7 Fox Kids and 4Kids TV Cartoons You Forgot You Loved — Time for a Rewatch

Saturday mornings used to be a battlefield, and Fox owned a big chunk of it. Between Fox Kids and the later 4Kids TV block, the network ran an 18-year streak of cartoons that shaped a lot of us. Everyone remembers X-Men, Batman: The Animated Series, Power Rangers, Animaniacs, and Spider- Man. But a handful of great shows slipped through the cracks. Time to give those their due.

How we got here

Fox Kids kicked off in 1990 as a joint effort between the Fox network and its local stations to pump out family- friendly programming. It blew up fast through the early 90s, growing into a four-hour Saturday morning block with a daily after-school run. In 1996, Fox locked in with Saban to form Fox Kids Worldwide, which supercharged the whole operation.

That run ended in 2001 when News Corp sold Fox Kids Worldwide to Disney. Fox basically lost its kids-TV machine overnight. The next year, 4Kids Entertainment slid into the old time slot with the FoxBox (which turned into 4Kids TV in 2005), a five-hour parade of licensed anime and originals. It lasted until 2008, when a lease-fee fight between 4Kids and Fox shut it down. In between, 4Kids turned out its own set of staples — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sonic X, Winx Club — while Fox’s earlier era had already minted icons.

Across those 18 years, dozens of shows built loyal followings. Some of the best are the ones people don’t bring up enough.

7 Fox Kids and 4Kids TV deep cuts that deserve a rewatch

1. Eek! The Cat (Fox Kids, 1992–1997)
   From Savage Steve Holland — yes, the guy who made 1985’s Better Off Dead — came a relentlessly upbeat purple cat (voiced by Bill Kopp) who tries to help and somehow wrecks everything in the process. The comedy leaned on machine-gun gags, chaos pacing, and an almost absurd level of punishment for its poor hero. It ran five seasons and even spun off a companion bit, The Terrible Thunder Lizards, which proved the show’s brand of mayhem could stretch well past its original setup.

2. Beast Machines: Transformers ( Fox Kids, 1999–2000)
   The follow-up to Beast Wars threw out the monster-of-the-week playbook and went fully serialized for 26 episodes. Optimus Primal (Garry Chalk) and the Maximals take on a virus-ravaged Megatron (David Kaye) across a mostly empty Cybertron. Mainframe’s CGI took a major step up for the time, and here’s the wild part: it’s the only North American Transformers series that was completely mapped out before a single episode went into production. That rigid plan gave it a straight-line story that split fans in 1999 but has aged into a well-earned reappraisal for its ambition.

3. Kirby: Right Back at Ya! (FoxBox/4Kids TV, 2002–2006)
   4Kids chased the Pokemon boom by snapping up video game anime, and Kirby was an early grab. The Japanese run hit 100 episodes on NHK, but only 52 aired in the U.S., so American viewers missed a big chunk. The setup is simple: Kirby crash-lands in Dream Land and has to swat down monsters ordered up by the greedy King Dedede (Ted Lewis) via the corporate nightmare factory literally called Nightmare Enterprises. What made it click was the constant rotation of Kirby’s copy powers from the games, which kept episodes varied and threw fans little mechanical easter eggs every week.

4. The Tick (Fox Kids, 1994–1996)
   Ben Edlund’s indie-comic goofball superhero finally went wide here, with Townsend Coleman voicing the nigh-invulnerable, wildly enthusiastic, not-terribly-bright Tick. His partner Arthur — a former accountant in a moth suit, played by Micky Dolenz in Season 1 and Rob Paulsen in Seasons 2–3 — mostly exists to keep this walking exclamation point from leveling the city. The rogues’ gallery is still one of the best jokes in superhero animation: Chairface Chippendale, El Seed, the Evil Midnight Bomber… each one a sharper parody than the last. Later live-action takes were fun, but the cartoon is still the most faithful version of Edlund’s original tone.

5. Silver Surfer (Fox Kids, 1998 )
   This one stings. Larry Brody built a fully serialized cosmic saga that blended cel art with early CGI and aimed straight at Jack Kirby’s look. The stories didn’t baby the audience either — episodes dove into imperialism, slavery, and environmental collapse. It pulled in strong ratings, eight scripts for Season 2 were written, and then a legal fight between Marvel and Saban (tied to Marvel’s bankruptcy era) yanked the plug after 13 episodes, leaving a cliffhanger that never got resolved. It’s on Disney+ now, and the modern audience finding it there tends to agree the original numbers weren’t a fluke.

6. Godzilla: The Series (Fox Kids, 1998–2000)
   Dropping months after Roland Emmerich’s movie faceplanted, this animated follow-up quietly fixed the film ’s biggest sins. Developed by Jeff Kline and Richard Raynis (bringing experience from The Simpsons), the show follows Dr. Nick Tatopoulos (Ian Ziering) and his HEAT team as they tackle weekly kaiju problems with help from the lone surviving Godzilla offspring, which imprints on Nick. The series immediately restores the classic atomic breath and rolls out a three-parter built around Cyber-Godzilla, a clean homage to Toho’s Mechagodzilla. It got 40 episodes across two seasons before the Pokemon vs. Digimon ratings war squeezed Fox’s schedule and shuffled it into odd time slots.

7. The Pirates of Dark Water (Fox Kids, 1991–1993)
   Launched as a five-part miniseries just called Dark Water, this was Hanna-Barbera swinging for the fences — at roughly $500,000 per half-hour, it was the priciest animated project the studio had made up to that point. Creator David Kirschner set it on Mer, an alien ocean world drowning in a literal carnivorous black tide. Prince Ren (George Newbern) leads a ragtag crew — the ecomancer Tula (Jodi Benson) and mercenary Ioz (first voiced by Hector Elizondo) — on a quest to find the Thirteen Treasures of Rule to stop the planet from being eaten. It was unusually serialized for its era and tackled themes like greed and survival without talking down to kids. The costs killed it after 21 episodes, with the quest unfinished, but it’s still a gem that deserved a proper ending.

If any of these hit your nostalgia nerve, they’re worth a fresh spin. A few were ahead of their time, a few got kneecapped by business nonsense, and more than one tried ideas Saturday morning TV almost never attempted. Bring them back? I wouldn’t complain.