"When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry."
—Don Bluth, speaking from personal experience
Often because cartoons are sometimes seen as entertainment for kids, some studios seem to think they can get away with releasing anything, no matter how poor the quality. When animation is targeted towards adults, creators often make it a point to go the extra mile to clarify that no, it's not for kids. However, there are some things even the Nostalgia Filter can't save. After all, with glitchy animation, many unanswered questions, awful decisions by the higher-ups, and jokes too unfunny for the most easily amused, can you blame them for not remembering?
To see some of the worst animation has to offer in cinemas, check out the Animated Films page. For horrible Asian animated shows that were made in Japan, see the Anime & Manga page, and for shows that weren't, see the Asian Animation page.
Important Notes:
- Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.
- It isn't a Horrible cartoon just because The Mysterious Mr. Enter, RebelTaxi, PhantomStrider, Saberspark, anyone from Toons These Days or Reviewers Unknown, anyone from or formerly associated with Channel Awesome, or any other Caustic Critic reviewed or said something negative about it. There needs to be independent evidence, such as actual critics (emphasis on plural) for example, to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review.)
- This page is not for horrible episodes (or even seasons) of otherwise well-received shows. For those, see Dethroning Moment and Seasonal Rot.
- To ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
- A show getting cancelled after one season isn't enough for it to be considered horrible. There are tons of Short-Runners that actually have large fanbases and/or cult followings. The show needs to be missed by next-to-nobody for it to count.
Examples (more or less in alphabetical order):
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Animation studios and creators
- Before they transitioned into doing subcontract work for various animated projects, Laughing Dragon Studios, then known as Blind Ferret Entertainment, created a pair of Animated Adaptations that are often considered the worst of the lot:
- Ctrl+Alt+Del isn't held in very high regard amongst the webcomic community, but not even the comic's fans will be willing to defend Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series. All of the issues the original comic had are present in full force, and the transition to a new medium adds in a whole slew of problems. The voice acting is poorly done and cheaply recorded (one background character in Season 2 Episode 4 apparently had his single line literally phoned in), and volume discrepancies are everywhere. The sounds are so badly edited that music tracks commonly overlap, and speech starts and stops partway through a line. The animation (outside of the intro sequence, which actually looks pretty good) is jerky, unnatural, and rarely isn't in a 3/4 profile. And all of that is compounded with the fact that Tim Buckley, the creator of the comics, tried to lock the show behind a paywall at one point. The series nearly killed Laughing Dragon in the cradle. TV Trash riffed it in a crossover
with The Cartoon Hero, and Rowdy C declared that it was one of the few shows that he felt had no redeeming qualities. On the other hand, DeadwingDork watched the entirety of the show live back in 2020, and his thoughts on it were none of the ordinary. The Mysterious Mr. Enter tore into the pilot, too, and considers it to have the worst audio out of anything he's reviewed. MagicMush would also dissect this landfill in his retrospective on Tim Buckley, alongside the other negative aspects towards its failure and unpopularity. Matt Makes Music joins the party too by dissecting the first season while also talking about how other web cartoons that are far superior can be watched for free, unlike the abomination he rightfully deplores. It was also the first and last thing riffed by The Annotated Series on their original account (and returned for more down the line). - They also created a pilot for an Animated Adaptation of Least I Could Do (actually the second attempt at doing so; Ryan Sohmer, the creator of the comic and the founder of the studio, had initially contacted Teletoon to produce the series, but backed out due to Executive Meddling from the latter party). While the animation and audio quality is better than Ctrl+Alt+Del (which isn't saying much), that's not enough to salvage the rest of the show. Essentially, it takes every flaw the Webcomic had and multiplies it exponentially: the characters are unlikable, the humor is bland and repetitive, and the show takes a very childish approach to adult themes. Here's a clip, for those curious.
- Ctrl+Alt+Del isn't held in very high regard amongst the webcomic community, but not even the comic's fans will be willing to defend Ctrl+Alt+Del: The Animated Series. All of the issues the original comic had are present in full force, and the transition to a new medium adds in a whole slew of problems. The voice acting is poorly done and cheaply recorded (one background character in Season 2 Episode 4 apparently had his single line literally phoned in), and volume discrepancies are everywhere. The sounds are so badly edited that music tracks commonly overlap, and speech starts and stops partway through a line. The animation (outside of the intro sequence, which actually looks pretty good) is jerky, unnatural, and rarely isn't in a 3/4 profile. And all of that is compounded with the fact that Tim Buckley, the creator of the comics, tried to lock the show behind a paywall at one point. The series nearly killed Laughing Dragon in the cradle. TV Trash riffed it in a crossover
- Disgraced animator John Kricfalusi had long complained about how his works were "held back" by Executive Meddling and censorship concerns. The following projects, both of which he made with complete creative freedom, suggested that in hindsight, the restrictions he faced were put in place for a reason:
- Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" was an adult-oriented continuation of The Ren & Stimpy Show, which was Kricfalusi's original smash hit from the '90s. Only six episodes were made, and Spike TV only aired three of them. A lot went wrong, and there was a lot of fallout:
- It was extremely reliant on gross-out humor and Black Comedy. While the original Nickelodeon show was well-known for such humor, it was never as offensive or shocking as in this version. It had graphic "jokes" about animal abuse, male pregnancy, and general Gorn. It seemed to be disgusting and offensive for its own sake or perhaps to drum up hype.
- Its pacing is absolutely atrocious; the episodes are incredibly long and feel slower than even the weakest episodes of the original series.note The show's habit of just lingering on the "action" killed whatever momentum the jokes had, making an already unfunny and crass adult "comedy" flat-out insufferable. This trait is at its absolute nadir in "Fire Dogs 2", where there are two scenes dedicated to Ralph Bakshi taking a crap that both go on for minutes; the second one follows it up with a similarly long bit of Ren and Stimpy trying to dispose of said crap. Kricfalusi himself admitted that the show's pacing was too slow for its own good.
- It sexualized female characters to a disturbing degree, even before you learn about how Kricfalusi was accused of sexual abuse by several female animators who worked under him. Nowhere is this more evident than the episode "Naked Beach Frenzy", which was a paper-thin excuse to ogle objectified female caricatures with no other purpose other than to be ogled at - many of which were based on said animators. And any ability to watch it completely collapses when you learn that he roped in animator Katie Rice to voice the character "based" on her (known only as "Soap Girl").
- Kricfalusi was hoping to use the show as a Career Resurrection. Instead, it helped bury his flagship franchise for about a decade. He was reduced to working on animating music videos and commercials, as well as his blog John K. Stuff and his personal project Cans Without Labels (which, as you'll see, is the other Creator Killer he made). In 2020, when Comedy Central announced a new adult revival of Ren & Stimpy, they made certain Kricfalusi wouldn't be involved in any way, and even then, observers were wary because the mere concept of an "adult Ren & Stimpy revival" had been so thoroughly tainted by this show. It would be stuck in Development Hell for four years before being pulled and eventually quietly scrapped. Spike TV, meanwhile, was hoping to make Adult Party Cartoon the flagship of its animation block; instead, they had to scrap it entirely.note
- Rowdy C reviewed it to commemorate TV Trash's fourth anniversary. The Mysterious Mr. Enter also talks about it. PhantomStrider singled out the episode "Ren Seeks Help" as the worst cartoon of all time. LS Mark and TheGrandMac have also discussed the show in full, commenting on how the way the show grew up with its audience ultimately neuters a lot of the comedy.
- Cans Without Labels is an animated short that was also intended to be Kricfalusi's comeback. Instead, it completely torpedoed what was left of his career (well, that and several sexual assault allegations that were revealed in 2018). The film was announced in 2008 and crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2012, before spending seven years in Development Hell, suggesting it was a labor of love - but it turned out to betray almost everything Kricfalusi preached as an animator. Rather than use his trademark Deranged Animation to advance a story, he pushed it to wild extremes to cover for a paper-thin plot with very few attempts at jokes, under the assumption that his comically-exaggerated faces would be funny enough to fill the gap. Despite only being about nine minutes long without credits, the short is padded to hell; it takes George Liquor thirty seconds to deliver a single line of dialog, with multiple long pauses between words that serve no purpose beyond letting him make a few more unfunny faces, and there's later a slow zoom-out of a static picture of the bathroom door while cartoon pooping noises play. His notorious perfectionism bore no results; the editing is a mess on all fronts, from the production to the acting to the sound, with one piece of background music ending abruptly and multiple voice lines having obvious cuts between different takesnote . The animation similarly looks incredibly cheap; the camera refuses to stop zooming and panning, perspective and scale are constantly off (the very first scene after the opening credits has George's nose and mouth shrinking as the camera zooms out), and the backgrounds are inconsistent between scenes. Despite long decrying the use of CGI in 2D animation, almost everything except for the characters is CGI - jarringly realistic CGI that doesn't mesh with the 2D characters at all.note The main conflict is randomly resolved when an unfunny Seltzerberg-esque parody of Donald Duck named "Donald Bastard" randomly shows up to eat the contents of the can for Ernie and Slab, presumably as an out-of-place Take That! to Disney. Despite the obvious corners being cut everywhere, the final short was released in 2019, seven years after it was fully funded - averaging out to a little over seventy seconds of footage completed per year. The Mysterious Mr. Enter elaborates on the short itself here, AniMat suffers through the whole affair here, Daniel Ibbertson goes into detail on what happened with its Kickstarter situation here, and TheGrandMac discusses the short here, as well as the animatic for a planned Ren & Stimpy short to accompany The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.
- Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" was an adult-oriented continuation of The Ren & Stimpy Show, which was Kricfalusi's original smash hit from the '90s. Only six episodes were made, and Spike TV only aired three of them. A lot went wrong, and there was a lot of fallout:
- Many of the syndicated cartoons produced by Sam Singer (called "the Ed Wood of animation" by Animation Magazine) were notoriously shoddy.
- Most animation buffs consider Bucky and Pepito the worst of the lot and frequently cite it as one of the worst cartoons ever made. Set against a bleak but beautifully-painted desert backdrop were the crudely-animated and thoroughly-unlikable title characters - an Anglo kid in a cowboy costume and his lazy Mexican sidekick. The plots often involved annoying animal pests and a tedious procession of contrived visual gags. Zerex would review this alongside Paddy the Pelican, with the main consensus being that the show itself is so dull and tedious that it actually came off as unreviewable when compared to the latter.
- A DVD collection of the worst cartoons ever made features not only two episodes of Bucky and Pepito but also two episodes of another of Singer's cartoons, The Adventures of Paddy the Pelican. Paddy's cartoons are especially lousy because they're pencil tests that were submitted as finished cartoons. The artwork is generally decent... and that's about all that can be said for them. The picture is often blurry, each shot comprises one or two seconds of animation looped back and forth, and there is no background. A few shots are dark enough to make actions barely visible. Perhaps even worse is the voice acting, all done by Singer himself in a single take with no script. The finished product sounds (appropriately) like an insane man talking to himself for eight minutes. The Mysterious Mr. Enter reviewed one of its episodes here, where he calls it the worst cartoon of all time (in terms of production values). Zerex kicks off 2025 by spending a whole hour discussing all 6 (found) episodes while also losing his sanity by the mile-marker. Vinny of Vinesauce subjected himself to two whole episodes and part of another (which he had to stop watching because it was just so mentally taxing) and said that he can understand why it didn't take off.
- Most animation buffs consider Bucky and Pepito
TV series
- While Henry Danger is a divisive show, it still has a following. The same cannot be said for its Animated Adaptation, The Adventures of Kid Danger, which is widely regarded as one of Nickelodeon's worst original animated programsnote . While the animated version gets rid of the overused laugh track, it introduces a whole slew of problems in its place: the animation and character designs are completely dull. The storylines are very lackluster, considering that the cartoon could've opened up a huge opportunity for storylines that couldn't be done in its live-action counterpart. The episodes are also full of unfunny and/or nonsensical jokes, references that are about as relevant as expired milk, the lead characters going from dull and annoying to outright unbearable, and tons of gross-out humor that isn't charming in the slightest. Newcomers and fans of Henry Danger disliked it and avoided the show, leading to low ratings that led to the show getting quietly removed from Nick's schedule. Coupled with Dan Schneider's departure from Nickelodeon, the failure of this show led to the death of his production company, Schneider's Bakery. The Mysterious Mr. Enter reviewed the show here as a separate Animated Atrocity and here as part of his Nick-o-Rama marathon, and he found nothing positive to say about the show. Not only that, but he also almost considered it for its own spot in his worst cartoons of the 2010s list before giving it a dishonorable mention that could also be a tie with The Powerpuff Girls (2016) at #4. The Alpha Jay Show has reviewed the show's pilot and similarly has no praise for it.
- Allen Gregory, a short-lived Fox animated series co-created by and starring Jonah Hill as the voice of the title character, Allen Gregory De Longpre, a nerdy, pretentious 7-year-old who's forced to attend elementary school in the face of the recession when his gay parents' finances are hit hard, principally those of his CEO father, Richard. The show features various dull and tasteless jokes, including some about AIDS and date rape; bland animation with hideous character designs (with the titular Allen Gregory more resembling a creepy ventriloquist dummy than an actual human child and side character Julie having a grotesquely huge forehead); off-putting homophobia during a time when adult animation was starting to move away from it (particularly the fact that Jeremy, one of Allen's parents, is a straight man who was sexually harassed and forced by Richard into marrying him); and characters who are some combination of idiotic, whiny, and/or complete jerkasses. There's also a subplot involving Allen's crush on his 70-year-old principal, played out in the most disturbingly sexual way possible. Fox must've realized they had a stinker on their hands when they saw the pilot, as not only did they only order seven episodes with the intent of burning them off at the first opportunity, but have also gone out of their way to ensure that the series never reappears online. Most of the crew (which included a then-unknown Rachel Bloom) also stated that they regretted working on the show. TV Trash eviscerated it by popular demand, believing it to be one of the worst shows he's ever reviewed. RebelTaxi also called it the 12th worst cartoon ever (in no particular order) in his review.
- After the Sputnik launch in 1957, there seemed to be a push for "educational" TV cartoons in the US to raise kids' intellects, and they were generally awful. One of them, The Big World of Little Adam, was nothing but a still shot of two kids' heads behind a book, conveniently covering their mouths to avoid animating speech - the only movement was their pupils darting back and forth. This "action" framed montages of still pictures of the subject at hand. On a whole other level of awful, one installment dealing with missiles praised the V-1 and V-2 rockets. However, the animated segments and slideshows weren't the only things present: The Other Wiki claims the producer, Fred Ladd, who is best known for bringing Astro Boy, Gigantor, and Kimba the White Lion to America, and thus started the first wave of anime in the English-speaking world, got hold of a bunch of NASA documentaries, and with the space race of the 50s and 60s running about in kids' minds, created the segments as framing devices for said documentaries.Toonopedia: This show inspired as many extra-media spin-offs and merchandised products as it deserved - that is, none at all. Today, it's occasionally glimpsed alongside Bucky & Pepito, in "Best of the Worst" retrospectives.
- Christian kids' entertainment is notorious for generally being low-quality with some exceptions, but Boys of Valor takes it to a whole new level. The voice acting is atrocious and the CGI is even worse: a generic grass texture is used for the ground in Hell, the villains look like huge-headed BIONICLE rejects, at least two scenes have one of the boys flying in a loop and colliding with the ground, remaining rock-still while doing so, and some of the models even seem to be directly stolen from The Sims 1 and Halo. To top it all off, the Big Bad is defeated by dancing, something even the bad guy is incredulous about. Watch iRawss tear it apart here. He also reviewed the sequel along with the Critic Core here.
- There are more than a few reasons why Calico Entertainment's Bubsy (Pilot) never got picked up. Not only because of unfunny jokes and overuse of Stock Footage, but almost all of our main "heroes" are completely unlikable and have voice acting that not only wastes the talent of famous names like Rob Paulsen, Jim Cummings, and Tress MacNeille but is also incredibly ear-grating. The only likable character is Arnold Armadillo, and he is sadly treated to a sadistic Running Gag involving his fear of getting run over by a truck. It was so bad that even the creator of Bubsy, Michael Berlyn, hated it. The Mysterious Mr. Enter took an axe to it here, as well as Tooncrap, Nothing but Cartoons, Cartoon Palooza, and even Joel from Vinesauce. There's also an annotated version as well. And just in case you weren't convinced enough, here's the entire thing. "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?", indeed.
- Da Boom Crew, co-created by Bruce W. Smith of The Proud Family fame, is widely considered the worst show to grace the Kids' WB! block. Dialogue that is overly aggressive in its Totally Radical tone, a generic plotnote full of holesnote , the wasted voice talents of Morris Day, Jerome Benton, and Wanda Sykes, and other things made this show not worth its timeslot. The show only lasted 13 episodes before getting the ax, with only the first four episodes airing in the United States. The Cartoon Hero reviews it here, and The Mysterious Mr. Enter ripped it a new one and considered it the second worst cartoon of the 2000s.note Rowdy C tears it apart here
- Fairview was Comedy Central's attempt to create a Spiritual Successor to South Park (which they used as a lead-in to attract viewers) and was also part of a new adult animation push into streaming services, yet it ended up being one of the most reviled attempts at an Animated Shock Comedy. With Stephen Colbert as executive producer, it miserably fails at political commentary as its "satire" ends up being far too shallow and unsubtle to hold any water (such as potshots towards anti-vaxxers that amount to them saying that they're against vaccines because they're stupid). The show's non-political humor isn't much better, mostly consisting of tired Toilet Humour, shock and gross-out humor, and sex jokes, all delivered with very little humor or cleverness. The character designs resemble creepy-looking nesting dolls, with overly-detailed, Archer-style human faces that horribly clash with the simplistic Weeble bodies—more like emojis than actual characters. The characters themselves are flat and receive no development. It's so poorly made that at one point, one of the main characters wears a mask that looks like it came from Google Images and cheaply photoshopped. What's more, the voice acting was literally phoned in over Zoom, making it jarring to the point that Saberspark reported that he recoiled in pain while watching the series. It received enormously negative reviews to the point of getting a 1.5 on IMDbnote and an audience score of 6% on Rotten Tomatoes (largely going untouched by critics), leaving it only a one-season, eight-episode seriesnote . Other YouTubers that also dissect this dreadful mess include LS Mark, who actually looked over a batch of inept ''South Park'' clones that were ironically made by Comedy Central and labeled Fairview in particular as one of the most thoroughly awful things he's had to watch, and Mr. Cow, titling his video with a very similar opinion.
- Fantasy Island (not to be confused with the TV series or the movie of the same name) was a television series that followed up on an embarrassment to animation known as The Legend of the Titanic and fellow Horrible entry Tentacolino and is as bad as you'd expect from that description. The show has about as many continuity errors as Tentacolino, including giving characters over-the-top Italian accents they didn't have in either of the films. Even aside from that, the script is insane, including having sharks create a tidal wave so they can steal beach chairs, ghost pirates attempting to steal the Titanic, and a baby being born a week after its conception and aging to ten years old within a few days, twice, which no one questions, among various other plot points that are abruptly dropped not long after being brought up. The art and animation are both very inconsistent as well; the new characters (including the aforementioned children) look like they came from a whole other universe than the returning characters, while the animation goes back and forth between traditional animation and Off-Model, rubbery-looking Flash animation. Having only aired in Italy and North Korea, the series was nearly impossible to find until it was uploaded on YouTube in 2019 on the production company's channel. As a result, it didn't have an IMDb for a good while, and it still doesn't have enough reviews to have a proper rating (though unsurprisingly, the few reviews it has are overwhelmingly 1-star). Raisor Blade reviews it here. Or watch Bobsheaux review it himself here.
- Fleabag Monkeyface is an animated Gross-Out Show and an Animated Adaptation of the children's book series The Disgusting Adventures of Fleabag Monkeyface. While the original book series isn't exactly a masterpiece (especially with its....oddly similar premise to another book series), it does have a fanbase. However, not even they are willing to praise this. The show features cheap and bland animation (some from the typically excellent Impossible Pictures, seemingly out of their element in cartoony CG compared to their usual photorealistic dinosaurs), rampant use of Narrating the Obvious, terrible character designs (best shown with the show's Big Bad, Dr. Dirk Spamflex, who, intentionally or not, resembles a penis and the fact that network chief Frank Forcemiser bears an odd resemblance to J. Jonah Jameson), one-note and unoriginal characters, repetitive storylines, grating voice acting, and generally baffling writingnote . Even the show's attempts at gross-out fall flat due to the dull lighting and stiff, lifeless CG animation. The show performed poorly, having CITV's lowest ratings during its lifespan and currently sits at 1.6 on IMDb. Not only that, it joined Peacock's catalogue of third-party animated shows in 2020... and quickly disappeared from it five years later. Even The Mysterious Mr. Enter, with his open dislike of the grossout genre, concludes that Fleabag is too sterile to even appeal to people who do enjoy grossout when he takes a look at it here.
- Full English was an attempt by British network Channel 4 to create an adult cartoon to capitalize on the success of American shows such as Family Guy and South Park. Unfortunately, despite using Rough Draft Studios for its animation and casting well-known British names such as Richard Ayoade and Kayvan Novak, the show was regarded as an abomination by viewers and critics alike. Many labeled it as a "British" ripoff of Family Guy with several copied elements, such as the main character's wife having a billionaire father who disapproves of his son-in-law. The gags were so offensive that even Family Guy at its most shocking isn't as tasteless. The most infamous was a segment in which the ghost of notorious reality TV star Jade Goody, who had died of cancer three years before broadcast, chats about her husband's then-ongoing rape case - only to be interrupted by the ghost of Princess Diana, who apologizes for being late because the traffic was "murder", who gets into a fight with Goody's ghost and calls her "baldy" while Goody's ghost calls her a "bulimic slut". That one led even the infamously sensationalist British Newspaper The Daily Mail to call it the "sickest cartoon ever". It was cancelled after four episodes, the remaining ones were shunted off to sister network E4, and none of it was aired again; Channel 4 still pretends it never happened. Torch Sheep has a review of it here, Steve Reviews has one review here, and Saberspark has one here.
- Good Times: Black Again is a 2024 animated reboot of the 1970s Good Times television series produced by basketball player Stephen Curry and Seth MacFarlane that premiered on Netflix. Although previous executive producer Norman Lear returned (this ultimately being his final completed project overall before his December 2023 deathnote ), the show as released is an utterly generic, trashy Animated Shock Comedy with little attempt to rise above the genre's worst excesses. The series was Not Screened for Critics, and upon release it was immediately clear why. From the moment its trailer released, it gained widespread backlash and criticism due to the poor animation (whenever somebody walks, it looks jarringly stilted and feels like several keyframes were missing during production), horrendous character designsnote , unfunny jokes, greatly Denser and Wackier tone, stilted storylines, and - most notoriously - the massive amount of Modern Minstrelsy and Unfortunate Implications toward African-Americans (something the 70s version strove to avoid), which was probably intended to Cross the Line Twice but barely made it over once. It received scathing reviews from multiple publications, including CNN, HuffPost, and Variety, currently holds a 3.7 rating on IMDb, and has an 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It also was publicly condemned by several people involved with the 1970s series, including the families of co-creators Eric Monte and Mike Evans. The show was unceremoniously canceled after a single season.
- Hammerman, a cartoon about rapper MC Hammer, is one of the most embarrassing examples of a Celebrity Toon. It ran for one season, and it's pretty clear from the start that most of its budget went into getting Hammer himself rather than anything else. For starters, the animation is awful, with a lousy attempt at achieving graffiti-like aesthetics and movement so limited that it could accurately be described as "two-frame animation with the least detail put in each frame, sometimes mirrored or flipped", and the lack of sound effects was compensated with the animation of unsound effects. The animation is not the only problem: the theme song is a generic hip-hop loop with MC Hammer singing a hastily-written Expository Theme Tune that doesn't feel like a song at all. Not only does each episode hammer a lesson into the viewers' heads, sometimes in the most nonsensical and backwards way possible, but Hammer explains both the Aesop and the whole plot at the beginning of each episode. More egregiously, Hammerman/Stanley is not even voiced by MC Hammer himself in the cartoon segments, with Clark Johnson providing the voice instead. Top it with idiotic characters and boring villains, and you get an awkward piece of animated crap that made both Mr. Enter and The Nostalgia Critic cringe. Even The Rap Critic mentioned how genuinely awful Hammerman was when talking about the song that actually ruined MC Hammer's career (Pumps and a Bump).
- Le monde selon Kev ("The World According to Kev"; also known as Kev's World) is a French cartoon that aired on M6 in 2018 before disappearing into oblivion, and it's not hard to see why. Starring controversial French comedian Kev Adams, the show is a rip-off of Titeuf, but with terrible character designs derivative of some cartoons that aired around the same time, like Star vs. the Forces of Evil and Steven Universe. Like many other French cartoons, it is also unnecessarily cruel towards the main character. For these reasons, it's often cited as one of the worst French cartoons to ever exist and holds a 2.8/10 on IMDb as well as a 2.7/10 on Senscritique.
- The disaster that was Mauser y Pirulo, a short-lived animated series that graced Venezuelan screens for less than a season in 1999. It was promoted as "the very first Venezuelan animated series," but in fact it was a Same Language Dub of the Colombian animated show El Siguiente Programa,note a vehicle for the duo of comedians/radio jocks Martín De Francisco and Santiago Moure. The original footage wasn't well-animated, but it was saved by witty writing and the voice acting of its main stars. In the Venezuelan "translation," however, the main characters were renamed and transformed into Beavis and Butt-Head expies, and the topical Colombian cultural references were awkwardly changed to Venezuelan ones, among other changes.note The result was a show that had to be stuck at the Midnight timeslot, where it quickly died. What few fans they had never managed to tape it, so while the original show received DVD releases and episodes can be freely found online, the only proof that Mauser y Pirulo even existed is the theme music, which some say is the best part of the show.
- Mega Babies was a cartoon made by Christian and Yvon Tremblay about a trio of superpowered infants who fought crime with assistance from their nurse. The jarring character designs and grating theme song (an annoying, warped version of "Rock-a-bye Baby") aside, to say that this cartoon is heavy on gross-out humor is a planet-sized understatement. A prime example of how repulsive this show is: one early episode starts with a shot of the babies sleeping... which wouldn't be so bad if one of them didn't have a stringy glob of snot shooting out of its nose with each snore. Watch it here, but only if you have a strong stomach. In his list of "Top 10 Ugliest Cartoons," RebelTaxi said that the show was so ugly that it was perfect for scaring teens from having sex - "It's not an accurate representation of childbirth or can it change their minds, but it should prolong the inevitable." Watch The Mysterious Mr. Enter nearly break apart from this abomination here. note
- MP4orce is a German cartoon and an obvious attempt at capitalizing on such shows as Code Lyoko. Described as having subpar exposition-heavy dialogue, flat stock characters, and generic plots devoid of nuance, the animation also leaves much to be desired, with characters often being "animated" with rotating JPEGs of their concept art when they're not the main focus of the shot. The vocal work is grating and the sound mixing is especially poor, with characters shouting over one another unintelligibly and annoyingly loud sound effects compared to the dialogue. Because of these factors, the show has a mere 2.7 rating on IMDB. Watch SATURDAZED Reviews review it here.
- Mr. Birchum is an adult animated sitcom starring Adam Carolla as Richard "Dick" Birchum, an old-school conservative who works as a woodworking teacher at his local middle school and was previously used in Crank Yankers. While the premise sounds solid enough on paper, the whole thing is undermined by the fact that The Daily Wire was more focused on the show being "anti-woke" than on it being funny, to the point that even conservatives found it off-putting. Mr. Birchum is characterized as a foul-tempered Jerkass who hates the more diverse and welcoming modern world (to the point of frequently going into rants about how "wokeness" is ruining society), as well as abusing his students and treating pretty much anyone who doesn't agree with his views like crap, and yet the audience is mostly expected to sympathize with him whenever he suffers any misfortunes. The show's open embracing of right-wing messages and the reputations of the cast and crew will turn off anyone who isn't a hardline conservative — but even regarding its target audience, there's not a lot for them either, as most of the show's attempts at satire is limited to half-hearted jabs at progressive culture... and that's provided they aren't yelling "Stop Being Stereotypical!" at Birchum and his friends. Its attempt at relevancy and being edgy is also terribly inconsistentnote . Combine that with the bland, low-qualitynote Thin-Line Animation and art style, and it's easy to see why the only fanbase it got was an ironic LGBT+ Periphery Demographic due to its Accidental Innuendo. LS Mark and Saberspark both make fun of this embarrassing disaster, while The Mysterious Mr. Enter expresses his thoughts on it, and José talks more about its troubling history.
- The Nutshack, produced by Myx TV, is the first animated adult TV show aimed directly at Filipino Americans, and also the worst. The show features horrendously stereotypical and flat characterization, racist and homophobic caricatures (Cherry Pie is a very obvious Asian transgender hooker stereotype, for instance), unappealingly crude Adobe Flash animation, pop culture references that instantly date it to the late Noughties, overly-sexualized female characters that clash with the crude art style, terrible and hard-to-understand voice actingnote , disgusting Toilet Humor that mixes terribly with the art style, and a childish approach to everything. Both RebelTaxi and The Mysterious Mr. Enter had nothing but negative things to say about the show, with the former calling it the 6th worst cartoon ever (in no particular order) and the latter calling it the worst animated series of the 2000s. The Cartoon Hero tells us what he thinks of the show here. Mr. Enter later gave an episode a full review here. ralphthemoviemaker called it one of the worst things he'd ever seen here. Its only saving grace was the theme song, which eventually became memetic thanks to its repetitively catchy nature.
- Pixel Pinkie. The premise was ripped off from shows such as The Fairly OddParents!, the storylines are by-the-book, the characters are very thin plastic cut-outs of normally well-done character types, the animation looks more limited than most Web Animation projects, and almost all the characters sound like they were voiced by one woman. Its creators are notoriously sore when it comes to criticism, having gotten into several Flame Wars with fans of Mr. Enter, whom they claimed was in no position to judge because he was American, as well as trying to false-flag his review several times under alternate names. PhantomStrider tore it apart in his Top 5 Worst Forgotten Girls Cartoons video. Zerex also reviewed it as well and was so appalled by how awful it truly was that he genuinely considered it to be far worse than FoP's infamous later seasons.
- Popzilla is an MTV cartoon from 2009 that has faded into obscurity for good reasons. The animation consists of nothing more than photoshopped stock images, and the skits are bland, unfunny, and rely too much on Overly Long Gags. It sports an IMDb rating of 1.7 and was one of the last animated shows to air on MTV. Some of the sketches can be found here. Highlights include Bill Clinton perving on the Obamas, the Jonas Brothers doing...naughty things with random objects like chili cheese fries and steel wool because it's not "doing it with a girl", and a CBS executive greenlighting a dwarf version of The Amazing Race because it amused him.
- Despite having well-known comedians like Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen, HBO Max's Christmas-themed miniseries Santa Inc. was reviled for trying way too hard to make an "edgy" Christmas Animated Shock Comedy. The show is full of horribly tasteless jokes and crude humor that rely too much on extreme vulgarity, sex, and/or nudity. Its Breaking the Glass Ceiling premise of a female elf named Candy trying to prove herself as a successor to Santa Claus is constantly hammered in. The main characters and supporting characters are either very huge Jerkasses and/or one-note, while the villains are all predictably sexist or corrupt. The show offers a Hope Spot in one of the final episodes, where Santa gives a sensible reason for not choosing Candy as his successornote and offers a compromise wherein Candy gets all the executive power in the company, while Devin acts as its public face, which she completely rejects with a "Go fuck yourself.", cementing the cast as irredeemable in the eyes of critics. As such, the show proved to be incredibly cruel, offensive, and lacked anybody worth caring about in the end. To the show's credit, the series has incredible Stop Motion animation, meant to pay tribute to the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials... not that it's enough to save the show's awful writing. It has an IMDb rating of 1.6, which the star talent blamed entirely on antisemitism.note Steve Reviews, Just Stop, Cynical Reviews, and Saberspark had very few kind words to say about the show. It was also given a negative review in Variety. And while it was included among the shows purged from the service in Summer 2022, this was not one of the shows that viewers were disappointed to see leave.
- Despite the involvement of director Mel Brooks (who reprised his roles as President Skroob and Yogurt and was an executive producer), Joan Rivers (Dot Matrix), Daphne Zuniga (Princess Vespa), and Dom DeLuise (Pizza the Hutt, in a rather undignified final performance before his passing), Spaceballs: The Animated Series has been given the Fan Nickname Da Soich for More Money from fans of the original movie.note The designs of the characters range from okay to awful, most notably changing Dark Helmet, originally played by 5' 6" Rick Moranis, to a dwarf. The joke may have been about Helmet being a comically short nerd compared to Darth Vader, but there was no reason to make him look like a bobblehead. The animation doesn't fare any better. In an annoyingly lazy move, it rehashes jokes from the movie. In fact, the first two episodes are a loose remake of the movie as a two-parter. The rest of the series is a Shallow Parody of other movies, such as The Terminator, The Phantom Menace, and even non-sci-fi works like Harry Potter and American Idol. That is not only comparable to a Seltzer and Friedberg movie, but it renders the title of the show and the movie it was based on redundant. Watch Bobsheaux tear it apart here. ShogunGin0 also shares his thoughts on the matter. Rowdy C tears it apart here. Hats Off Entertainment, who is a fan of the movie, covers it here in his Forgotten Failures series. Quite notably, when a second film, Spaceballs: The New One, was finally announced in 2025, it completely ignored the show, stating flat out that while the past 38 years had been full of massive sci-fi franchises, there had only been one Spaceballs.
- Velma is an Animated Shock Comedy take on the Scooby-Doo franchise that excludes the titular dog. Critic Heather Hogan describes it as a show that "doesn't have any idea who its audience is, yet seems to despise them all the same." All of the main characters are unsympathetic jerkasses who frequently abuse and manipulate each other, including Only Sane Man Norville (Shaggy), who can be Not So Above It All, to the point that it's hard to see how they could ever be friends. Velma herself is an egotistical, Know-Nothing Know-It-All who bullies and gaslights Fred for being from a wealthy white family as a Running Gag and slut-shames any woman she deems prettier than her. Besides that, the writing is so shallow that any viewer, regardless of political beliefs, will find something offensive among the litany of strawmen and stock characters. Halfway through the first season, a love quadrangle between the entire main cast takes over the show, leaving the mystery element feeling undercooked and nonsensical. The show's attempts at parodying the Scooby-Doo formula are considered limp, mean-spirited, and outdone by earlier, more popular works, and its other attempts at humor are limited to annoying meta-references and bashing its viewers. It sits at an abysmal 39% critic and 7% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with even Grey DeLisle (the voice of Daphne Blake since What's New, Scooby-Doo?) describing the show as "a bastardization of a beloved classic cartoon." Saberspark, MangaKamen, Elvis The Alien, and Spilling the Milk here and here, among others, all trashed the show. Very few people were disappointed when the show was canned after the second season'snote Halloween special. Mindy Kaling, who voiced Velma and executive produced this show, has since moved onto better prospects like Running Point and Not Suitable for Work, both of which were far better-received than this animated nadir.
TV films and specials
- The Christmas Tree is a 1991 animated TV Christmas Special with abysmal Limited Animation that falls head-first into the Uncanny Valley, filled with ugly character designs, awkward voice acting with voice actors who sound like they're half-braindead (one of the characters is a little girl who's very clearly voiced by an 18-year-old woman, one of the little girls slurred and mumbled her lines, and there's also one who has an inexplicably pitch-shifted, almost artificial-sounding voice), and bad timing (at times there is no pause between sentences, leading to awkward tone-shifts when characters speak). And then there's the editing, which includes scenes that cut into other scenes randomly and without warning. Top it off with an Cliché Storm Idiot Plot, various Plot Holes, and a botched black-and-white moral at the end, and you have one of the worst Christmas specials ever. The Nostalgia Critic, in his review, even labeled it as such. Phelous had a similar (if not quite as extreme) opinion in his own review, while Best of the Worst gets some mileage out of it. The Double Toasted crew flat-out called it the laziest Christmas movie ever made, right up there with Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa. PeanutButterGamer has also reviewed this film, and so did Saberspark.
- Madballs: Gross Jokes is an utter disaster of an animated short. The humor is bland, with most "jokes" sounding like they were taken from a children's joke book. None of the skits are interesting at all, and there isn't any semblance of a plot. The animation is poor, with ugly and uninspired character designs and visuals. None of the characters have any personality, with the possible exception of Skullface. Tooncrap takes a look at it here and considers it one of the worst animations they've reviewed, along with Bubsy. The Mysterious Mr. Enter also took a look at it and declared it one of the worst episodes he reviewed in 2013. The fact that it came out the same time as the more polished Escape From Orb by the same producers doesn't help in the slightest.
- Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa, a musical Christmas Special marred by problems such as characters who are flat to the point of being stereotypical (e.g., two of the kids are a hip black kid and a short fat kid with a sandwich in his hand), an emotionally manipulative Cliché Storm of a plot, exceedingly abysmal animation with downright-ugly character designs even for 2002 that not only puts Vídeo Brinquedo to shame but actually makes them look like Industrial Light & Magic by comparison, and to top it all off the wasted talents of actors like Mark Hamill, Jodi Benson, and Paige O'Hara (this might be an indicator of where most of the budget went). Publicity for the special even had the gall to compare the characters with the Peanuts gang. How this ever made its way onto network TV is anyone's guess. Watch the whole abomination here, and be sure to check out its website for more cruddy Christmas cheer.
- Curiously, there is one trait that is universally agreed to be pretty good: the voice acting, which is actually pretty decent. However, it's universally acknowledged that this is only by virtue of having the aforementioned voice-acting legends in it, and it's far from enough to save the special.
- As it was being broadcast, viewers took to the internet to express their surprise that something of that quality made it onto TV. Kyle Norty reviewed it in December 2015, saying it had the worst CG animation he had ever seen. In 2016, Bobsheaux threw in his two cents. Pan Pizza calls this the 7th Worst Cartoon (In No Particular Order) in his usual hilarious way. And to complete the 2016 trifecta, witness Mr. Enter endure this mess.
- On the first Tuesday of December 2017, a remarkable coincidence resulted in three Internet connoisseurs of terrible animation discussing Rapsittie Street Kids on the same day. The Nostalgia Critic covered this trainwreck, saying that it and The Christmas Tree are tied for "worst Christmas special ever". The Island of Misfit Christmas Specials' Peter Paltridge called it "...an unholy mess that it's mindboggling it could air on commercial TV", plausibly predicting that it could reach a mainstream level of ironic fame. Phelous deemed it, to quote Silent Hill, "...A world of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life."
- In December 2020, Saberspark reviewed it as one last screw-you to the year that was.
Web series
- The Backyardigans is a beloved classic among fans of Nick Jr. in the 2000s. Its 2020s music videos, however, are a disgrace to its legacy. The lifeless-looking character redesignsnote aside, all the charm from the songs of the original show is replaced with stupid, barebones versions of the songs with lazy and dull new lyrics added to them. None of them even include Tasha or Austin.note To make matters worse, the first one came out not even four months after the passing of series creator Janice Burgess, leading fans of the original series to accuse Nickelodeon of disrespecting Burgess' hard work on the series by trying to capitalize off of the show's success. Vailskibum talks about the "Castaways" music video here.
- Biatches is a short-lived web series released by Comedy Central for their digital platform, CC Studios, and is considered their bottom of the barrel. The series features a heavy overreliance on unsubtle, witless, and immature Toilet Humor and sex jokes,note low-quality animation, and a downright unappealing art style with hideous character designs, which is made worse by said overuse of toilet humor, unlikable and annoying main characters, a side cast made up of flat stereotypes, and voice acting that ranges from phoned in to obnoxious and grating. All of this has resulted in a series that sports a horrendous IMDb rating of 1/10, making it the lowest-rated Comedy Central cartoon and among the lowest-rated shows, animated or not, on the site. Zerex himself would go on to say that Biatches might easily be the worst cartoon ever made, period, even more so than fellow contender Pixel Pinkie.
- My Little Pony: Newborn Cutiesnote was a Flash-animated adaptation of My Little Pony and was the last series of the third generation of the franchise, and for good reasons. While the G3 specials and movies aren't the epitome of children's entertainment, the animation is fairly competent, the songs are pretty catchy, professional voice actors give the characters likable personalities, and it isn't above poking fun at its ditzy characters. By contrast, with Newborn Cuties, Hasbro put in as little effort as possible to maximize their profits, which really shows: all the voices were provided by clearly untrained children,note and all sound almost exactly the same, stock sound effects are used constantly, the Flash animation is minimalist at best, and there are moments where voices come out with no indication of who's saying the lines (to the point that not a single character's mouth moves in the second short, although there is another version of it that fixes this problem), the characters' movements coupled with their ugly models make them look bizarrely wrong, plotlines were blatantly recycled from earlier G3 specials, and the reoccurring cast of quirky characters that its fans had grown attached to were completely thrown out to market the same handful of characters and toys. In addition, the writing's completely juvenile, insulting, and contains the (albeit meant to be wrong) unintentionally racist line, "Everyone in Ponyville knows unicorns belong in Unicornia." Is it any wonder that it was discontinued two shorts in and replaced with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic? Watch Mr. Enter tear apart the second short, "Over Two Rainbows," which is worse than the already abysmal first short, "So Many Different Ways to Play." PhantomStrider put it as #4 on his Top 5 Worst Forgotten Girls Cartoons. The Crimson Mayhem, who edited some of Enter's reviews, reviews it himself.
- The Red Ape Family is an animated series based on (and starring) Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and itself being hosted on a blockchain, with each episode being sold as an NFT. Claiming to be the first of its kind,note the show ostensibly centers around a family of Bored Apes leaving Earth to live a new life on Mars. The animation looks pretty awkward sometimes; one early scene has a glaring typo, proving how sloppily it was put together; the story is not clearly explained to the viewer, with the only real explanation being in the trailer; and the jokes either make no sense, are dated, or are blatant attempts to preach to a choir of cryptocurrency speculators. Its only interest, even to its target audience, is that it is technically a form of currency. Saberspark took a look at it here and concluded that it was a blatant and soulless cash grab, to the point of including it in his rant video against NFTs as a whole and later returning to dance on the show's grave when its budget ran out during production of the fourth episode. It was also reviewed by Sankobyte and Prixet, who were equally unkind in their treatment of it. Cynical Reviews also covered it here in his video about NFTs and NFT cartoons.
- During the final season of Better Call Saul, AMC released Slippin' Jimmy, an animated miniseries serving as a prequel and depicting the childhood of protagonist Jimmy McGill. From the moment it was announced, fan reception had been universally negative. Many people had initially thought that the show's promotional images◊ were tongue-in-cheek pieces of Fan Art meant to parody the Spin-Off Babies trope and were shocked to learn that it was actually a real show. The character designs are considered ugly and generic, with comparisons being drawn unfavorably to GoAnimate despite being animated by former Rick and Morty animation studio Starburns Industries. Despite supposedly being a prequel to Better Call Saul, it's a prequel In Name Only: the series is tonally inconsistent with the gritty realism present in the rest of the Breaking Bad franchise, with scenes like fart clouds transforming into frogs and the characters accepting a ride from a cabbie who is actually a pirate, scenarios that feel wholly out of place in the context of the main series, combined with the returning characters (Jimmy and his childhood friend Marco) acting nothing like how they do in the actual TV show. Despite Jimmy earning the nickname "Slippin' Jimmy" by being a Con Man, Jimmy pulls off only a single con job over the course of the series. The animation itself isn't anything spectacular, either: background props are identifiable as pieces of clipart, even sporting scattered white pixels around their edges on occasion, indicating that the animators hastily erased the white backgrounds around them without bothering to touch anything up; in one episode, the animation budget appears to have been exceeded, as the episode ends on an extended shot of the building exterior while the characters' voiceovers explain what is happening inside. While YouTube removed their dislike counter in 2022, an official upload of an episode of the series (now taken down) sat at only 1.1 thousand likes despite having over 95,000 views, which indicates strong negative reception. The series holds a 2.6 rating on IMDb, and on any media related to this, comments sections are unanimously negative, with any praise being transparently ironic in a similar vein to the praise heaped onto the also-negatively-received Morbius film. Watch Mr. Cow suffer through all six episodes here.
- Time Travel Academy (a.k.a. Learn Our History), a series of educational CGI cartoons produced by former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to educate kids on the "history that schools are afraid to tell." Let's put it this way: you know you've got a real stinker on your hands when you can't even make the trailers look good. Its flaws include amateurish CGI work (it looks like it was done half-heartedly by a novice animator and CelShaded to cover up the fact), cardboard cut-out characters coupled with wooden dialogue and completely phoned-in voice acting, moments of historical inaccuracy, blatant plagiarism,note and, to top it all off, an obviously one-sided Author Tract despite the show's claim to "teach history without bias."
- The Transformers: Combiner Wars, a 2016 web series co-produced by Machinima and Hasbro with animation by Tatsunoko Production, based on the Generations subline of the same name. Initially billed as a more mature work for hardcore fans, said hardcore fans almost instantly savaged it due to poor-quality CGI reminiscent of Transformers: Energon, a low framerate that makes actions highly janky, an unclear and barebones narrative, a large amount of Padding despite the full miniseries only clocking in at 40 minutes, little screen time devoted to the Combiners the series was created to advertise, terrible characterization (with Windblade, usually portrayed as a kind diplomat, being depicted as a vengeful assassin out to kill the Combiners and anyone related to them, and Starscream being depicted as humbled by having a position of leadership, only to reveal it was all an act in the final episodes with little foreshadowing), and, most infamously, the fact that the web series was released well after the toyline it was made to promote had left retail. When TFWiki.net says Energon looks good by comparison, you know something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And not even the involvement of Dashie and Jon Bailey and the generally praised take on Megatron could save this trainwreck. The two follow-up Prime Wars series, The Transformers: Titans Return and The Transformers: Power of the Primes, though not without their flaws, were still surprisingly good sequels thanks to longer episodes, better animation, more consistent characterizations, and an All-Star Cast.
