I'm an unapologetic fan of cartoons of all shapes, sizes, styles, and eras, so putting together this list was more of a treasure than a trial for me, especially as my research led me into some of the dusty corners of the internet and my memory; the nostalgia is strong in this one, my friends! If you're like me, you'll delight at the chance to revisit some old pals like T-Bone and Razor, Goliath and his clan, Guardian Bob, and the Toxic Avenger.

Now, you'll notice some glaring omissions from the 90s cartoon classics you know and love. That's because we've filtered out any cartoons derived from comic books and video games, like X-Men, Batman: The Animated Series and Mega Man; you can find them in another list down the road. The cartoons that made the cut had to have the majority of their episodes in the 90s themselves, even if they started before or ended after that glorious decade. Also, to keep the list on the slim and trim side - it is the "best" after all - we've eliminated some of the sillier "action series," like Bill & Teds' Excellent Adventures and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. That still left us with some Honorable Mentions, which include: Wing Commander Academy, Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, and Van-Pires, to name a weird few. Check out our list, in no particular order, to see if your favorite made the cut!

Swat Kats

The theme song to T-Bone and Razor's high-flying adventures should be playing in your head right now. Its rocking riffs accompany the title "kats," two vigilante pilots who masquerade as junkyard dealers when they're not busy flying their high-tech fighter jet in defense of Megakat City. This show rarely wasted time on exposition or deep character development (though the main characters' backstories are well told), opting to get right to the action. The Radical Squadron ran up against such villains as Dark Kat, Dr. Viper, The Pastmaster, Morbulous, and even the city's own military defense fighters, the Enforcers. Luckily, their endless array of weapons, vehicles, and skills get the Swat Kats through even the deadliest of scrapes.

The show's original creators, the Tremblay brothers, found success in a Kickstarter campaign for a reboot of the series, dubbed Swat Kats: Revolution. Keep an eye out for it!

ExoSquad

If you love exo-suits with rocket-launchers, space pirates, and an exploration of sociopolitical factors during interplanetary war, then boy is this series for you! Or if you just like to watch colorful characters by such names as J.T. Marsh, Wolf Bronsky, and Marsala fly around in battle-suits and blow shit up, then ExoSquad will work for you just the same.

This American series, created in response to popular Japanese anime, followed the ragtag members of Able Squad as they attempted to aid the human resistance during the Neosapien War in the 22nd century. It dealt with its story in a much more mature manner than similar series: characters could die, detailed strategy played a big part in each episode, and the theater of war was more realistically portrayed. (Though Bronsky did belch a lot, so it wasn't like it was all super-serious.) Unfortunately, ExoSquad was cancelled following a cliffhanger finale which introduced a newer, greater threat that would face humans and Neosapiens alike.

The Powerpuff Girls

There's no way this classic cartoon wasn't going to be included on this list. The Craig McCracken creation had been floating around in various forms throughout most of the 90s before blasting its way onto Cartoon Network's main rotation in 1998. After numerous award wins and nominations, spin-offs, merchandising opportunities, and even a current reboot to the series, the original The Powerpuff Girls remains one of the best cartoons ever made.

Centering on the title characters Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, The Powerpuff Girls sees the three superheroic daughters of Professor Utonium defending Townsville, USA in all manner of ways. This could easily have been a cutesy "girls save the world" cartoon, however, each of the characters - heroes and villains alike - are positively brimming with quirks, quarks, and quintessential traits that play out in their individual arcs to the nth degree. It's a hilarious show, touching at times, and absolutely packed full of action in ways that might surprise you now if you happened to miss it along the way.

Darkwing Duck

Ah, now we get to the classic Disney toons that introduced new spins on existing characters in their storied catalog. First up is the DuckTales spin-off that featured that series' character Launchpad McQuack partnering up with mild-mannered Drake Mallard, better known by his costumed alter ego of Darkwing Duck. The title hero, who possessed no real superpowers of his own (he couldn't even fly), was often more concerned with fame and adoration than he was with actual crimefighting. Though he ultimately was able to protect St. Canard from villains such as Negaduck, Dr. Bushroot, The Liquidator, Megavolt, and Quackerjack with the help of his allies, he normally did so in a silly, slapstick fashion.

And yet Darkwing Duck is still a show that focuses on action over adventure. Where it really succeeds is in its open and obvious parody nature, paying homage to such cultural touchstones as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Batman, among others. However most of these references probably fly over the heads of kids like the Thunderquack, but the silliness shines through just the same.

TaleSpin

If Darkwing Duck was all about superhero slapstick and Golden Age parodies, TaleSpin is a cartoonish take on classic adventure stories and even the Oscar-winning Casablanca. Again, it's a Disney property that takes characters from one of its properties (the Jungle Book, this time) and reimagines them in a pseudo 1930s setting. This time around, Baloo the bear is a bush pilot who flies cargo out of his base in Cape Suzette (puns!), which is plagued by air pirates (led by the fantastic and flamboyant Don Karnage) and the machinations of industrialist Shere Khan. Once the gang saves the city yet again, they all hang out at Louie's Place, a bar owned by King Louie, the orangutan.

TaleSpin is one of very few cartoon series that are all about classic adventures. It doesn't have the jet-fueled dogfights of Swat Kats, or superpowers, or advanced technology; it's just good, old-fashioned fisticuffs, flying aces, and races to beat the bad guy to the punch. This wasn't being done all that often in the 90s and it's barely done today, so do yourself a favor and revisit a classic era through the lens of TaleSpin.

Gargoyles

I've made numerous attempts to drag Disney's attention back to their fantastic series Gargoyles in the hopes that someone somewhere might realize the potential of this diamond in the rough and polish it up for another go 'round. We've seen parodies of Golden Age comic books and classic adventure stories, but Gargoyles took a very serious run at Shakespearean themes, Arthurian legend, and various mythologies ... just with monstrous creatures who happened to be stone by day and winged warriors by night.

Their origin story is one of tragedy and betrayal, just as their seemingly triumphant reemergence in the modern world is fraught with difficulty and disloyalty. I've always loved the idea of these powerful and intelligent guardian creatures who have a glaring weakness: they have to either hide themselves away during the day or trust a human with protecting their vulnerable stone selves in the daylight. The core story of Gargoyles is solid, allowing for a fantastic mythology to grow from there. It's just unfortunate that we haven't seen a modern-day live-action franchise built around these maligned monsters.

Aladdin

Sometimes, Disney realized that they really didn't have to reinvent the wheel and create new characters out of their existing properties. Sometimes, you just take your successful movie characters and plunk them down into a TV show to continue their adventures. It worked pretty well for Aladdin, which followed after the events of the feature film sequel The Return of Jafar. Oddly enough, this series found Aladdin engaged to Princess Jasmine, but he and Abu were still resigned to live in the slums of Agrabah. Magic Carpet, Genie, and Iago offered up plenty of sidekick humor and plot complications/solutions along the way, as you might expect.

As far as I'm concerned, Aladdin is the best of Disney's more direct series adaptations, especially when we're talking about action. Genie's magic offered up limitless opportunities for adventure while the rich setting of Agrabah was quite literally a huge sandbox to play in. Some viewers might have preferred the Classical stylings of Hercules or the underwater musical musings of The Little Mermaid, but I'll stick with the Street Rat.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers

Guys! The environment! Save it! Well, it was a good effort from Ted Turner & Co. who created this team of super kids and their co-op superhero Captain Planet with an eye toward educating audiences about the threat to our ecosystem. It was a fantastic creation that still holds sway in the zeitgeist today, even as our environmental problems seem to be getting worse instead of better. Perhaps giving five kids elemental rings with the power of conjuring a solitary hero tasked with protecting the entirety of the Earth from ecological disaster was a fine start, but just a step forward on an endless journey.

For its time, Captain Planet and the Planeteers (and its sequel series The New Adventures of Captain Planet) introduced viewers to action-packed pro-environmental adventures against such dangers as overconsumption (Hoggish Greedly), poor sanitation (Verminous Skumm), unethical and unregulated scientific research (Dr. Blight), the threat of nuclear power (Duke Nukem), and poaching/unethical business practices (Looten Plunder). It was simple, it was memorable, and it was downright fun. There's never a bad time to revisit this series, but I think it's also well past time for a reboot.

Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?

One of the few (okay, maybe the only one) educational series on this list is the Daytime Emmy-winning adaptation of the popular Carmen Sandiego computer games. For the uninitiated, the central idea of the games was to teach players various lessons related to geography, history, and other academic subjects. Yeah, it tricked kids into learning things while they were playing a game, just like this series (sorta) tricked kids into learning things while they were watching a cartoon.

Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? was different from other cartoons on the air at the time by design. In order to meet standards set by the property owners and to distance itself from the violence of other shows (it was a PBS show after all), the creators set the series inside a video game which followed a pair of siblings tracking down the title villain and preventing her and her henchmen from stealing priceless artifacts. For an educational cartoon on public television, that's about as good as it gets!

MIghty Ducks

What a whirlwind of meta-adaptations this thing was! It debuted in the fall of 1996 on Disney-owned ABC, inspired by the live-action Disney films (the 90s triple deke of  Mighty Ducks movies in '92, '94, '96) and the actual NHL ice hockey team founded in 1993 as The Mighty Ducks (before changing, thankfully, to Anaheim Ducks in 2006). That's a pretty weird string of real-life occurrences, so the adaptation of the property into a cartoon about alien duck-like humanoids from the planet of Puckworld (Oh God, I'm starting to rethink this one) isn't the strangest thing that happened.

The strangest thing is how the plot of the show Mighty Ducks weirdly mirrored the real-life franchise. When the ducks land on Earth - where their fight against the evil Saurians has taken them - they're soon scooped up by an ambitious hockey manager who gives them a "believable" cover as a legit hockey team. Sure! Cartoons! Honestly, this one's on the list not because the premise is so bizarre, but because the fights (and the puns) are fun to watch. We owe it to the poor writers who were tasked with cooking up something watchable out of a featherweight premise. (And it was still better than ProStars.) Kudos, writers!

ReBoot

Even if ReBoot didn't boast an excellent story chock full of humor, heart, and action, it would make a "best of" list simply for being the first completely computer-animated half-hour TV series. That was pretty impressive for its time, though anyone going back to watch it today will likely have a tough time adjusting to its relatively coarse animation. It also added a meta level of storytelling that was rather rare in cartoons: the main characters were sprites within a computer system tasked with keeping it safe from viruses while also playing games generated by the user. Rather than just watching someone playing a game, we were watching the daily lives of characters who called the computer system of Mainframe their home.

An added bonus of this clever storytelling twist is that we not only got to see Bob the Guardian, Enzo and Dot Matrix, and others take on the villainous Megabyte and Hexadecimal, we also got to see them defend Mainframe through an ever-changing variety of computer games. Winning was very important to the computer characters since, if the user won, the game cube would leave behind a hellscape of nullified sprites and destruction in its wake. The series grew in complexity as an overarching mythology took root and the "Net" was introduced, along with new characters, but just the same, it's probably due for a ... reboot.

The Pirates of Dark Water

Always the quest! This high-seas adventure series had one of the most compelling mythologies of cartoons in the 90s and easily the most frustratingly abrupt ending. It followed Ren, a prince of a forgotten land, who is tasked with finding the lost Thirteen Treasures of Rule in order to keep the malevolent Dark Water from completely taking over the alien planet of Mer. Luckily, he's aided in his quest by a wizard named Tula, a pirate named Ioz, and a hungry monkey-bird named Niddler. Unfortunately, the massive pirate lord Bloth wants the treasures for his own purposes and will do anything to stop Ren from reclaiming them.

Nautical adventures in cartoons are pretty rare, and ones set on an alien world that's just similar enough to our own to be recognizable but different enough to be fascinating are rarer still. So it's with a long-seething rage that I remind you that, after the series' 21 episodes, only eight of the 13 treasures had been found. We'll likely never find out what happened to Ren and his crew, or the world of Mer at large, but so long as you know that going into the series, you'll surely enjoy the adventure!

Toxic Crusaders

Guys, let's get weird for a minute. This relatively kid-friendly adaptation of the gruesome, sexually explicit, low-budget Troma picture, The Toxic Avenger continues the exploits of that title character, but buddies him up with a team of fellow mutant superheroes. While the live-action Toxie definitely earned his R-rating, the cartoon cleaned things up quite a bit and led to a cult following, despite only airing 13 episodes.

The title character was originally a nerdy janitor named Melvin Junko who had an unfortunate run-in with some toxic waste. The accident permanently disfigured him, but granted him superhuman size and strength (plus a sentient mop named ... Mop). With allies such as No-Zone, Major Disaster, Headbanger, and Junkyard, Toxie battles against the evil forces of Killemoff (That's DOCTOR Killemoff!) and other alien polluters from the planet Smogula. The Toxic Crusaders burned out fairly quickly, but oh, they burned so brightly!

Beast Wars: Transformers

Just when you think you've gotten used to seeing Optimus Prime all shiny and chrome as a Peterbilt truck, he shows up as a gorilla in Beast Wars: Transformers (or the affectionately titled Beasties: Transformers in Canada). That was pretty shocking at first. Actually, it was pretty shocking throughout the entire series to watch animals like a gorilla, cheetah, rat, and numerous dinosaurs bend their limbs and peel back their flesh in excruciatingly painful Cronenbergian contortions in order to revert back to their robot forms. (On the plus side, it was fun to scream Maximize! or Terrorize! when they did.)

In a series set as a sequel to the original story, Optimus Primal leads the Maximals (descendants of the Autobots) against Megatron's Predacons in the race to obtain energon, as you might expect. However, the Daytime Emmy-winning animation style and the wildly creative addition of new characters (and gruesome transformations) over time make this a necessary watch for any self-described Transformers fan.

Mighty Max

Oh, the underrated hits keep rolling in. Plenty of cartoons come into being based on a successful toyline, and so it was with Mighty Max. The cartoon was created thanks to the success of the British toys by the same name, which themselves were spun off of the Polly Pocket series of toys. It's a rare cartoon series that had a satisfying series finale that wrapped up the overall plot while also leaving the story open for future exploration. Honestly, Mighty Max could just be the best example of this throughout all cartoons, not just in the 90s.

It followed the title character, a rambunctious preteen boy who receives an apparently unremarkable cap, which was hidden inside the statue of a fowl, of course. Lo and behold, the hat opens portals through which the cap-bearer and others might travel. Max gets thrown into an ages-old battle against the evil Skullmaster, with the help of Virgil the knowledgeable Lemurian chicken ("Fowl, actually.") and Norman the Viking bodyguard. Mighty Max is a fantastic trip across space, time, and the astral plane, and it ends with a mind-bending twist that makes the entire series worth watching again.

Dog City

Ah, the 90s, when puppets and Muppets were still welcome on children's programming, and animated dogs could live the life of a private investigator. Dog City is easily the noir-iest entry on our list, and one that comes with a twist. It grew out of the 39-minute long TV movie broadcast as part of The Jim Henson Hour in 1989, featuring puppetry work from Jim Henson Productions. That puppetry would be included in short segments of the animated Dog City, which saw private investigator Ace Hart (an animated anthropomorphic German Shepherd) conversing with his animator, Eliot Shag, himself a live-action anthropomorphic German Shepherd puppet.

The mixed-media presentation alone is enough to keep Dog City in the conversation, as is the cartoon's decision to play up investigations and crime-solving. (It took a fun departure to play up the Batman/Watchmen parody with Watchdog, too.) So while it's a little lighter on action than some of the other items on this list, it earns huge style points.

The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest

It's not too often that a classic cartoon series gets a modern reboot that actually improves upon the original. However, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest does just that. The Hanna-Barbera original introduced the curious title tyke and his pal Hadji, along with Jonny's father Benton, their bodyguard Race, and their pugnacious bulldog Bandit. The 90s remake really played up on the advances in animation technology since the original, which was evident right from the new series' excellent intro sequence. It kept the adventurous spirit and sci-fi elements of the original intact while also introducing action on two fronts: in hand-drawn traditional animation and the virtual QuestWorld, created through computer animation.

The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest also aged up the heroes a bit, making them teenagers and allowing them to be a little more independent in their actions and mature in their thoughts. It also introduced Jessie Bannon, the daughter of Race and an integral member of the team. The plots chose to factor in real-world phenomena and character-centric conflicts rather than "monsters of the week," though that realistic approach was changed for a more sensationalist take in Season 2. It's fun, albeit a bit frustrating, watching the changes over the course of the overlooked series' 52 episodes, so give this one a watch if you're feeling adventurous.

The Bots Master

Admittedly, this one's on the list just to illustrate the 90s' love of primary colors, 3D gimmicks, and the letter Z. The Bots Master takes place in the near future of 2025 (fingers crossed that this one doesn't come true) in which humanoid robots are quite common thanks to the genius of engineer Ziv "ZZ" Zulander. However, his company's CEO Sir Lewis Leon Paradim has designs on world domination, so he uses a "Krang Chip" to override Ziv's creations and use them to his benefit. Luckily, Ziv has created his own B.O.Y.Z.Z. (Brain Operated Young Zygoetopic Zoids) to fight back against Paradim.

Okay, this is nuts. It's a bonkers show that's so frenetic at times that it doesn't even really matter what the plot is. It's a mess of bold colors flying around the screen, replete with awful character names like Jammerzz, Toolzz, D'Nerd, Genesix, Swang and Ninjzz, but it's just so crazy that you can't help but laugh along with the action. Then once that 3D segment starts, grab your 3D glasses and watch out! "It's Lazer Time, boyzz!"

Aeon Flux

Easily the most adult cartoon on the list, Aeon Flux started as a six-part series of experimental short films, followed by five standalone episodes that continued Peter Chung's avant-garde animation and storytelling style. The character got her own 10-episode series that earned a rating of TV-14, and with good reason. Not only did earlier iterations of Aeon Flux feature the character dying multiple times, but the promiscuity, sexual content, and graphic violence were more than simply a style choice: they were signatures of the series.

But the thing that made the psychosexual shoot-em-up action of Aeon Flux so fantastic were the political machinations behind the scenes of the dystopian's dual settings. Aeon Flux, who's quite the skilled assassin and acrobat, hails from the anarchic nation of Monica, which neighbors the police state of Bregna, ruled by her on again/off again lover/nemesis Trevor Goodchild. Things get very twisted as the series goes on, but as far as the style of Aeon Flux's action scenes are concerned, it's unmatched.

Biker Mice from Mars

Alright, back to crazy town. We've already had anthropomorphic alien ducks who play hockey while saving Earth from threats, so why not get some anthropomorphic Martian mice who like motorsports, a.k.a. Biker Mice from Mars? You see, title characters Throttle, Modo, and Vinnie have escaped war on their home planet and have arrived on Earth - Chicago, specifically - to defend it against the evil Plutarkians. The battles against aliens, robots, and other monsters are just as bloodless as most of the cartoons on this list, but they do their fighting in style by using weapons like a cestus and a bionic arm.

Oh, and did I mention they meet a lady mechanic by the name of "Charley" Davidson? Yeah. So while this one's another pro-environmental tale of good monsters vs bad monsters, you've got to give it credit for turning mice into badass motorcycle riders. If you were a fan of this show, there's a great chance you also liked and remember Road Rovers and Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa.