main characters, terrible comic relief relying too much on toilet humor, virtually no character development, and an overblown love square among the main characters that was shoved so hard into our faces that it distracted us from the story.

Plus, it occasionally violated the canon of the first show and ended with a finale that was loaded with deus ex machinas, random occurrences with poor explanations, a final showdown that proves very anticlimactic, and even goes out of its way to ruin the character of Amon, who until that point had the potential to match Princess Azula as a villain.

Though to the show's credit, it does feature great music and superb animation, it gave us Tenzin and most importantly, it gave us Avatar Korra and Asami Sato.

Will the show improve with Book 2? Only time will tell.

11) The Emperor's New School

"Lazy" is rarely a word you use in describing something from Walt Disney, and yet lazy doesn't begin to describe the utterly pointless Saturday Morning bust that is The Emperor's New School. While like many people I did genuinely enjoy The Emperor's New Groove, it's not a Disney classic nor is it the best Disney movie, and yet somehow it became Disney's cash whore when they decided to make a franchise out of it. Already suffering from dull and uninspired animation that even the SyFy Channel would be embarrassed to put out, the show went out of its way to mess with the movie's canon in such a way that it still confuses fans of the movie even to this day, taking Emperor Kuzco from his palace and instead making him an Emperor-To-Be in a the highly stereotypical Kuzco Academy, where he does stereotypical high school things with stereotypical high school characters. Oh yeah, and he goes back to being an asshole in every single episode despite learning his lesson in every single episode and the freaking movie.

But the show's worst offense comes from its humor, which is literally every single joke and running gag from the movie being told over, and over, and over again. The chimp and the bug, Bucky and his balloon animals, the "secret" lab, the wrong lever, and Kuzco being turned into some kind of animal by Yzma in plot to overthrow Kuzco and become empress, which is the main plot for nearly every episode and none are done as well as when Kuzco turned into a llama, nor are they as funny. All of the gags of the movie are reused in every episode, so much so that the entire series is literally the movie in constant and endless rewind, done to a point where if you saw one episode of this show, you'd never have to see the movie because it's literally the exact same thing! Ugggh!

While Eartha Kitt does return as Yzma and John Goodman does return to play Pacha, and the show introduces Malina as the main female protagonist, none of this is enough to save the show and Malina herself is not even that interesting a character to begin with. With the constant running gags of the movie, confusing setup, no David Spade, and a complete failure to find new legitimately funny jokes that work, The Emperor's New School is an embarrassing low for Disney, it's lazy and repetitive as fucking hell, and nearly ruins a half-decent movie that really did not demand its own franchise.

10) Pokemon

While I was swept up by the craze when it first came out, the Pokemon anime looking back is one of the stupidest things to still be on the air after sixteen years on the air. While the games and cards are probably still pretty cool for most fans, the series itself is repetitive, unoriginal, juvenile and getting less and less funny with each new season. Headed by a cast of characters and supporting characters who are all too dumb to live and constantly engage in idiotic antics and dialogue, further mired by some truly bad voice acting on part of 4Kids' "brilliant" casting, extremely dry and repetitive running gags including Meowth's fantasies and the fact that every Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny looks exactly the same (It's NOT funny anymore, people!), Brock's lovesick womanizing behavior, and some truly awful Pokemon designs mixed in the larger bunch, Pokemon has confined itself too much to its original comfort zone and refuses to try anything new with its material despite an interesting setup and decent animation, instead doing the same schtick it's been doing for sixteen freaking years.

On top of that, this show is pretty much promoting cockfighting, people. Notice how this entire Pokemon world's culture seems to revolve around nothing else but forcing Pokemon to fight each other in pointless battles strictly for their own entertainment? It's fucking cockfighting!

And don't even get me started on the show's biggest offense, Team Rocket; the absolute worst villainous trio in existence and by far the most annoying with their pussy antics, horrifyingly bad jokes, the repetitive plot to capture Pikachu, and that goddamned motto. Why won't these retards just die?!

In short, Pokemon despite its flashy animation and huge impact on culture is unoriginal, boring, repetitive, and filled with too many stupid characters for me to give a crap about them.

And the movies also sucked, ESPECIALLY Pokemon: The First Movie and Pokemon The Movie 2000. Sorry to my folks for forcing them to watch them with me!

9) Family Guy

The bastard child of braindead comedian Seth MacFarlane, Family Guy is really just a racier and less funny answer to The Simpsons, and while its animation is easier on the eyes than The Simpsons, if it's a choice between these two shows, give me a clip of Homer strangling Bart, even with me not being a hardcore fan of the latter. Family Guy for me has never been a funny series and it was initially canceled for that reason in 2002 before MacFarlane decided he liked being the only guy to be even less funny than Adam Sandler. Filled with may too many unsympathetic characters who engage in too many slanderous and offensive jokes often of a sexual nature, way too many episodes where we see more of Peter Griffin or his friends than we really need to see, Stewie being creepy as hell despite his popularity with fans, and the constant, and I do mean constant gag humor...........I mean my God, WHAT is the point of them? The majority of them don't even make sense and most of the time aren't even that funny, and just breaks the flow of the episode. There's a right way and a wrong way to do randomness in a funny way, and this show has always done it the wrong way.

And really, just like I said before, I just really don't find it that funny. Okay, sure I sometimes get a laugh out of it when I am channel surfing and it comes on and I did like the episode Blue Harvest Moon being a huge Star Wars fan, but other than that I just find the show gross and unpleasant most of the time. Yeah, it's an adult comedy, but to me it's a very bad adult comedy.

Though I will say this: Brian and Meg are the best characters on the show. STOP making fun of Meg folks, she's suffered enough! And I guess for some Lois is rather attractive.

Aside from that though, Family Guy is garbage. Kudos to South Park for mocking it in their two-hour special several years ago. A show written by manatees.....

8) Scooby-Doo

No folks, I don't like Scooby-Doo anymore. Not necessarily because it's a bad cartoon, but because it's overrated as Hell. I mean come on..........it came out in 1969, people! Move on already, this show was never THAT good. Between the fifty or seventy different incarnations it's had on TV since then, the show has gotten more repetitive and at times less funny. YES, even the removal of Scrappy doesn't do enough to save it. The characters are still very dimwitted at times, Scooby and Shaggy are still food-obsessed cowards, and Scooby despite having his freaking name in the title never really does any of the detective work! He just runs with his tail between his legs hoping he lives to the next day to claim his next triple-decker sandwich from Shaggy. He's not that much of a hero folks, just an overgrown mutt with a speech impediment.

While I did like it very much as a kid and even the movies held up for a while, particularly Zombie Island and Alien Invaders, the movies have only gotten lamer and lamer with the passage of time and the inclusion of real monsters these days is still moderately fun, it doesn't make up for how tired and overrated the franchise has become.

And don't even get me started on the unwatchable, audience-insulting horrors that are those goddamn Scooby-Doo live-action movies. Heaven help anyone who was involved in their production.

7) Chowder

One of many mediocre kids' shows to come out from Cartoon Network in the past decade in the midst of the studio's creative bankruptcy, I never understood why Chowder got such a positive reception at the time of its release. All about a troll-like kid named Chowder who dreams of becoming a world-class chef and yet constantly fucks everything up with his own gluttony, Chowder featured hit or miss animation that was either passable or 'meh', a forgettable cast of characters, told a lot of lame jokes, featured a main character who's really just an extremely obnoxious and simple-minded little kid, and rarely had anything to do with cooking at all.

On top of that, this show featured Tara Strong as Truffles the fairy, a voice role that frankly didn't take full advantage of how funny and charming Tara can be. Then we got John DiMaggio, the voice actor of Dr. Drakken, Fu Dog, and Marcus Fenix who's reduced to playing Schnitzel, some rock monster guy who's sole schtick in any episode is babbling "radda, radda, radda" in every single episode. Bad enough the character doesn't need to exist, but how dare you waste the talents of Tara Strong and especially John DiMaggio? Shame on you, CN! Shame on you.

While the show I guess is fine enough for kids, it's nothing special in the slightest and in my mind, too forgettable for me to really care about it.

6) Angela Anaconda

Nothing quite compares to the absolute Nightmare Fuel that is Fox Kids' Angela Anaconda. Featuring probably the worst animation of any cartoon series in history, Angela Anaconda was a crude flash animation series relying on cutout style visuals that made South Park look like a Hayao Miyazaki movie. With crude cutouts of the faces of real-life people from black and white photographs pasted onto stick figure bodies that somehow were normally colored and animated with the same photoshop animation they probably used in those vile Baby Geniuses movies, these characters were abnormally big-headed and when they moved around the crude collage-style backgrounds it was as creepy as a large spider coming your way. The show looked like a really bad animated spinoff of Pleasantville if the town had stopped in mid-colorization. The whole style made for a truly unsightly show.

Plus, the characters and ESPECIALLY the main character and her main rival were extremely obnoxious and unlikable, the characters highly stereotypical, the jokes older than God himself, the stories more ancient than Greece and the cliches more widespread than the AIDS virus.

Plus, WHY is she named Angela Anaconda? Never did I see her manhandle any snakes in this series!

On a whole, this was just a creepy as fuck and downright unpleasant series that while it may have amused ten year olds at the time also had the ability to haunt most who saw it for the rest of our days. If not for the horrendous animation style and obnoxious characters it might've been tolerable. But for its animation alone, it is one of the worst cartoons I have ever seen, and those who made it could use a serious psyche evaluation.

5) Teen Titans GO!

And now for the show that inspired me to make this list, the ultra-disappointing spinoff series that badly stains the legacy of the original Teen Titans series, another show I was a HUGE fan of before Avatar came around. Despite bringing back all of the original core cast members, TTG has absolutely no continuity with the original series, and instead of focusing on the superhero exploits of one of the most famous superhero teams in the comic world, it instead focuses on their childlike and teenage antics at Titans Tower between the times they're saving the world.

What the fuck? Isn't that like remaking Batman: The Animated Series under the direction of Joel Schumacher?

Plus, the animation from what I've seen so far is absolutely horrid, with its simplistic chibi style and obnoxiously light colors, which makes the whole thing look like it was fit in quite comfortably with CN's long-forgotten Tickle U block. Plus, outside of the obvious and slightly amusing brony joke with Raven and her Pretty Pony series in the first episode (We still love you, Tara Strong!), I have yet to hear one single funny joke from the series in any of the bits I've seen so far, and to have refused the opportunity to make Season Six of the original series after it ended on such an anticlimactic note and to instead produce this five-year old dreck with no regard for the still-loyal adult audience, is just further testament to Cartoon Network's desire to pander to its target audience without giving a crap about the fans who were there to catapult the station into the success story it used to be. Way to fucking thank us, Cartoon Network.

On top of that, WHY did we need to see Robin super muscular and in a speedo in one episode? WHY?

All I can say is, SAVE SEASON SIX of Teen Titans, people! Damn thee Teen Titans GO! for the embarrassing fail that you are!


4) (NOW #12) Camp Lazlo

Okay, this is NOT the worst show I've ever seen, but I can't remember it doing me any favors either. Camp Lazlo, while popular and acclaimed at the time still wasn't a very big step in the right direction for Cartoon Network by any means whatsoever. Sure, maybe some folks found charm in the animation and some found the characters mildly funny, but I'm sorry, every character in this show aside from Slinkman and maybe Edward (Who does NOT look like a platypus but rather a duck/beaver hybrid) annoyed me greatly, mostly Lazlo himself with his annoying voice, annoying antics, and brainless ventures. I don't mind happy-go-lucky characters when they're done right, but Lazlo was obnoxiously upbeat, and his naivete and disruptiveness to other characters like Edward or Lumpus just rubbed me wrong for reasons I can't fully explain. He's like one of CN's answers to SpongeBob, but a lot less funny and with nothing to balance out his irritating nature.

Actually, there's a certain internet critic who summed up this character perfectly in one of his reviews from last year. What was it? Oh yeah: MONKEYS AREN'T FUNNY.

Neither are his pals for that matter. I don't know if it's cruel for me to say this, but Raj's accent annoyed the heck out of me, and I hardly remember the other guy. Plus, the show's nothing special. Too many browns, yellows, and oranges in all the scenery for my taste and I only occasionally got a good laugh out of any of it. (Again, mostly from Slinkman, Edward, or Lumpus himself, but never out of the title character)


Again, NOT the worst show I've ever seen and it's harmless enough for kids, but I can't say I miss this series.

3) My Gym Partner's a Monkey

Say it with me now: MONKEYS AREN'T FUNNY!

And that too is an excellent summary for this pathetic excuse for a cartoon. I don't know what, but something about this show just really pisses me off more than most of the others on this list, and I'm not even entirely sure why that is, but all I can say is this cartoon sucked bigtime.

And why? Well, how about the fact that the story, revolving around a kid named Adam Lyon who gets sent to a school for animals after some idiot secretary spelled his name "Lion", is literally riding entirely on a friggin' spelling error????? Weak, people. Weak!

But that's not even the worst of its crimes. How about the fact that the animation is very subpar by most standards and isn't at all that pretty to look at? Sorry, but if a cartoon has bad animation, I don't care how funny it may be, it still isn't visually pleasing and it turns me off pretty fast. (Sorry Adventure Time and Regular Show.)

But that's not the worst crime! How about how most of the jokes fall flat and the characters are not all that memorable, save for any of the animal characters voiced by Grey DeLisle?

But no, you want to know what the worst offense in this cartoon is? Jake Spidermonkey.

Oh my God, I HATE this mischievous little bastard. If some of you hate SpongeBob nowadays in the newer episodes, well try another character voiced by Tom Kenny who's entire sense of humor revolves around showing off his BUTT? "The butt of many jokes", you might say. Yeah, this obnoxious little ape was always screeching about showing off his ass whenever he got the chance, and that made up the majority of his humor, it was a one-note character. Plus, he's just all around obnoxious like most monkey characters tend to be in today's cartoons. I never once got a laugh out of this guy in the times I was watching him and often found him to be a terrible friend to Adam. And he never, ever shut the hell up.

And it didn't help that this was one of the cartoons showing the most at the precise Cartoon Network was no longer fun to watch anymore. So seeing this obnoxious dreck pop up certainly didn't help matters. I don't know why, but damn, I hated this cartoon.

2) The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

Everybody seemed to love this cartoon back in the day. Well, everybody except ME.

I absolutely despised this show from the time it debuted under the title Grim and Evil alongside the very short-lived Evil Con Carne. Revolving solely around toilet humor, ones bodily functions, the raw and rampant stupidity of characters like Billy among other things, this was not only a very obnoxious show, but a very gross one. I never understood why people like to indulge in toilet humor, for me that was never funny even as a little kid. (I wasn't your typical kid, I guess. ) I mean shit, piss, snot, and fart jokes are NOT funny people, they never were! It's just nasty and makes you uncomfortable, and this show relied way too much on garbage like that. Plus, I did not like the main characters much. Sure, the take on the Grim Reaper is admittedly amusing with him being held hostage by two live kids, but Billy was endlessly annoying and Mandy was just creepy. Okay, Mandy had her moments and so did Billy, and Grey DeLisle plays a chilling kid character, that's just her niche folks, that's one of her many, many talents. But even with that, I can't say I was very fond of Mandy. This could be a very demented cartoon at times with its mix of horror and black comedy like Courage The Cowardly Dog did, but whereas Courage was funny, this was not. Something about this formula didn't do it for me, and I think it has to do with the brand of humor it was so reliant on and the characters it starred.

That's not to say this show did not have its moments, there was stuff I did enjoy like the Chocolate Sailor, Mandy turning into a demon beast, Irwin turning into a werewolf, Billy getting replaced by a lookalike, or the Dragonball Z parody, but again not enough moments like these to make up for the stuff that either failed to make me laugh or succeeded in making me feel gross.

So what else can I say but, I was ecstatic when the show finally finished in 2007. I thought it would never go away.

1) Total Drama World Tour

Taking the last spot on my list is the season of Total Drama everybody else has heard me rant about and easily the most offensive thing I've seen in recent memory.

Where do you go after Total Drama Island? ANYWHERE BUT HERE, FOLKS.

I'll make this short since most of you have heard me rant about it already. We all know what a great season Total Drama Island was, it was a superb and funny parody of reality TV shows like Fear Factor and Survivor, and we loved the characters so much that we were ecstatic for more seasons. But then Total Drama Action came out which everybody hated for being an overall crappy season that booted all of the fan favorites, played up the romantic bullshit, and was just all-around not fun. Seriously, how do you make a season about movie genres so BORING?????

But that doesn't compare to Total Drama World Tour, which to me was even more offensive than Action. Although it had a superb premise with a, well, a world tour where the contestants participated in challenges that centered on elements of the nations they visited and broke out into song at random times on Chris' command, the season quickly abandoned its plot in the favor of drama nobody wanted to see. Not only were a lot of characters who were well-liked and booted early in TDA booted early all over again in TDWT and not only did certain minor characters fans wanted to see more of get abused once again or outright excluded, but the season after getting a strong start resorted to a massive and scandalous love triangle among wildly overrated characters Gwen, Courtney, and Duncan that hijacked the main focus of the season and created a shitstorm of hate that pitted all of the contestants against each other in a flame war regardless of whether they were involved in this affair or not. Friendships crumbled, the fandom's two favorite couples were ruined for one that was not even that popular at the time, the show became less about the story and more about the romantic cocktease, and created an all-around unpleasant atmosphere that made it impossible for me to enjoy the rest of the season, so when push came to shove, I quit before ever finishing it. Fine fucking work, Fresh TV, you proud of your little bastard child season I hope?

Plus, the season was extremely mean-spirited throughout, a few of the songs sucked, Duncan once again became the goddamn focus despite having starred in two seasons straight and winning in Action, all of the characters acted out of character since apparently Fresh TV doesn't know its own characters well enough to know how to keep them consistent, and whether any of this bothered you or not, almost everybody agreed that the season finale, where NOBODY won the money and implied that the main cast had been wiped out in a volcanic explosion when in next season we found out this was not the case.............SUCKED.

Bottom line, it's a terrible season, a terrible sendoff for the original cast, it ended terribly and it nearly killed the Total Drama franchise.

Please folks, keep fighting to restore the show's good name, and AVOID THIS SEASON AT ALL COSTS.

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You folks agree with my list? What shows did you hate growing up? Which of these shows did you absolutely love that I should show more appreciation for? Am I too harsh a critic, or did any of these annoy you the same way they did me?

Hope you found something amusing about this list, more to come very soon.


(AGAIN: Do not take offense at my comments, I do not mean to offend anyone who is a fan of these shows, this is merely me giving my two cents so please don't hate me for this list. )


Original meme belongs to

All these shows are properties of their respective owners and I claim ownership of NONE of them.