I remember having quite a few VHS tapes from a company called “Just For Kids”, that had some of the neatest shows.
“Sherlock Hound”, “Kissyfur”, “Foofur”, “Seabert”, and quite a bit more. My siblings and I loved animals, so this got us interested right away!
I also grew up in a religious household, so Christian videos were standard for us.
Did you know that there was a bible-story-centric anime called “Superbook”? Used to watch it all the time! There was also “McGee and Me”, “Secret Adventure”, and “Adventures in Odyssey”. Used to listen to the “Adventures in Odyssey” radio show all the time!
“The Donut Man” was a Barney-esque Christian show for kids, too.
What obscure things did you watch growing up?
It’s technically a Disney Movie, but Brave Little Toaster was a bizarre move we used to watch all the time as kids. Up there with movies like Flight of the Navigator or Short Circuit or Batteries Not Included in terms of rewatchability for us. Tried watching it with my kids a year or two ago and I feel like I don’t know how my parents could have let me watch it as a kid. So dark. So weird.
To this day I am still extra cautious with the vacuum cleaner cord because of that scene where the vacuum runs over and vacuums up his cord! That movie had some really intense scenes!
Right?! I remember taking extra care to never lose my blanky because of that movie.
The junkyard car song from that movie has to be one of the most soul crushing, depressing songs ever
Thanks for sharing. I was gonna look it up to refresh my memory. Soul-crushing indeed.
Oh god… so that’s where my depression came from!
Being born in the early 90’s in a country neighboring Russia, you could find quite a lot of bootleg or otherwise weird VHS-tapes of Soviet-era cartoons that had made it across the border back after the Iron Curtain collapsed, usually at flea-markets or in bargain-bins.
I remember we used to have quite a few of them, most were just collections of different Russian cartoons from like the 70’s and 80’s. A few I’ve managed to track down, like Nu Pogodi! The rest of them I’ve tried to find with the limited details I remember, but haven’t had any luck.
I don’t know how obscure it is, but I loved watching KaBlam! It was weird animated shorts in a variety of styles. My favorites were the shorts made with stop-motion and action figures!
There was a lot of made in Canada cartoons. Flying Rihno Junior High, 6teen, and Being Ian for example.
Canadian animation is wild, and so much of it is unknown outside of the country.
I remember seeing a short called “La Salla” on Canadian TV when I was a kid. Caused me a bit of childhood trauma lol
Totally. Every once in a while I think about what an interesting legacy creators of those shows leave. A lot of the time they only worked on one show and it stays obscure for those didn’t view it when it initially aired and outside of the country. Yet over a decade later people still look back fondly.
What was La Salla about?
Canadian animation was fantastic!
Ryan Larkin was briefly going to be the future of animation, and then he crashed and burned. The handful of shorts he managed to create are INCREDIBLE though.
Man, that so tragic…
Looks like he struggled with drugs and homelessness? That’s so sad.
Is that the cgi short with the evil doorknob?!
YES! Well, kind of!! With the apple!!
Hahaa! Yes I remember that short. YTV used to randomly play it in the middle of the night, just for added nightmare fuel
Apparently it won some kind of award? It’s definitely a bit fun for me as an adult, but DEAR GOD did it frighten me as a kid watching it at night!
Only saw it once and it stuck with me for about 25 years. Spooked me good!
Jam the Housnail.
I thought for the longest time it was a fever dream. That it didn’t exist. I could never find it anything related to the godforsaken thing on any Canadian channels list of cartoons they aired. My family thinks I am joking when I mention how horribly this show plagued my thoughts over this years, but I had been searching for a decade.
Anyway apparently it’s from Japan and I probably watched it on Veoh or something, because it’s on my anime list now and I finally found out what it was called last year.
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Old Soviet cartoons are so absolutely beautiful! I really do hope you are able to find them someday.
There is a video about Soviet animation, if you haven’t seen it already!
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Very haunting images, have you tried tracking these cartoons down as an adult?
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You definitely should digitally scan and post it somewhere! Im sure there are lots of others who would love being able to see it.
Not sure how obscure it is, but I used to watch Liberty’s Kids on PBS all the time.
We had this VHS we watched as a kid called “How Come?” And I don’t even really remember what it was about. But I think it was educational? The only thing I could find about it online was this ebay posting of the VHS: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/hMEAAOSwNsVfWTMT/s-l400.jpg
There was one made in stop motion called “Bumpy in the night”. Just two seasons, but it was fun. I liked it.
Have you rewatched it? It’s like a fever dream. Hahaha I loved that show.
Beakman’s lab. In Chinese
We also had a few of the “Just For Kids” VHS tapes growing up and it took me ages to track down info about the company down when I randomly remembered them a year or two ago. I absolutely loved “The Elmchanted Forest” as well as “Sampson and Sally” and “Katy and the Katerpillar Kids.”
From what I found Just For Kids had bought the rights to some obscure Eastern European films from the 80’s and dubbed them into English before they disappeared themselves which was a disappointment to me given the fond nostalgia I had for their movies. Took me forever to find the films I remembered because of that, but I did eventually.
Oh boy, I had a few like this that come to mind.
Bucky O’Hare was a favorite of mine. There was also this weird British superhero teddy bear called Super Ted.
Someone else in this thread mentioned Bump in the Night, which was def a big one for me, too.
I also had a VHS of Cubix: Robots for Everyone that I was obsessed with. It was a Korean CGI animated show that sadly never got all that big in the US, but there were a couple of lame video games and a few toys that made it here.
I could make a whole huge list, so I’ll stop here, but it would be a disservice of me not to mention Extreme Dinosaurs which was (and still is) objectively the coolest show ever made.
Does anyone remember a show that featured a big record man who clacked wooden spoons together? He was terrifying haha, he would say “AND HERE COMES THE BEAT”…
Also, anyone remember 3,2,1 Contact on PBS?
I would call these semi-obscure, but I absolutely love The Secret of NIMH and The Land Before Time. Don Bluth films have such a special place in my heart.
Oh yeah and also I was a public TV kid, and I watched the Wishbone movie, Between the Lions, Peep and the Big Wide World, and I’ve had yet to meet someone that knows what The Zula Patrol is. It’s such a banger TV show.
And you can’t forget about Word World.
