When talking about 90s cartoons, you usually see NickToons, Cartoon Network, Toonami, Fox Kids, and WB Kids mentioned. One collection of toons that tends to get overlooked are the ones put out by MTV Animation.
Sure, you’ll hear about Daria and Beavis and Butt-Head. Sometimes, people will remember Aeon Flux. The network had some dope toons going on. Let’s rank the top five MTV Animation shows to air from five to the best.
The Head
This was the superhero series that MTV should’ve continued until its conclusion. Debuting in 1994, this was a show that is easy to forget even though it ran for two seasons.
It didn’t even start a superhero toon and the comedy in the series was the main reason to watch. I’d say think of this show like MTV’s version of The Tick or Freakazoid.
Aeon Flux
This sci-fi series was extremely weird as a kid but I came to appreciate how Aeon and Trevor’s odd relationship and the dystopian/post-apocalyptic world around them were presented.
The art and animation are usually what draws younger viewers into cartoons while the story might end up lost on very young viewers who are used to faster-paced stories.
Aeon Flux was very “pay attention to what’s happening” in nature. At 11 or 12 all I knew was that this was much more mature than any other cartoon on the air in the early 90s.
On one hand, the content would’ve allowed it to thrive on HBO but on the other, it was very much at home on MTV.
Celebrity Deathmatch
In the late 1990s, wrestling was blazing hot. While MTV worked with World Championship Wrestling a few times, it wouldn’t have its own wrestling programs until the following decade with Wrestling Society X.
Celebrity Deathmatch was MTV’s way of having wrestling on the network by focusing on matches with pop culture-heavy hitters of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfE5NTI1V4E
Stone Cold Steve Austin was featured on the show as a guest commentator and even faced Vince McMahon on an episode.
This show was pretty damn fun to watch and the claymation approach made everything better. Even by 90s standards, Celebrity Deathmatch was probably one of the goriest toons on the air.
Daria
This was the cartoon for 90s kids with a sarcastic or dry sense of humor. Unlike our next entry—which it is a spin-off of—this was a series that you had to watch an episode in its entirety.
Daria was basically an animated sitcom with a pretty mundane, everyday situation that Daria, Jane, and their classmates end up in. The titular character—as well as Jane—pretty much plays the reasonable ones surrounded by family and friends who are definitely the odd ones.
I wasn’t edgy but it did look at situations and the people through the lens of a teenager who really didn’t need the extraness of it all.
Along with our top entry, Daria was picked up for a reboot on Comedy Central last year. While our top entry is in its position for its significance to MTV during the 90s, this toon was a case of the spin-off being better than the original.
Beavis and Butt-Head
Much doesn’t need to be said about Beavis and Butt-Head. It was the flagship show of MTV Animation in the same way that Rugrats and Spongebob were for Nickelodeon.
It was MTV to the core. We had two teenagers getting into stupid sh** in a boring small town with them enjoying their favorite pastime of enjoying music videos.
That was basically the cartoon, this wasn’t a show that if you missed an episode then something important was missed. This was a franchise show for MTV Animation being the first toon to score a movie and the only show with a movie that did well at the box office.
Dated animation and simple stories aside, this was what a network would want from a show that they invest in. Plus, it spawned a loved spin-off and was pretty much precursor to King of the Hill.
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