Without Dexter’s Lab, Cartoon Network would never have started taking the risks that made it a by-name in class leading cartoons during the late nineties and early noughties.

Dexter's Laboratory

Dexter's Laboratory

The show centres on Dexter, a child genius with two mortal enemies, his ditzy older sister and a boy school called Susan who claims to be his intellectual equal and his secret underground lab where he plays with science as if it were building blocks.

Dexter, despite being a genius, is an idiot, often getting as over excited and distracted as any of the other kids he so gleefully looks down upon. A lovable stuffed shirt, Dexter could even be described as the slightly less pernickety forbearer of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper. Constantly undone by DeeDee’s constant, dim-witted interfering

The show was a showcase for the channel’s newest and brightest talent, headed up by creator Genndy Tartakovsky and writer Seth MacFarlane of eventual Family Guy fame, as Dexter’s Laboratory was the first fully original show created and shown by Cartoon Network in 1995. And what a debut it was.

The show’s super quick-fire jokes, referential gags and surprisingly surreal humour had made sure that the show’s central comedy is still as funny as it’s ever been. That Cartoon Network allowed such a radical and risky show to be its opening salvo speaks wonders to the channel’s executives at the time.

A dash of the surreal is a constant part of Dexter’s Lab, as the show will often cut to segments surrounding Dexter’s pet monkey and its crime-fighting night life, as well as occasionally dipping in and out of a sitcom based around a group of superheroes being unable to live with each other.

This was a show defined by its weird and wonderful characters. From frustrated genius Dexter himself, to his germaphobic mother and his private-investigator wannabe father, the entire family is an oddball bunch in the very best of ways.

After the first season established the show, the creative team went for broke with the next season, churning out a record 39 episodes for season two. While it might have been easy for the team to o let the quality drop, they never did, with Dexter’s second year easily its best.

As Cartoon Network then wanted to expand, it moved most of the Dexter’s Lab team on, putting the show on permanent hiatus in 1999.

The show was brought back two years later, but with most of the creative team gone, the show was a mere shadow of what it had been, and didn’t even come close to the fantastically funny first two seasons. Unfortunately, their dramatic dip in quality badly colours Dexter’s Laboratory, making a third of the entire show’s run extraordinarily disappointing and something to be avoided.

Earning four back to back Emmy nominations from 1995 to 1998, the show was a critical success as well as a ratings hit, and firmly secured Cartoon Network’s future almost instantaneously, laying the ground work for the channel to create so much of the period’s best animation.

Despite the tragic end the show came to, the first two series of Dexter’s Lab still stand as some of the most inventive, clever cartons that Cartoon Network has ever graced the airwaves with.

FemaleFirst Cameron Smith

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