What-a-Cartoon - History - Broadcast

Broadcast

The first cartoon from the What A Cartoon! project broadcast in its entirety was The Powerpuff Girls in Meat Fuzzy Lumkins, which made its world premiere on Monday, February 20, 1995 during a television special called the World Premiere Toon-In (termed "President's Day Nightmare" by its producers, Williams Street). The special was hosted by Space Ghost and the cast of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and featured comic interviews and a mock contest with the creators of the various cartoons. The Toon-In was simulcast on Cartoon Network, TBS Superstation, and TNT. To promote the shorts, Cartoon Network's marketing department came up with the concept of "Dive-In Theater" in 1995 to showcase the 71 cartoon shorts. The cartoons were shown at water parks and large municipal swimming pools, treating kids and their parents to exclusive poolside screenings on 9' x 12' movie screens.

Beginning February 26, 1995, each What A Cartoon! short began to premiere on Sunday nights, promoted as a World Premiere Toons. Every week after the premiere, Cartoon Network showcased a different World Premiere Toons made by a different artist. After an acclimation of cartoons, the network packaged the shorts as a half-hour show titled World Premiere Toons: The Next Generation, featuring reruns of the original shorts but also new premieres. Eventually, all of the cartoons were compiled into one program bearing the name of the original project: The What a Cartoon! Show. The show's initial premieres for each short preceded Cartoon Network's Sunday night movie block, Mr. Spim's Cartoon Theatre. The shorts continued to air on Sundays until 1997, when the network moved the shorts to Wednesdays at 9pm. Following the premiere of Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel as full series in July 1997, the series shifted to Thursday nights, where it remained.

The What a Cartoon! Show continued airing new episodes on Thursdays until November 28, 1997, when the 48th short of the 71 contracted during Seibert's era aired. After that, more shorts were produced and aired between 1997 and 2001. In 2000 and 2001, the pilot shorts appearing on the network's viewer's poll that lost (including the original Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? short, Ferret and Parrot, Foe Paws, Jeffrey Cat, Longhair and Doubledome, Lucky Lydia, Major Flake, Nikkie, Prickles, Trevor, Uncle Gus, Utica Cartoon, Commander Cork, Maktar and David Fiess's Lost Cat) were eventually added when The What a Cartoon! Show was re-titled The Cartoon Cartoon Show in the early 2000s (decade). In 1998, Cartoon Network debuted two new short pilots and advertised them as "World Premiere Toons": Mike, Lu & Og and Kenny and the Chimp in "Diseasy Does It!". Both were produced by outside studios and are technically part of the original 71 shorts specifically produced by Hanna-Barbera for What A Cartoon!. The two pilots were compiled into The Cartoon Cartoon Show, while both shorts eventually garnered their own series, Mike, Lu & Og in 1999 and Codename: Kids Next Door in 2002. A pilot King Crab: Space Crustacean (1999) was also retconned into The Cartoon Cartoon Show anthology.

The show continued to air for many years afterward until eventually being dropped from the schedule. Recently, reruns have played on Cartoon Network's retro animation sister channel, Boomerang. The Big Cartoon DataBase cites What A Cartoon! as a "venture combining classic 1940s production methods with the originality, enthusiasm and comedy of the 1990s."