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If there was one thing the ’90s were all about it was, inexplicably, anthropomorphized animals that were in some way “radical.” It all started with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it quickly and rapidly devolved from there, until most children’s television was naught but horrifically mutated animals skateboarding on pizza. Here are the worst offenders:

Street Sharks

Street Sharks was a show about four idiots who went to meet their dad in an abandoned sewer because a man with an eyepatch who refers to people as “creatures” asked them to. Then he turned them into sharks, which came as a huge surprise to absolutely nobody. What was surprising, however, were the kickin’ abs he decided to mutate into them. But…why? Are sharks notorious for their washboard gut-muscles? Or better yet, how? My god, did he…did he isolate the gene for kickin’ abs?

I guess four idiots is a small price to pay for progress…

The intro to Street Sharks is notable for several reasons: First, its liberal use of the term “Jawsome!” which is either the best catchphrase ever, or the tragic result of a massively mutated shark face trying and tragically failing to speak like people. And second, please note the liberal use of the “exploding through walls” shot. Apparently contractors in the ‘90s were so extraordinarily shitty that drywall exploded like an old pinto everytime you bumped into a wall. Here’s how the marketing meeting for Street Sharks probably went:

Kirk: “We need a show to compete with Ninja Turtles.”

Alan: “Well, what’s scarier than ninjas and turtles?”

Bill: “Black dudes and sharks.”

Kirk: “…”

Bill: “No, seriously guys. It’ll work! Like, sharks combined with rough and tumble gang members!”

Alan: “Actually I think he’s got something there, but what will we call it?”

Kirk: “Ghetto Sharks?”

Alan: “Gang Sharks?”

Kirk: “Uh…Urban Sharks?”

Bill: “N*GGER SHARKS!”

Kirk: “Bill, honestly – do you need to see somebody? You’ve got some issues.”

Bill: “JAWSOME!”

Cowboys of Moo Mesa

The Cowboys of Moo Mesa dared to ask the question: What if cowboys were like…actual cows?

And the answer was: It’d be pretty much the same.

There was also a villainous bull, a “sexy” cow-damsel that the cowboys tussled over, and an adorable calf-boy sidekick for comic relief. So basically, it was Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom only…everybody was cows… and they were in the wild west and…okay, it’s not “basically” anything: It’s just a screwed up conglomeration of stolen ideas, laced with confused concepts, and swirled with a nauseating smidge of bestiality. But hey, if you learn anything from Cowboys of Moo Mesa, let it be this: The bad guy was a cow too. That means that some cows are sons of bitches, and it’s okay to eat them no matter what hippies say.

The Mighty Ducks

Do you remember America’s brief fascination with Emilio Estevez, skating based sports, and the virtues of a can-do attitude in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulty? That all culminated in the feel-good hockey film, The Mighty Ducks, which was basically just a palette swap of The Bad News Bears starring the best Young Gun. The movie revolved around a jaded Emilio taking a team of misfit kids to the hockey championship, and it did so well they made a cartoon out of it!

Wait….what the fuck was that clip? What did that have to do with literally anything? The children are now genetically engineered duck-warriors… with cybersuits and laserswords? But…they still play hockey in between fighting aliens? This is what happens when you hand over script development to an insane foreigner whose only English words are “ducks” and “hockey,” then retranslate it back into English, and then shoehorn some aliens into there too for no particular reason.

But hey, as long as kids buy some thirty dollar Ducktrucks, it all works out, right?

Samurai Pizza Cats

Samurai Pizza Cats almost doesn’t belong here; the show was more of a parody of the ‘90s surge in television shows about surfing furries than a genuine effort. But still, there they are: Cybernetic Samurai cats who like pizza as much as they like wacky shenanigans. Much like the Power Rangers, this was originally a Japanese show that was given English voiceovers so terrible it was almost racist. However, unlike the Power Rangers, there is something very, very wrong with you if you find yourself wanting to fuck the pink one.

Extreme Dinosaurs

The Extreme Dinosaurs were both extreme and dinosaurs. There. You are now filled in on their epic backstory. Oh wait, they also fight the Reckless Raptors. You should probably know that too I suppose. Now, aside from beating up on Velociraptors with poor impulse control, the Extreme Dinosaurs also happened to have the best theme song in existence:

The internet is a vast ocean of information, occasionally broken by small islands of pure, batshit crazy. For every brief and passing trend, every fad that passes out of the collective zeitgeist, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who, thanks to the online connectivity, can and still do dedicate their entire lives to it. Beanie Babies? Kriss Kross? Hypercolor? Their online presences are not only still alive, but thriving. One particular fanbase and their arch-nemeses, however, manage to put the feverish, insane devotion of all the others to shame. And when you’re so crazy that you make a man who spends his every waking moment building Alf-cars stable, you know that’s saying something.

You might remember Scatman John from his hit single “Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop.)” Because this man wore a suit and spouted gibberish quickly, and because it was the ‘90s and we just didn’t really give a fuck, we decided to make him famous and then promptly forget about him. His career lived on in Japan and Germany for a time, (possibly due to the double-meaning of the term “scat” leading them to believe that he was merely a proud and jazzy Coprophiliac who shared their forbidden, disturbing love of sex-pooping,) but it soon lapsed into obscurity. Here’s one of his videos.

Nothing special, right?

Well, on Youtube that video generated 18,000 comments. Even putting aside what are by far some of the oddest spam messages ever generated:

“on December 3, 1999 scatman died and went to a better place scatland. if everone was like him the world whould be? a crime and drug free and better place. Copy and paste this if you belive Scatman John wanted a better world for us all and that his legend shall live on forever in scatland. R.I.P. Scatman John
I believe that scatman will live forever”

What you might not know, is that Scatman John was a prolific Stuttering Activist, and his hit single was actually all about overcoming his impediment. Because of this, he served as something of a folk hero to the suttering community – but even so, that number is still staggering, and you can find similar numbers on almost every single other one of his officially released videos; the comments sections of which are likewise populated with this very same over-zealous, deity-like level of devotion. Here’s just one example, apparently typed up by somebody from a country where they charge for internet access by the letter:

“if i had thers wishes it would be scat man to come back and second he could live forver third i wish ppl wouldnt make fun of him and if they do il slpa them scat man i got? ur back ill go to ur grave adn wacth it evrey day ur the best R.I.P scatman u will be missed hint: ur the best plz god make him come back”

This is nothing, however, when compared to another aspect of his fanbase: The truly hard-core fans who have taken a concept present in a few of the Scatman’s songs and decided, on a whim apparently, to believe every word of his lyrics literally. His singles “Scatman’s World,”  and “Song of Scatland,” spoke of a fictional place called Scatland, where the people spoke a quirky little language and lived idyllic fairy tale lives. He then invited all of his fans to play pretend as well. It was a sweet, endearing little gesture that, again thanks to the internet, quickly grew disturbing and weird. A certain percentage of his fans now seem to believe that Scatland is a real place, and speak of the Scatman as some sort of novelty-song spouting God figure that will benevolently rule over them for all time. Again, just a small slice of this delicious Insanity Pie:

“you didn’t explain it all. His awesomeness was more than this earth can a=handle so god took him away and he was like “Your greatness will destroy heaven too!!?!?!?!” So he took? him to Scatland, the greatest land ever and the only one that can handle his aweosmeness. He rules it of course. Yeah I said he rules Scatland. Not he rules (even though he does) and it’s pretty obvious as to what I said. Scatman’s awesomeness was too great for the? earth to handle. So God killed him and took him to heaven. But his awesomeness was more than heaven could handle too. So God created a dimension for him (Scatland) and put him there. That is the only place that can handle his awesomeness. He rules scatland and spends his days scatting. Hope that worked.”

You might think that’s an isolated incident, but this theme of Scatland worship permeates every discussion board of the Scatman I could find. The fervor of his cult-like supporters, however, is neatly off-set by the other side of the spectrum: The Scat-Trolls. Again, because this is the internet, out of context comments and misunderstood lyrics have led many to believe that Scatman John was a raging racist who preached genocide and wished to cleanse the world of everything but his chosen people. These people troll Scatman boards across the internet, condemning him to hell and accusing him of everything from base racism to actual, literal murder and genocide. Here is but a small sip from their tasty box of Psycho Juice:

“im happy taht this bitch is dead. he will have fun with satan’s cock stupid ATHEIST motahfucka gay scum”
“scatman hates ALL RACES fcuk sHITMAN”
“he syas all arabic peoples are the same to him”

This hatred seems to stem from two things – first, a common misunderstanding of one his lyrics, where some people are certain that he says: “Fuck Paris, France and Tokyo, Japan / I’d like to fuck those living in Turkey and Iran.”

The actual lyric is a little less horribly offensive, and quite a bit less horribly hilarious: “The folks of Paris, France and Tokyo, Japan / Are like the folks that live in Turkey and Iran.“ The second basis for this hatred seems to come from an 1995 interview he did with the Advance for Speech Pathologists and Audiologists Magazine:

Q:  What are your feelings about other stutterers that you have met?

Scatman:   We stutterers are among the world’s sweetest people.
We know what humility is because we have been humiliated to death. We have experienced exactly what black people have experienced– oppression, suppression.

Now, given that’s a little…exaggerated. I personally know of no society that stole stutterers from their homes, exported them to distant continents, enslaved them for generations, and only recently, begrudgingly allowed them their civil rights – but then I’m no expert. Maybe this actually was the case in some foreign, godforsaken land – like Cleveland. Regardless, it doesn’t seem like he’s expressly trying to be racist. However, because the internet needs little reason to perpetuate erroneous beliefs, the two camps to this day rage against each other in the comments sections of most every page dedicated to the man.

So that’s the story of how, thanks to a bizarre sub-culture of the internet, this simple, harmless novelty singer is now not only widely believed to be directly akin to Super Hitler, but also worshipped as a sort of low-grade alternative Speech Impediment Messiah.

Next up, I explore the relatively common belief that Rico Suave was directly responsible for the JFK  assassination, eats live dogs on a daily basis, single handedly stopped World War Two using only his greasy pectoral muscles, and tragically died for our sins – impaled and left to hang for nine days on a giant, plastic, zebra-striped cowboy hat.

Read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots, where you can continue to read short essays about subjects that you have absolutely no interest in.