Saturday-morning cartoons as we know them might be a bygone era, but some of the best still live on streaming. Take a stroll down memory lane with us as we talk about our favorite early-morning, after-school, and Saturday-morning cartoons growing up.
The heyday of Saturday-morning cartoons is long behind us. In the era of streaming television, where services like Netflix and Hulu have the means to surprise-drop whole seasons of animated shows and feature-length films on subscribers without warning and and where (nearly) all your favorite shows are accessible with the push of a button, popular animated television is no longer “appointment” television and instead is a matter of finding time to fit it in with the rest of one’s busy media schedule.
Here at Polygon, we love animation — especially the era of animation when one had to be in front of a television set at a particular time of the day on a particular day of the week in order to catch our favorite shows. We’ve put together a list of our favorite childhood cartoons and where you can watch them. For the sake of this list, a “Saturday-morning cartoon” is less a matter of whether it aired on the weekend or not, but rather a matter of a show that made any day it aired on feel like a Saturday for the duration of its run time.
Here are Polygon’s favorite Saturday-morning cartoons!
American Dragon: Jake Long made immediate waves in my San Gabriel Valley-based extracurricular group. Sure, he had dyed spiky hair (to indicate he was a cool Asian to white kids), and yeah, it was a mystical martial arts-styled show. But we loved him because Disney finally figured out that we loved Brenda Song, and decided it was time to branch out a little more. Like any good superhero show, Jake’s own arc is focused on his ability to hone his powers — practicing his ability to shape-shift into a dragon. —Nicole Clark
American Dragon: Jake Long is available to stream on Disney Plus.
If you were a PBS kid growing up in the ’90s or early 2000s, then you — like me — might have absolutely loved Arthur. The aardvark family was so lovely, even if they didn’t always get along in the moment. I loved his friends like Buster, Muffy, and Francine, and am still obsessed with the Library Card Song. The show also had tons of cameos, including late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. A genuinely incredible and entertaining show for kids. (Why am I crying?) Truly, what a wonderful kind of day. —NC
Arthur is available to stream on PBS Kids.
I’ve watched this show across so many platforms. I streamed it after its recent move to Netflix, and in college I watched Legend of Korra episodes as they launched on Nickelodeon’s own streaming site (the final season never aired on TV, even though the show has since hit cult status). But as a kid I watched the hell out of Avatar episodes after school and on weekends, fully engrossed in the world’s elemental magic system and its geopolitical strife. Its storytelling was sophisticated for a kids’ cartoon, and I watched it as I went from preteen to teen, crossing the chasm of 13. My mom, who often had to deal with my cartoon bingeing, genuinely enjoyed watching it too. It remains an animated show that I love to watch as an adult (up there with Steven Universe). —NC
Avatar: The Last Airbender is available to stream on Netflix.
I could write a blurb on Batman: The Animated Series. I could try to sum up, in a short two-to-four-sentence paragraph, how the series shaped my aesthetic and narrative sensibilities from an early age and spurred me to pursue a lifelong journey through art that would ultimately result in me writing about it as a career.
But instead, I think I’ll just quote a paragraph from an essay I wrote last month for the show’s 30th anniversary:
My love for Batman: The Animated Series transcends the character or the medium. The show didn’t just introduce me to the character of Batman, and it didn’t simply cement my love of animation; it opened my world to whole dimensions of art and expression and history I might never have pursued or known had I not encountered that series from an early age. In no uncertain terms, Timm and Radomski’s show is, however many degrees removed, responsible for setting me on the course to pursue a career writing about art and sharing that knowledge and passion with others. I’m a curation editor here at Polygon, which means my job is sifting through the ever-growing and shifting catalog of movies, television, comics, and games and spotlighting work I find particularly noteworthy, thought-provoking, and beautiful. I never would have honed those sensibilities, let alone thought to write about them, had it not been for Batman: The Animated Series.
Batman: The Animated Series is available to stream on HBO Max.
I was not yet born when the original Transformers cartoon series first aired on American television but, to paraphrase an old meme, “Born too late to watch Transformers, born too early to explore space, born just in time to absolutely lose my mind over Beast Wars.” Old-school Transformers fans will shake their heads and harrumph at the idea of the 1996 CG series being one’s introduction to the franchise, but to my 6-year-old self, I loved it all the same and couldn’t tell the difference.
The cartoon told the story of Optimus Primal and his crew of Maximal comrades who crash land on a mysterious planet — revealed to be prehistoric Earth — along with their mortal adversaries, the Predacons, led by Megatron. Beast Wars was one of my formative introductions to serialized storytelling and a series which, years later, even considering the dated visuals, still manages to hold up as a drama that’s as riveting as it is occasionally hilarious. —TE
Beast Wars is available to stream on Tubi and Pluto TV.
Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot to me represents the platonic ideal of what a Saturday-morning cartoon is and ought to be. Based on Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s 1995 comic book of the same name, the series follows the eponymous Rusty, a boy robot who resembles a cross between Astro Boy and Pinocchio, who is set to replace the BGY-11, a massive war robot built as a last-ditch defense against world-ending threats both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. Unbeknownst to most of the world, however, including Rusty, the Big Guy is not in fact a robot— it’s a heavily armed battle suit piloted by Lieutenant Dwayne Hunter, who works undercover as the Big Guy’s ostensible “repairman.”
A mashup of broad-shoulder superheroics and sci-fi kaiju action shot through with themes of aspirational futurism and coming-of-age drama, Big Guy and Rusty is the third most inspiring giant robot cartoon this side of Yasuhiro Imagawa’s Giant Robo and Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. Over the span of two seasons, Big Guy and Rusty ventured across the expanse of Earth to the far reaches of the moon to 200 years in the past and back again, thwarting evildoers and growing together as a surrogate family along the way.
Unfortunately, like so many other cartoons of its era, Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot was canceled on a shocking cliffhanger that still fascinates and perplexes me to this day. That said, with a show like Big Guy and Rusty, it’s the journey that matters more than the destination. Plus, it’s got an absolute banger of a opening theme song. —TE
Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot is available to stream on YouTube.
Parodying James Bond — or, if you want to be specific, short-lived 1960s Bond knockoff TV series Danger Man — 1980s British cartoon Danger Mouse is about a mouse secret agent, who wears an eyepatch and a white roll-neck sweater, foiling the dastardly plots of evil toad Baron Greenback while keeping his hapless hamster companion Penfold out of trouble. Kids love nothing more than humor that makes them feel sophisticated and grown-up, and Danger Mouse’s mix of slapstick, farce, gentle satire, and radical, fourth-wall-breaking wit hit this sweet spot with unerring aim. It even had the courage to mock its perfect hero, and the very idea of heroism — Danger Mouse’s essential cowardice is often what saves his skin. —Oli Welsh
Danger Mouse is available to stream on Netflix.
I still rewatch the show’s finale on my tiny fifth-generation iPod Nano, which I’d spent iTunes money on to entertain myself during long bus rides to volleyball tournaments.
