Ask Lemmy

Venture Brothers beats them all.

Freakazoid was unhinged and spastic in a way I haven't seen since

I'm only aware of Brak as a character on Space Ghost Coast to Coast, but if he has his own show I'm gonna find it!

Also how about the Venture Bros, especially with Patrick Warburton's homicidal Brock Samson.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Rocko's Modern Life yet

Well, Just You Wait!

The villain often times was portrayed drinking and smoking.

Duckman.

FL*CL, which is unhinged but not in a sick leaning manner, it's just really weird.

Aeon Flux (the anime TV series, not the movie)

~~I want to say it was aired as part of the Def II, teenage audience program slot on BBC2 in the '90s, the original UK home of Ren and Stimpy and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but the Wikipedia article for Def II doesn't mention it at all.~~

Edit: Nope, it was Liquid Television (see reply). Some but not all of MTV's weird programmes ended up on BBC2, sometimes even under the original parent name, like Liquid Television.

-- Ren & Stimpy

-- Ed, Edd and Eddy

-- Cow & Chicken

-- Courage, the Cowardly Dog

-- Animaniacs

Drawn Together

Hokuto No Ken, not because it's particularly unhinged but because in France it was programmed in the morning cartoon segment with dragon ball etc... it was so out of place that the dubbers had an obligation to tone it down in the translations and add jokes and puns.

It went about as well as you would expect, just a layer of absurdist humor on top of the ultra violence and gore...

Invader Zim

Clone High was not for children, it was on MTV! And the Brak Show was on Adult Swim! also, I feel it should be distinct between 'unhinged but good' and 'unhinged but awful', and also perhaps 'unhinged and awful but wildly entertaining '

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack

Ren and stimpy

Cow & Chicken / I M Weasel.

Salad Fingers https://youtu.be/OWBFKL6H7rI

Pop Team Epic (Poputepipikku)

I'm not going to count shows aimed at adult audiences because that feels like cheating (that also includes not listing anime aimed at adults because that doesn't seem like the spirit of the question). Of shows aimed at and easily accessible during their run to children I'm going to say Courage The Cowardly Dog and Invader Zim.

Courage had insane creepy visuals in almost every episode.

Zim wasn't consistently freaky to the point of being notable in every episode, but the ones that were, they were really out there. The show was from the mind of the creator of the Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (which I read as a kid thanks to my interest in Invader Zim) and the show's darker elements are obviously reigned in just enough to get on TV.

Before I’d go to school, at 6am the WB channel played what became my private Disney Afternoon equivalent, which rotated through four shows: Jumanji, Garfield, Sonic the Hedgehog, and— for whatever reason— Roughnecks, the animated Starship Troopers series.

It was rated PG, was produced by Paul Verhoeven, and people fucking died. No idea how it snuck in alongside the tamer stuff, but it very much felt unhinged at the time/someone didn’t vet it for kids.

Happy Tree Friends

This is definitely an older one, but I would like to add Cow & Chicken! Some of that stuff was pretty wild!

How on earth could you leave out the Emmy award winning phenomenon Courage the Cowardly Dog?

That show was unhinged

The Oblongs

Ren and Stimpy was already mentioned, and that one is pretty out there. Rocko's Modern Life would be a trailing second place imo. Plenty of innuendos and inappropriate storylines in that cartoon.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (though that one was a mix of cartoon and live action, still massively unhinged) and Big Mouth

• butt ugly martians

• lazy town

• Tex Avery show

• X-DuckX (one of my favorites - just found out that that’s a French cartoon)

• honorable adult mentions: drawn together, robot chicken, ren&stimpy