I was about 5 years old, and every Saturday morning I just HAD to watch The California Raisin Show. It was about these raisins who were a singing group and went on adventures. All of the characters were fruits and vegetables.
I grew up with all the strange ones from the late 90's early 2000's and loved them all; Rocko's Modern Life, Cow and Chicken, Catdog, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ahh! Real Monsters
While doing some research to determine if I hallucinated an Angry Beavers episode, I discovered that that show also features toenail clippings. Season 4 episode 8, Blacktop Beavers... "The beavers race a trucker (who is revealed to be Truckee in the end) to the world's largest pile of toenail clippings."
Probably Ren & Stimpy, if we're talking actual weirdness. I also liked KABLAM! a fair bit. My all-time favorite weird show (albeit not a cartoon) was Pee-Wee's Playhouse. I was raided on that shit. Had his suit and tie and everything.
When I was really young, there were some fairy tale cartoons on super early in the morning.
They were broadcast in very short segments, about 5 or 15 minutes each, but the animation was amazing.
Many decades later, I learned these were Soviet productions from the 1950s and 60s, and a lot of the human motions were rotoscoped, i.e. traced from actual moving human models.
The opening theme still pops in my head every once in a while.
Like right now.
That one episode where one of their rich cousins or something has a pocket dimension literally in their pocket is the one that always stuck with me. While trying to figure out if I just hallucinated that, I found the list of episodes on Wikipedia, each with a one-line description of the plot, and they are just so funny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Angry_Beavers_episodes
"Norb lives his dream of being a Lipizzaner stallion."
I can't find anything similar to what I'm thinking of, so maybe I just hallucinated it?
There were so many odd ones, but it was a great show.
I remember there being an episode where Norbert became really good at plastic surgery and went into a competition where he had to turn his subject into a photo-realistic platypus and even as a kid I was like “this show is unhinged”.
GKR, pronouned Geeker, sometimes got up extra early on Saturdays to catch it. It was about a super powerful robot guy who was absolutely insane, voiced by Billy West. Best friends with a sentient T Rex and a mercenary cyborg lady with a gun arm. Totally oddball, kind of cyberpunk, I'm sure it was garbage
Ovide and the Gang - we had this one on tape and it was a touch of streaming without commercials decades before that happened. Animation was OK for its time but still had a lot of errors even a kid will notice. Something about it as a kid felt a little weird but the setting was refreshing.
Hammy Hamster - Grandma taped this one for us. If you like making dioramas and want your pet hamster, guinea pig, and other critters to be TV stars this laid the groundwork. Not a cartoon but it fits right in with them.
Wapos Bay - is also worth a mention. It's a more modern stop motion take on the Cree community in Saskatchewan. It has a unique brand of humor and that "way up north" feel to the setting and aboriginal community dynamics which makes for a good change of pace. It was almost like a cleaned up family friendly South Park.
All of these shows are Canadian in origin if that explains anything. Wapos Bay I didn't see until later in life but usually would drop everything if my dad told me it was on. First two I haven't thought of in so long I had to google them to make sure they were real and not my imagination. Truly weird TV shows are always worth the time because there's never anything like them.
I'm surprised I don't see Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo on here.
My brother and I used to watch it on on-demand when my parents were out of the house in the early 2000's. Absolute insanity. I tried to re-watch it a couple years back for nostalgia, and my more matured brain just couldn't comprehend it... That was before I started smoking weed, maybe I should give it another shot, it might make more sense if I'm zonked out of my gourd.