10 '90s kids’ TV shows we wish were around right now

It's a whole lot of fun with prizes to be won.

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This week, have you ever felt like this? If you've dared turn on the news recently, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world is being run by idiots. Which is why it felt good this week to see that the world is still full of clever people making clever things. For starters, both Google and Amazon showed off the future of the smart home. Google’s vision of the future is a speaker shaped like a pillow, Amazon’s a drone that films intruders. One of these companies has been watching far too much RoboCop. We also felt smarter speaking to legendary composer, Ludwig Göransson. He’s written music for The Mandalorian, Creed and Black Panther, and is the person trying to 'out Zimmer' Hans Zimmer on the Tenet soundtrack. The way he put the music together for Chris Nolan’s epic head scratcher is as mind-melting as the movie. And it sounded great when we listened to it on the new UE Hyperboom, Ultimate Ears’ biggest Bluetooth speaker and the loudest we’ve ever tested. We also managed to brew our own beer, thanks to the bods at the Greater Good Fresh Brewing Co - its new Pinter system will turn you into a master brewer in no time - and we spoke to the founder of the English Whisky Society about an upcoming English Whisky Festival they're putting on (virtually). We also celebrated the fact that Oasis’ seminal album What’s The Story... turned 25 this week - there’s a great new documentary on YouTube featuring Noel Gallagher reminiscing about the ground-breaking album.  And it is here we segue gracefully from ‘our kid’ in the ’90s to ’90s kids’ TV shows. In our exclusive newsletter ShortList, we look at the best children’s TV from the 1990s and kind of wish we could be transported back to that more innocent time right now...

10 ‘90s kids’ TV shows we wish were around right now by Tom Victor / Marc Chacksfield

There’s nothing worse than looking back at the things you liked as a kid and realising they were absolute trash.  Hopefully, then, you’re like us. By which I mean you have – and have always had – impeccable taste in television, going back to your days as a snotty little kid flicking on CBBC or CITV the second you walked (ran) through the front door without so much as stopping to wipe your feet. We’ve gone back through all the shows that come under the vast banner of ‘90s kids’ TV and conducted some extensive research. We’ve plucked out the very best, the gold standard, the crème de la crème To qualify for this list, the shows in question needs to have run for two or more years on British TV during the decade.

1   Fun House   The only show, to our knowledge, to have a theme tune with several lines that both rhyme and scan. We can’t stress enough how important that is. Fun House also involved go-karts indoors, which is surely every kid’s dream until they actually ride go-karts indoors and realise they have to sit through a long safety video first, and then you have five minutes of go-karting, and then Little Tommy Jerbs’ mum has run onto the track and made everyone stop because he’s crapped himself after taking the first corner too fast. Go-karting sucks. Fun House rules.

2   Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles   That’s right, they might have been ninjas in America, but the turtles were nothing but heroic over here. Mainly because the UK bods in charge of kids’ telly decided the word ‘ninja’ was too violent for sensitive anglo-tots. Weirdly, a bunch of Renaissance painters named themselves after these fighting reptiles.

3   Animaniacs   Show me a man who didn’t get their entire geographical knowledge from Animaniacs and I’ll show you a liar. The cornerstone of an entire generation’s education – you could probably get away with not going to school and just watching this over and over. Well, not now, because it’s out of date, and Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore, but still…

4   Rocko’s Modern Life   He’s… a baby kangaroo, we think? Some sort of marsupial, at least. The only thing that’s certain is most of the jokes went way over your head if you watched Rocko’s Modern Life as a kid, but the visual humour more than made up for that. Watch it again if you get the chance, though – you’ll probably, uh, notice more things.

5   Round The Twist   Round the Twist might have begun in 1989, but its combination of short run and high quality meant pretty much every episode of the Aussie show’s first two seasons showed up on after-school TV during the ‘90s on multiple occasions. Look, It’s taken a long time to format this list, and we can’t just “remove it” because you think it “doesn’t technically count.” It’s ‘90s, OK and it has a great theme tune and is strangely scary in places.

6   Knightmare   Ah, the big one. The mack daddy of kids’ TV shows. It’s basically a weirder Crystal Maze for kids, isn’t it? That was all it was. But it was brilliant all the same. Mainly for its use of  blue screen chroma key and The Dungeon Master, Treguard (played by Hugo Myatt) saying things like “Danger, Team” over and over.

7   Pinky And The Brain   A children’s cartoon about two lab mice stuck in a recursive loop where they are forced to do the same thing every single day. Fortunately for us, the idiot viewers, that same thing was take over the world, which was at least nominally entertaining. If they made a show about us doing the same thing we do every day, it would be… not appropriate subject material for a kiddies’ cartoon, so fair play to these mice.

8   How 2   All your telly faves and some guy called Gareth came together to make science cool. Well, not exactly cool. And not exactly science. But it veered on the edges of both of these things well enough to make for cracking after-school TV that got you learning things without even realising. Covert education. Sly shit.

9   ZZZap!     Now we’re talking. Objectively the best original show on ITV, it was a travesty that they took this off the air. We spent years wistfully staring at Beanos, and Dennis outright refused to come to life and be our mate. ZZZap! was there though. ZZZap! was a live-action comic. ZZZap! was our mate.

10   ChuckleVision     To me, to you. The death of Barry Chuckle caused national mourning in 2018 and for good reason: it broke up the perfect comedy pairing since The Krankies. Their show was a staple of 90s kids’ TV, seeing the two hapless brothers try and fail at menial tasks. It was brilliant fun and a world away from that current god of children’s telly, Mr Bloody Tumble.

And there's more….

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