Animation · 1990s
The 1990s account for 94 of the 463 animation shows here, and 103 opening sequences.
Nickelodeon carries the most, with 13.
Eight of them rebuilt their titles mid-run, Beast Wars: Transformers most of all with three sequences.
94 shows103 sequences
1 sequence
One Piece
The longest-running opening rotation in television — more than twenty distinct sequences over a quarter of a century, each announcing a new arc.
- Season 1
2 sequences
South Park
A banjo, a cut-paper Colorado town and four boys at a bus stop — re-recorded and re-animated repeatedly across nearly thirty years while staying recognisably the same twenty-nine seconds.
- Season 1
- Season 15
1 sequence
SpongeBob SquarePants
A sea shanty led by a painted pirate head, in call and response with children — one of the most universally known pieces of television music written this century.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Family Guy
A musical number performed by the family about how television used to have values — a sitcom opening from the 1970s, done straight and then undercut.
- Season 1
- Season 10
2 sequences
King of the Hill
Four men drinking beer in an alley, and a guitar riff. Thirty-one seconds that tell you the show has no interest in going anywhere.
- Season 1
- Season 14
1 sequence
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Ninety seconds cut faster than the eye resolves, with whole frames of text and diagram flashed for one frame each. Yoko Takahashi's theme is bright, major-key J-pop laid over imagery that is doing nothing of the kind, and the mismatch is the point rather than an accident.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Futurama
Like The Simpsons, an opening built to differ every week — a new caption under the logo and a different scrap of old cartoon on the screen the ship flies past — wrapped around Christopher Tyng's theme and a crash into a billboard.
- Seasons 1–4
- Seasons 6–7
2 sequences
Pokémon
The longest-running video-game adaptation on television, and a theme song that outlasted every cast change.
- Season 1
- Season 5
1 sequenceBeavis and Butt-Head
Two teenagers on a sofa, and a guitar riff played about as well as they would play it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBatman: The Animated Series
No dialogue, no narration, and the character's name never appears — a full orchestral score over a robbery, a rooftop and a silhouette, and the audience is trusted to work it out.
- Season 1
1 sequenceArthur
An aardvark in the third grade, in the longest-running animated children's series in American television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Ren & Stimpy Show
Rubber-limbed animation and a jaunty theme, both of which are considerably more unhinged than a children's network should have permitted.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEd, Edd n Eddy
Wobbling outlines and a scat vocal, drawn deliberately so that every line shakes — the last major American cartoon animated entirely by hand on paper.
- Season 1
1 sequenceX-Men: The Animated Series
A guitar riff, a name card per character, and nothing else — the most efficient superhero roll-call ever animated, and the reason the 2024 revival copied it exactly.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCourage the Cowardly Dog
Twenty-nine seconds establishing a farmhouse in the middle of Nowhere and a dog who is right to be frightened.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDexter's Laboratory
Thirty seconds of a boy genius and the sister who ruins everything, in the flat graphic style that defined a decade of the network.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBatman Beyond
The same animation house forty years on, trading the orchestral score for industrial percussion and a Gotham that has kept getting worse.
- Season 1
1 sequenceVeggieTales
Bible stories told by vegetables, made on desktop computers in Chicago before any studio would have paid for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBlue's Clues
A host talking directly to camera and waiting for an answer, which changed how American preschool television was made.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDaria
The cast doing ordinary things badly while the lead refuses to participate, over Splendora's 'You're Standing on My Neck'.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpider-Man: The Animated Series
The Fox Kids Marvel block's other pillar, alongside X-Men, with a guitar theme that does the same job.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wild Thornberrys
A wildlife-documentary family whose daughter can talk to the animals they are filming.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHey Arnold!
A jazz theme over a city block, for a children's cartoon that treated urban childhood with unusual seriousness.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCardcaptor Sakura
CLAMP's magical girl, with a new costume every episode and three separate openings across the run.
- Season 3
1 sequenceÆon Flux
Peter Chung's assassin, drawn in a style nothing else on television had, and killed off at the end of most early episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBerserk
'Tell Me Why' — an English-language pop song with almost no relationship to the series it introduces, which has become part of the show's reputation.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Maxx
Sam Kieth's comic animated almost panel for panel, about a homeless man who is a superhero in another world.
- Season 1
1 sequencePinky and the Brain
A theme that explains the premise as a call and response, ending on the same question every week and never answering it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRecess
A brass march over a school playground treated as a sovereign state, which is exactly how the series plays it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRocko's Modern Life
An Australian wallaby in O-Town, written for children with as much as possible smuggled past them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJohnny Bravo
A pompadour, a bass riff and a character who has never once been correct about anything.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGargoyles
A thousand years of stone, narrated with the gravity of a Shakespearean prologue — which given how much of the cast came from Star Trek, it very nearly is.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSailor Moon
The series that built the magical-girl template, opened by "Moonlight Densetsu" across five separate runs.
- Season 4
1 sequenceDoug
A mouth-percussion theme over a boy walking to school — an opening performed almost entirely with a human voice.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGreat Teacher Onizuka
A former biker gang leader who becomes a teacher for the wrong reasons and stays for the right ones.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDigimon Adventure
Seven children pulled into a digital world, opened by "Butter-Fly" — a song that has outlived every reboot.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSlam Dunk
A delinquent who joins the basketball team to impress a girl and stays for the game.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperman: The Animated Series
The companion to Batman: The Animated Series, and the same trick — a full orchestral score over a sequence that names nothing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHome Movies
Nineteen seconds, squiggle-drawn, from the series that established the improvised-dialogue style its creator would later bring to Bob's Burgers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTiny Toon Adventures
A patter song naming the entire cast, which the series' successor Animaniacs would take further still.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRocket Power
Four children in a California beach town who do every extreme sport in sequence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRugrats
Mark Mothersbaugh scoring a baby's-eye view of a living room — the theme is closer to a Devo B-side than to children's television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAaahh!!! Real Monsters
Monsters at school under a city dump, learning to frighten people as a trade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCatDog
A cat and a dog sharing one body, and a theme song that spends its whole length asking how.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCowboy Bebop
A jazz record given ninety seconds of animation. Silhouettes and hard-edged colour panels cut on the beat of a big band, borrowing the grammar of 1960s film titles so completely that the show it opens looks like a rediscovery rather than a debut.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Powerpuff Girls
Narrated origin, sugar, spice and everything nice — a premise delivered in one sentence over sixties-modern graphic design.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFreakazoid!
A superhero theme performed at a volume and speed that make the joke before the show has started.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Todd McFarlane's Spawn
The comic adapted as adult animation, and among the first American cartoons made explicitly for an adult slot.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Angry Beavers
Two beaver brothers who have left home and are managing it badly.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAnimaniacs
A patter song with a different closing rhyme every week, sung by three cartoon characters at a tempo no live performer would attempt.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Real Adventures of Jonny Quest
The 1964 Hanna-Barbera series rebuilt for the nineties, with early CG sequences inside it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCelebrity Deathmatch
Claymation celebrities fighting to the death in a wrestling ring, with commentary played completely straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceI Am Weasel
The Cow and Chicken spin-off, with a theme that is mostly the title said repeatedly.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBobby's World
Howie Mandel's stand-up child character animated, with Mandel voicing both the boy and his father.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe PJs
Eddie Murphy's stop-motion housing-project comedy, animated in foam rather than drawn.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceKaBlam!
An animated anthology framed as a comic book being read, with the hosts drawn on the page.
- Season 1
1 sequenceYu Yu Hakusho
A delinquent who dies saving a child and is given a job in the afterlife rather than a rest.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpider-Man
The nineties adaptation, with a guitar theme that a generation can still produce on request.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhere on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?
The geography game animated, with Rita Moreno as the thief and a jazz score to chase her with.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMighty Max
A toy line turned into a series with Tim Curry and Richard Moll in it, and a body count.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLife with Louie
Louie Anderson's Wisconsin childhood animated, with his own father as the character the show turns on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEek! The Cat
A purple cat whose motto is that it never hurts to help, in a series built entirely on disproving it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHisteria!
History taught as an Animaniacs-style variety show, made to satisfy an educational broadcasting requirement.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries
The chase reframed as a detective series, with Granny solving cases and the cat still not catching the bird.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBob the Builder
Stop-motion construction with a call and response the programme never varies, and a number one Christmas single.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRoad Rovers
Domestic dogs from six countries turned into a superhero team by a scientist who does not explain much.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Critic
Al Jean and Mike Reiss's film critic, made between their Simpsons runs and cancelled by two networks.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTrigun
A desert western scored like a spy thriller, with a gunman who refuses to kill anyone.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCow and Chicken
A cow and a chicken with human parents whose faces are never shown above the waist.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAngela Anaconda
Photographs of real faces cut out and animated over drawn backgrounds, which is as unsettling as it sounds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Animals of Farthing Wood
Animals leaving a destroyed wood for a nature reserve, and a children's series that killed off its cast as it went.
- Season 1
3 sequences
Beast Wars: Transformers
Transformers rebuilt in computer graphics on a fraction of the budget, which is why everybody is an animal.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequenceThe Busy World of Richard Scarry
Busytown animated faithfully enough that the books' cutaway drawings survive intact.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaillou
A four-year-old with no hair and very little patience, adapted from Quebec picture books.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDetention
Nine children in permanent after-school detention, animated in a flat 1950s style that nothing else on the block used.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDragon Tales
Two children who reach a dragon world by reciting a rhyme over a scale they find in a toy box.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEarthworm Jim
The game adapted with its own voice cast and most of its absurdity intact.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJay Jay the Jet Plane
Talking aeroplanes at a small airfield, made first on video and later for television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKevin Spencer
A Canadian animated series about a chain-smoking sociopath and his parents, drawn as crudely as it is written.
- Season 4
1 sequenceKipper
Mick Inkpen's dog animated at the pace of the picture books, which is to say slowly and on purpose.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLittle Bear
Maurice Sendak's drawings animated in no hurry whatever, and about the quietest programme Nick Jr. ever ran.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMadeline
Bemelmans' twelve little girls in two straight lines, animated in the style of the books.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Magic School Bus
A science teacher who shrinks her class and drives them through the lesson, with Lily Tomlin at the wheel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMummies Alive!
Four Egyptian mummies revived in San Francisco to guard the reincarnation of a pharaoh's son.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNanalan'
A puppet toddler spends the day at her grandmother's, filmed at grass height.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Oggy and the Cockroaches
A French cartoon with almost no dialogue in it, which is the reason it sold to nearly every country there is.
- Season 1
- Season 6
1 sequenceReBoot
The first television series animated entirely by computer, and set inside one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRedwall
Brian Jacques' abbey mice animated in Canada, with the villains drawn considerably better than the heroes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRolie Polie Olie
A world of robots built entirely out of spheres and cylinders, computer-animated in Toronto.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSamurai Pizza Cats
Kyatto Ninden Teyandee rewritten wholesale in English by writers working without translated scripts.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSkysurfer Strike Force
Five pilots on energy surfboards, from the syndication block that ran opposite the Saban shows.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuper Mario World
The last of the Mario cartoons, made for one autumn after the game of the same name.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTheodore Tugboat
Model tugboats in Halifax harbour, narrated for years by Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Vision of Escaflowne
A schoolgirl pulled into a war between a hidden planet and an empire, scored throughout for full orchestra.
- Season 1