Something about TV shows aimed at children often invites the bizarre, with many strange, short-lived series aimed at young impressionable viewers falling by the wayside over the years. The best kids’ shows are able to captivate their audiences with relatable narratives, great characters, and dazzling production values, retaining the interests of kids and adults alike for years to come. But not every TV show that sets out to capture a child audience does so successfully, and many downright weird kids’ shows have languished in obscurity for a good reason.
Because children are usually more willing to accept odd characters or nonsensical circumstances, some TV shows have taken it upon themselves to be quite experimental in determining what captures the attention of younger viewers. In many cases, standards for kids’ shows are quite low so long as they don’t include any content deemed too intense or inappropriate for children, which can lead to some ambitiously strange attempts at entertainment. Indeed, not every series aimed at kids can reach the same critical acclaim as the likes of PBS’ best shows.
10 Angela Anaconda
Had some unsettling animation
For the most part, TV shows aimed at kids tend to be animated, with colorful cartoon characters that easily grab the limited attention span of children. Angela Anaconda went a very different route with its visual flair, presenting a uniquely bizarre photorealistic style of animation that formed warped characters out of real pictures. Narratively, the series is nothing special, detailing the titular Angela’s misadventures in the small town of Tapwater Springs.
What really makes the show so strange was how unnervingly uncanny the art style looked like in motion. With awkward proportions, photorealistic faces, and chalky gray skin, the inhabitants of Tapwater Springs are absolutely eye-watering to look at for extended periods of time. The incessant lively orchestral soundtrack and grating voices don’t do the show any favors, either. It’s a shock that Angela Anaconda somehow managed to subsist for six entire seasons.
9 Boohbah
A hypnotically strange Teletubbies follow up
One of the most infamously strange kids’ shows of all time is easily the British series Teletubbies, which presented the fever-dream reality of alien babies that frolic in a meadow ruled by the gaze of a baby-faced sun. Evidently, this just wasn’t weird enough for the series creators, who sought to outdo their previous work with Boohbah. Centering around a new cadre of multicolored baby-like creatures, the Boohbahs traded antennae and TV screen stomachs for light-up eyebrows, retractable necks, and a high-pitched, chittering language.
The nonsensical episodes of Boohbah make Teletubbies look like a prestige drama, with hypnotically strange visuals featuring little to no coherent story to speak of. The Boohbahs spend their time farting, bouncing around their utterly alien multicolored environment, and snuggling into fuzzy sleeping pods, making the whole show seem like a maddening glimpse into a foreign reality. While the Teletubbies are still fondly remembered in pop culture to this day, the Boohbahs remain a lesser-known off-brand version for a good reason.
8 Two More Eggs
A relic of “random” internet humor
Created by The Brothers Chaps of Homestar Runner fame, Two More Eggs is a relatively recent, short-lived American animated webseries that aired on Disney XD. With each episode hardly over a minute long, Two More Eggs has little concern for storytelling or lessons as it addresses child audiences. Instead, the series mostly reads like an eclectic handful of gags featuring a variety of novelty characters, with a scruffy potbellied fellow named Dooble being the biggest staple character.
From Dooble running around singing his own nonsensical theme song to a trio of roughly 3-D animated characters called the CGI Palz that spend their time “glitching out”, Two More Eggs presents a new generation with a forgotten brand of internet humor that came and went before they were born. The show’s “lolsorandom” comedy stylings are ironically novel to kids that just barely missed out on the Homestar Runner genre of joke-telling. In that pursuit, the series is undeniably weird, firing off a haze of utterly incoherent scenes.
7 Mr. Meaty
A nauseatingly freaky puppet show
Sometimes, kids’ shows can be surprisingly terrifying, with weird concepts breaching over into downright horror territory. Such is infamously the case for Mr. Meaty, a briefly-lived Nickelodeon show about two friends who work at the titular fast food restaurant. While the decision to go with puppets instead of animation should be something worthy of applause, the nightmarish designs of Mr. Meaty’s characters are strange to the point of being genuinely upsetting.
As if the acne, frog-like lips, and bulging eyes of its unpleasant character designs aren’t bad enough, Mr. Meaty revels in gross-out humor and sickening plot lines that have all the warm appeal of spoiled meat. One of the worst offenders is a particular episode in which one of the characters swallows a dangerous tapeworm, which darts out of his mouth to steal scraps of food from right underneath his nose. For many that grew up with it, Mr. Meaty is little more than a bad, uncomfortable dream.
6 Oobi
Stretched a dumb gimmick into 52 episodes
Slapping a pair of googly eyes on one’s hand and pretending like it’s a speaking mouth is usually funny for all of five minutes. Yet somehow, the TV show Oobi managed to stretch this simple concept out into a syndicated series with a whopping 3 seasons and 52 episodes, taking place in a world populated entirely by human hands with eyeballs. The show’s protagonist, Oobi, is used to teach kids various lessons about sharing, managing emotions, and dealing with similar mundane situations typical of the average educational show.
As if the unconventional approach to presentation wasn’t off-putting enough, Oobi made the equally bizarre decision to have all of its characters speak with broken grammar, referring to themselves in the third person with an undeveloped sentence structure. This seems quite counterintuitive for a TV show aimed at educating young kids on various topics. There’s also something uncomfortable about watching human fists with eyes use tools and eat food with their “mouths”, creating a strong uncanny valley effect of weirdness that led many to block out Oobi from the mind going into adulthood.
5 Jigsaw
A haunting variety show with a frightening mascot
Not to be confused with the slasher villain of the same name from the violent Saw franchise, Jigsaw is an obscure kids’ show for a good reason. Airing on BBC in the 80s, the British children’s variety program featured a wide variety of different acts, from animated segments to live-action sketches. The whole thing was hosted by a giant orange floating jigsaw puzzle piece with a bored-looking face called “Jigg”, who acted as an arbitrator of the festivities.
Jigsaw boasts an eclectic cast of characters that would present viewers with puzzles to solve alongside them, from a puppet pterodactyl to a pair of superheroes who can only be summoned by saying six words with two Os in them in a row. By far the most infamous character was Mr. Noseybonk, a mime performer with a terrifying face mask featuring a long, bulbous nose and an eerie grin. The character was so widely known for being scary to children that he was parodied in an episode of The X-Files.
4 Bibleman
A Christian superhero with some eyebrow-raising villains
Veggietales is widely considered to be the gold standard of Christian media aimed at children, with relatable characters, witty jokes, and a non-overbearing approach to its theological lessons. Perhaps taking inspiration from the “Larryboy” Batman parody of Veggietales, the direct-to-video series Bibleman offered a live-action alternative for Christian kids’ shows. The show followed the adventures of Bibleman, a biblical superhero wearing the “Armor of God”, using scripture (and, for good measure, a lightsaber) to defeat his enemies.
The low-budget lighting and awkward costume design of Bibleman makes for a wildly strange viewing experience, nevermind the awkward pairing of Christian imagery and children’s superhero fanfare. Bibleman had some questionable villains as well, including a creepy Joker rip-off called The Fibbler and a terrifying green-skinned demon man known as Primordius Drool. By far the most alarming was the villainess The Gossip Queen, who has been criticized for being representative of Jewish stereotypes – quite a bold move for a kids’ show promoting Christianity.
3 Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
A carnival of sensory overload
Paul Reuben’s iconic character of Pee-wee Herman was first introduced to many by the film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a child-like man and inventor of elaborate Rube Goldberg breakfast machines. Pee-wee’s Playhouse gave child audiences an extended look at the character with an episodic glimpse into Pee-wee’s day-to-day life. Pee-wee’s Playhouse worked as a variety show, with human, puppet, and cartoon characters all working together to entertain and confuse.
Watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse as an adult yields some bizarre realizations, such as the show’s penchant for dirty innuendo humor that went over kids’ heads or the whiplash of seeing Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis. Pee-wee’s entire house was made of living furniture and other inanimate objects, who all screamed in unison every time the designated “word of the day” for that episode was said. The colorful sets, quirky characters, and secondhand knowledge of Paul Reuben’s arrest and following controversy all contribute to a strange legacy for the series.
2 The Big Comfy Couch
A comforting, if weird kids’ show
Not every “weird” kids’ show necessarily leaves a bad impression, as best demonstrated by The Big Comfy Couch. The 1992 live-action series centered on a clown girl named Loonette, who would navigate various situations and life lessons with the help of her silent puppet doll companion, Molly. While the titular couch always bookended each episode as a sort of narrative home base, Loonette would routinely branch out from her living room to meet with other characters, such as Granny Garbonzo, the rollerblading mail man, and Major Bedhead.
Setting aside the fact that everyone is a clown of some kind in The Big Comfy Couch, the series’ low-budget sets, grainy sound quality, and slow pacing lent it a sort of liminal strangeness that is hard to replicate. The presence of mischievous living dust bunnies and Loonette’s habit of stretching her legs on a clock-shaped carpet also contributed to the undeniably weird atmosphere. Still, The Big Comfy Couch is undeniably charming for those that do remember it fondly.
1 Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids
Introduced horror to young audiences
It’s a difficult thing balancing horror stories for child audiences, with such projects needing to be scary without being too intense for young viewers. Many modern horror kids’ shows accomplish this quite well, but earlier attempts like Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids were still figuring out how to effectively market scary stories to kids. The anthology series utilized both traditional animation and impressive stop-motion to convey a variety of spooky tales, with the framing device of the creepy Narrator introducing each segment via a film reel.
True to its name, Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids wasn’t afraid to get dark with its subject matter. The series featured vignettes ranging from undead grandmothers, young artists being terrorized by their own creations, and even a barber that mutilates ill-behaved children. Thanks to the off-putting animation and macabre themes, Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids was a decidedly weird TV show, even by British standards.