The What A Cartoon! Show (originally known as World Premiere Toons, and later renamed The Cartoon Cartoon Show) was an anthology show on Cartoon Network running from 1995 to 1997, with a few scattered shorts airing towards the end of The '90s. Created by then-president of Hanna-Barbera Fred Seibert as a throwback to theatrical studio cartoons from The Golden Age of Animation, it was described as "48 chances to succeed or fail" at potential original programming. The premiere of the project was on a special hosted by Space Ghost.

True to Seibert's word, 48 cartoons were produced by a generous handful of creators (mostly Hanna-Barbera staff), each reflecting the artist's individual style and sensibilities. Five of the shorts — Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls and The Chicken from Outer Space (the basis for Courage the Cowardly Dog) — would go on to be the network's first original shows, or Cartoon Cartoons. One wound up being the prototype for a much more popular toon later on for a competing broadcaster (Larry & Steve would serve as one of the inspirations for Family Guy). Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera themselves got back in the director's chair to create "Hard Luck Duck" and two shorts featuring Dino of The Flintstones, respectively. Others, such as Yoink of the Yukon, Pfish & Chip, Yuckie Duck, and Shake & Flick, were not as successful, but have gained a strong cult following from classic CN fans.

After the show's initial 1995-97 run, Fred Seibert would leave Hanna-Barbera to produce a counterpart series for Nickelodeon at his own production company, Frederator Studios. In the meantime, CN would retool the series into The Cartoon Cartoon Show, with then-vice president of Cartoon Network Sam Register now serving as producer. The rebranded anthology series now showcased new episodes and reruns of the network's full-series cartoons in addition to premieres of new pilot episodes. Three new shorts were made in 1998 and 1999, those being Kenny and the Chimp, Mike, Lu & Og, and King Crab: Space Crustacean; the second of these would be greenlit into a series.

In 2000 and 2001, Cartoon Network would take a more direct approach to greenlighting shows with The Big Pick, in which viewers got to vote for brand-new series from that summer's collection of ten pilots. The winner of the first Big Pick was The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, with runner-up Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones? also getting picked up^note The original Sheep in the Big City short was aired as part of that "Cartoon Cartoon Summer" as well, but had already been greenlit., whilst the second Big Pick was awarded to Codename: Kids Next Door.

In the late 2000s, a spiritual successor was being produced in the form of Cartoonstitute, and was to be headed by Craig McCracken and Rob Renzetti, both of whom got their start on WAC. It never came to be due to both financial issues and the channel's live-action push at the time, although of the shorts that were completed, two of them (Regular Show and Uncle Grandpa) went on to be successful series in their own right. In the years since the failure of Cartoonstitute, while Cartoon Network continues to publicly showcase new pilots online (under the name Cartoon Network Minis) in order to gauge viewer response in a similar way as all these prior shows, they no longer are packaged into an anthology series of any kind.

On April 15, 2021, Cartoon Network announced that they will be creating a brand new anthology series of shorts, Cartoon Cartoons, named after the network's original brand name for its animated shows. In 2024 it was reported that none of the shorts from the project would be publicly released.

List of shorts featured:

Tropes featured:

• 555: In the title card for "Lost Cat", the lost cat sign has the phone number 555-1234 written on it. In the episode proper, the phone number is 555-9603.
• 30 Minutes, or It's Free!: The plot of Pizza Boy in "No Tip" revolves around a character who has to deliver a pizza to someone who is in the North Pole. The time limit is five minutes, in order to receive a big tip. While the delivery is successful (it's done within the time limit), the pizza's damage plus it having anchovies results in the customer not only refusing to give the tip, but also rejecting the pizza itself.
• Accidental Misnaming: In the short "Snoot's New Squat", Snoot's superior officer keeps getting his name wrong, calling him "Agent Squint" and the like.
• All-CGI Cartoon: "Strange Things" was the only short featured on this programming block that was made entirely using computer animation.
• All for Nothing: In Pizza Boy in "No Tip", the titular character is tasked with delivering a pizza to the North Pole in 5 minutes of less to be guaranteed a big tip. He manages to pull this off after a series of insane mishaps and injury, but gets no tip because of the damage to the pizza and ignored the "no anchovy" request. He loses it.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Melvin from "Malcom and Melvin" suffers this in spades. No one in the city cares for him, and many consider him either annoying or perverted. The only one who is even remotely worried about him is his own mother. And all this before Malcom the Cockroach comes to sympathize for him.
• Anchovies Are Abhorrent: The episode "No Tip" is about a pizza boy who has to deliver a pizza to an eskimo couple and a polar bear living in the Arctic in less than five minutes. When they order the pizza, the polar bear requests "hold the anchovies". Of course the pizza maker still puts anchovies on the pizza, costing the pizza boy his tip once he almost kills himself reaching the Arctic, leading to him giving the customers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and ending up in jail. (The pizza was also significantly worse for wear because of the trip, but it didn't seem to bother the customers)
• Animation Bump:
  • "Help?", which was lavishly animated by Bruno Bozzetto and his team in Italy.
  • "Tales of Worm Paranoia". Inevitable, being animated by both Kennedy Cartoons and Carbunkle Cartoons.
  • "Buy One, Get One Free*", which was produced by many former Games Animation staffers who worked on the Bob Camp-era seasons of The Ren & Stimpy Show.
• Artistic License – History: This is acknowledged in Gramps when the grandkids keep pointing out the errors in Gramps' story about how he actually lived his life. For example, when he mentions meeting the President, who's depicted as a statuesque woman, they point out that America never had a female President, causing the President in the story to briefly change into Richard Nixon. He then begs them to let this part remain unchanged, which they reluctantly do.
• Ate the Plate: In "Kitchen Casanova", a man cooks a meal for his date and when they both eat it at the end, they both get lost into some kind of feeding frenzy and they eat not only the meal but the plates and the entire table.
• Banana Peel:
  • In the short "Strange Things", the robot museum has on display "the most dangerous thing in the world", a banana peel. (At the end, the custodian decides to replace it with his assistant instead.)
  • "Boid n' Woim" has Woim do this to Boid during a Rollercoaster Mine chase. Appropriately lampshaded by Woim...
    Woim: [eating a banana, to the audience] You know what I'm gonna do with this banana peel, don't ya?
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: In the short "Kenny and the Chimp: Diseasy Does It", which was later featured as a segment of the first episode of Codename: Kids Next Door, Kenny has been infected with many of Professor XXXL's collection of diseases, by the end after being cured of the latest illness he winds up naked and covers himself; however, when the ice cream cake he had ordered earlier arrives and he chases the delivery boy along with Chimpy and Professor XXXL, you can clearly see that he has no genitalia.
• Berserk Button: In "No Tip", near the end of the short the Alaskan wife refused on giving a tip to Pizza Boy. This results in him having a mental breakdown that has him sent to prison. The Priest offering him a "tip" is what breaks him again.
• Batty Lip Burbling: The king in the "Swamp and Tad: Mission Imfrogable" has lip burbling as part of his name, which is mostly a sequence of sound effects and a dance for unexplained reasons.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: The short Captain Sturdy: Back in Action shows a Cartoon Network satellite being obliterated by Moid's death ray.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Parodied in "King Crab: Space Crustacean" with the alien found inside Zesty Relish's Mr. Burp can. First it emerges as a vaguely humanoid blue creature with an elephant's trunk-like snout, which asks if it can "hug" Zesty's face until its next mutation. When he agrees, it latches onto his face, shoving its trunk down his throat to lay something inside his stomach, before detaching and then melting into sludge. Then Zesty takes ill, graphically explodes, and from amongst the gore emerges a Green-Skinned Space Babe — who then asks if she can hug King Crab's face until her next mutation, before revealing she's actually Zesty's mind reincarnated in this new female humanoid alien's body.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In "Commander Cork" we see some flashbacks of bad experiences in the past: Him getting mocked for bathing in underwear at the communal showers; him eating fish, with her mother saying they can't revive the fish; and him trying to revive a fish at the communal showers.
• Breakfast Cereal Mascot: "Major Flake: Soggy Sales" is about a Captain Crunch-like mascot who risks getting fired if he doesn't get more sales for his cereal.
• Breaking the Annoying Instrument: In "Raw Deal in Rome", a poodle name Shake tries to perform on stage in Rome, but a flea named Flick keeps one-upping him. When Flick steals the show by playing a harp, Shake destroys it by smashing it with a hammer-loaded catapult, runs over it with a steamroller, vaporizes it with an electricity shooting gun and sweeps up the pile of ash that remained.
• Butt-Monkey: Yuckie Duck's shorts both have him get the short end of the stick in the end, being made into duck soup for messing up a customer's order in "Short Orders" and his stint as a paramedic ending with him requiring medical attention himself in "I'm On My Way".
• The Cameo: The Jetsons have a brief cameo in Wind-Up Wolf.
• Captivity Harmonica: In Pizza Boy in No Tip, after getting sent to prison for assaulting the Eskimo couple for not giving him a tip, Pizza Boy is seen playing the harmonica after relating his tale of woe to the prison parson.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • In "Dino Stay Out", When Fred confronts Dino on his way home from bowling of letting the sabretooth cat of the house, Dino explains about him having disguised as an infant, Santa, and Tiger-skin rug. Fred doesn't believe him at first telling him had he put the cat in the shed, he would be in the shed. That is until Dino informs the sabretooth tiger's family inside .
  • In “Look Out Below”, Junior informs George that the Pigeon is putting out the lights for his sleep. When he didn’t see the pigeon he thinks it’s just Junior’s imagination. But he believes Junior when the Pigeon comes to knock out.
  • In Gramps. Despite what details Gramps changed, it seems he really did save the world from an alien invasion as the alien leader testifies to his own grandchildren.
• The Cast Show Off: Most of the shorts were created by Hanna-Barbera staff, given free range to create whatever they wanted.
• Chest Burster: Parodied in "King Crab: Space Crustacean"; when Zesty Relish purchases a soda from an alien vending machine, his chosen 'beverage', Mr. Burp, produces a small, blue, elephant-trunked alien that asks if he can hug Zesty's face until his next mutation. Being a naive idiot, Zesty agrees, whereupon the Mr. Burp creature turns into a blue Blob Monster and adheres to his face, resulting in King Crab hastily retrieving him to the ship's medical bay. The creature lets go of Zesty after King Crab asks politely, promising to be Zesty's friend... but then up and dies. But before it dissolves into lifeless slime, it tells Zesty that it left a "little reminder" of itself growing inside of Zesty and absorbing his DNA. Sure enough, no sooner have they flushed the remains than Zesty takes ill, blurting out that his guts are on fire before fainting and experiencing horrible discolorations. Right before the short ends, Zesty explodes, revealing a cute blue retro-style alien girl, who lets King Crab be smitten before revealing she has Zesty's mind inside the new body. Just in case the viewer needed it to be more obvious what they were doing, the first 'soda' in the vending machine is literally titled "Chest Burster".
• Christmas Episode: George and Junior's Christmas Spectacular had George and Junior tasked with delivering a Christmas present on Santa Claus' behalf as punishment for delivering the letter asking for it late.
• Comforting Comforter: In the featurette Mina and the Count, as the Count is about to escape before the morning comes, a sleeping Mina is seen shivering, to which he pulls her bedcovers over her, smiles and manages to depart just in time.
• Cranium Chase: Happens to the dog in Sledgehammer O'Possum: Out and About and Wind-Up Wolf.
• Crappy Carnival: In the short "Zoonatiks", the three protagonists are working in one of these at the beginning, called B.T. Hazbeen's Circus. Its low quality is the reason why our heroes want to get into the Hackensack Zoo.
• Creator Cameo: The superhero in the "Malcom and Melvin" shorts was voiced by Ralph Bakshi, who created the shorts and disowned both of them after they aired.
• Deranged Animation:
  • Anything directed by Pat Ventura: Yuckie Duck, Sledgehammer O'Possum, and George and Junior. Also "Buy One, Get One Free", which has visual influences from The Ren & Stimpy Show (not hurt by a few staff members who worked on that show).
  • Also the two Ralph Bakshi shorts "Babe, He Calls Me" and "Malcom and Melvin", "Help?" by Bruno Bozzetto, and Tales of Worm Paranoia, directed by Eddie Fitzgerald.
• Domestic-Only Cartoon: Being a Cartoon Network program, most of the shorts were made by either Hanna-Barbera or Cartoon Network Studios and animated overseas, but there have been exceptions.
  • "Help?", which was produced in Italy.
  • "Babe, He Calls Me" and "Malcom and Melvin", which were produced by Bakshi ZooToons in New York.
  • "Strange Things", which was made by Sensible Shoes Productions in the U.S.
  • "O Ratz: Ratz in a Hot Tin Can", which was made by Perennial Pictures Film Corporation in Indianapolis.
  • "The Chicken From Outer Space", by Stretch Films in New York.
  • "The Adventures of Captain Buzz Cheeply: A Clean Getaway", produced by Buzz Image Group in Canada.
  • "Journey to Sector 5-G", which was made by Cuppa Coffee Productions in Canada.
• Doom Magnet: "Awfully Lucky" has a con artist taking a pearl that an old man tosses away so he can sell it to a museum for a large sum of money. Hilarity Ensues and a series of bad luck forces him to abandon this and toss away the pearl himself..
• Downer Ending: "Tales Of Worm Paranoia" ends with Johnny losing his mind after getting trampled by the human again.
• Dropped in the Toilet: In "Lost Control", Godfrey and Zeek accidentally flush their TV remote in the toilet, forcing them to tour the sewage treatment plant to get it back. However, they get so bored with what's on TV that Godfrey, much to Zeek's horror, deliberately flush the remote again so they can go back to the sewage plant to find it again.
• Either/Or Title: "Kenny and the Chimp in: Disease-y Does It or Chimp-n-Pox"
• Eskimo Land: In "Pizza Boy," the title character has to deliver a pizza in "five minutes" to Eskimos at the North Pole, who ordered pizza because they were sick of whale blubber. The joke was based on a true story. In the early 1990s a McDonald's franchise was opened in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, the first one in northern Canada. Within a few months it became trendy for Inuit living in the far north to have McDonald's ship pizza and burger orders up via air cargo on the weekly transport. Even after the national office discontinued the McPizza, the Yellowknife franchise still carried them because the demand was so high. In 2000 the franchise earned more profit per square foot than any other franchise in Canada, and 20% of their income was from pizza.
• Exact Words: In "Yuckie Duck: I'm on My Way," Yuckie is a Paramedic who sees a patient whose heart literally jumps out of his chest and jumps repeatedly on him. Yuckie exclaims, "That patient is having a heart attack!"
• Expy:
  • The superhero seen in the "Malcom and Melvin" shorts vaguely resembles Batman.
  • Hard Luck Duck from the short of the same name is an almost exact clone of the earlier Hanna-Barbera creation Yakky Doodle. Both are naive ducklings who have to be protected from being eaten by a hungry fox.
• The Faceless: The President in Fat Cats in Drip Dry Drips.
• Face on a Milk Carton: In the short "Hard Luck Duck", a Cajun fox tries to cook a little duck; just as he's adding the milk, he notices the duck's face on the carton and comments, "News Travels Fast."
• Flea Episode: "Snoot's New Squat" revolved around a miniature alien scouting for a new home for his species and setting up house on a hypochondriac Funny Animal dog named Al, who mistakes him for an infestation of fleas.
• Frothy Mugs of Water: Averted in Captain Buzz Cheaply: A Clean Getaway. The titular protagonist bribes an alien into sparing his life by offering him beer and we later see a whole bunch of signs that read "beer".
• Fur and Loathing: One of the one-shots, Yoink Of the Yukon, revolved around a grizzly bear named Nook and his feud with the Royal Canadian Mounties over their allowal of fur trapping in the Yukon. Mind you, this being meant for comedy, fur trapping here is portrayed as literally stealing the clothes off the critters' backs, leaving them naked and freezing in the snow. The issue is resolved when the main character Yoink, after much conflict, ends up outfitting all of Nook's friends with a set of tuxedos he got off the Home Shopping Network.
  Yoink: It was the best I could do on such short notice, eh?
• Fur Is Clothing: At one point in "Shake & Flick in: Raw Deal in Rome", the fur covering the lower half of Shake's body falls down like pants to reveal boxer shorts.
• Garbage Hideout: In the short Swamp and Tad in "Mission Imfrogable", Agent Newt isn't so much hiding in a trash can as he is wearing one with his arms and legs sticking out.
• Gender Bender: Mixed with Chest Burster (yes, really) in "King Crab: Space Crustacean". After Zesty Relish violently rips apart to reveal the Green-Skinned Space Babe that he was impregnated with, she then reveals she actually has Zesty's Genetic Memory (and thus personality), so he's effectively been transformed into her.
• Girls Like Musicians: All Malcom in "Malcom and Melvin" has to do is play a few notes on his trumpet for girls to fall for him. His female neighbor breaks down his door admitting she's in love with whoever playing it and runs along to put on a cheerleader outfit for him when Melvin says it was him. When Malcom starts playing again in the end dozens of women run towards the source.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: "King Crab: Space Crustacean" has two. The ship's medical officer, Dr. Drew Deli, looks like a beautiful Indian woman with a fleshy antennae sticking out of her forehead and mind-reading powers. The second is a beautiful, scantily-clad blue woman with retro-style alien antennae on her head and two-toned pink and white hair. Created in a parody of the Chest Burster trope.
• Groin Attack: Fat Cats in Drip Dry Drips features a scene where Louie accidentally hits the President in the grapes when he was doing his measurements.
  Louie: Oops, sorry Mr. President.
  President: (high-pitched voice) No problem!
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Johnny's acid-scalded face in "Tales of Worm Paranoia". As if once wasn't bad enough, they cut to it three times!
• Here We Go Again!:
  • In "Awfully Lucky", after all the suffering due to the curse, the main character decides to throw the cursed pearl into the sea, but actually falls in a fisherman's boat, who immediately fishes a treasure chest, followed by apparently being crushed by a large falling object.
  • The ending of Godfrey and Zeek. After all the trouble the two go through to retrieve the TV remote from the sewage plant, the two get bored with what's on television and Godfrey decides to flush the remote down the toilet so they can get the remote back again.
  • "Swamp and Tad: Mission Imfrogable" had the titular characters retrieve a package from Earth for their king that turned out to be a pizza. The duo is then told that they have to go back to Earth to retrieve more pizzas, much to Tad's dismay.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Tales of Worm Paranoia is about a worm named Johnny being terrified of a human that obliviously injures him constantly. Unlike most other examples, it's a straight up Cosmic Horror Story.
• Indestructibility Montage: In the short "Yuckie Duck in Short Orders", has the title character serve a customer a steak that refuses to be cut and goes through every tool imaginable with zero results.
• Instrumental Theme Tune: Both theme songs (the heavy metal WAC theme and the sillier Cartoon Cartoon Show theme) were lyric-less.
• Interrupted Suicide: In "Malcom and Melvin", Melvin tries to off himself by jumping from the window ledge, but he changes his mind when he hears Malcom's trumpet-playing.
• I Was Never Here: The possum from "Podunk Possum" absolutely did not see any mysterious UFOs this evening, especially after being confronted with the MIBs' very shiny badge.
• Jerkass: Luther from "Awfully Lucky". The very beginning of the short has him steal a man's sandwich, tease a dog with the last bite before eating it in front of the pooch, and steal a baby's milk bottle to wash it down. It is clear they wanted to make him as unsympathetic as possible when the curse of the Paradox Pearl continuously gives him good luck only to follow with bad luck so that his misfortunes wouldn't seem unfair.
• Kid Hero All Grown Up: Captain Sturdy: Back in Action has Captain Sturdy's grown-up sidekick Ultra Boy.
• Laughing Mad: The Mad Bomber in the first Pfish & Chip short.
• Line Boil: The characters in The Kitchen Casanova squiggle slightly.
• Living Museum Exhibit: In the episode "Stranger Things", a clumsy robot plays with "the most dangerous thing on earth" (a Banana Peel). When he superiors see all the damage he had done over the course of the film, they declare him the new most dangerous weapon and put him on display.
• Mad Bomber: Pfish & Chip's stock in trade is to catch these guys. The villain of the first short is actually named Mad Bomber.
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon:
  • Help?, which has no dialog aside from Jof's "Help!"
  • "Shake & Flick in: Raw Deal in Rome", which has no dialog aside from a few screams.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: In the short "Help?", Jof the cat runs to the hospital because he pricked his finger while sewing.
• Mouth Cam: Johnny in "Tales Of Worm Paranoia". LOWLANDS
• My Brain Is Big: Parodied on "Captain Buzz Cheeply: A Clean Getaway" with the Blubnoids, an alien race whose foreheads evolved faster than their brains and protrude three feet ahead of them. Their plan is to kidnap Buzz's Robot Buddy Slide and use him to fill their brains with his knowledge until they fit their foreheads to capacity. Unfortunately for them, this makes their heads too heavy to hold up, and end up with their foreheads embedded to the ground. What's more, 95% of Slide's memory is made up of useless sci-fi trivia, which the Blubnoids will be arguing about for decades to come.
• Nightmare Face: The titular Podunk Possum can apparently deploy a monstrous one of these at will, scaring an entire alien fleet away from Earth.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Podunk Possum featured the psychotic ghost of a Colonel who owned his own chicken restaurant who is clearly based on Kentucky Fried Chicken's founder Colonel Harlan Sanders.
• No OSHA Compliance: Parodied in Strange Things. The short is set at the "Institute of Dangerous Research", where scientists specialise in discovering, isolating and categorising "The Most Dangerous Thing on Earth".
• Noodle Incident:
  • Whatever happened to Grandma in Gramps. According to Gramps' grandchildren, it was a result of their refusing to listen to one of his stories. "SHE WAS DEAD WHEN I GOT THERE!!"
  • In Kenny and the Chimp, Prof. Triple-Extra-Large warns Kenny that he doesn't want a repeat of what happened last time they visited his lab, and Kenny tries to defend himself by saying "But Chimpy was the one who put the sardines in the..." before the professor cuts him off.
• Obliviously Evil: The truth regarding the human in "Tales Of Worm Paranoia". Johnny himself thinks the human is being intentionally evil, but as the title suggests this is his paranoia getting the best of him: the audience is shown the human is a perfectly friendly guy who is just dopey at worst and simply doesn’t notice Johnny.
• Old Superhero: The premise of "Captain Sturdy: Back in Action", where the titular superhero has to go out of retirement after learning that the official retirement age for superheroes has been changed and as a result his pension has been cancelled.
• OOC Is Serious Business: In "Larry and Steve" they get into a store and meet a employee that is always smiling and never loses her cheerful personality, except when Larry proposes putting a super-powerful light bulb on a normal lamp, foreshadowing what a bad idea this is.
• Pain-Powered Leap: In the short Longhair and Dumbledome, the latter falls off a cliff, and out of sight. He then promptly jumps aaaaall the way back up, and attributes the sudden burst of strength to a cactus that he landed on.
• Post-Script Season: Sort of. 48 cartoons were contracted for 1995-97, but more were made after that including Mike, Lu & Og, Kenny And The Chimp, King Crab: Space Crustacean, and the Big Pick shorts from 2000-02.
• Psycho Poodle: Subverted in No Smoking. Cerberus, a hellhound who is The Dragon and pet of the Red Guy, has the body and one head of a poodle. However, he shows hardly any malice, and seems like a Punch-Clock Villain more than anything else.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The opening theme. "WHAT! A! CARTOOOOOOOOON!"
• Quick Nip: In Seth MacFarlane's short "Larry and Steve", which served as a prototype for Family Guy, an airplane pilot who strongly resembles Glenn Quagmire in both appearance and voice lets a young boy take over piloting his plane while he goes to "take a wee nip of the creature."
• Real Men Cook: There's a story titled "The Kitchen Casanova" about a man cooking to impress a girl. Oblivious to the fact the wind is flipping the pages of his cookbook, he adds ingredients from several recipes and, to his surprise, she likes the final result albeit she only started eating out of pity.
• Rampage from a Nail: The lion in the second Yuckie Duck short "I'm On My Way" gets a tack stuck in his rear end.
• Sadist Teacher: Mr. Fitzgibbon in the short "Trevor in Journey to Sector 5-G". He deliberately tries to stump his students by coming up with extremely hard math problems and even withholds recess until they answer correctly.
• Say My Name: From "Dry Dry Drips": "EEELLLMOOOOOO!"
• Skewed Priorities: Captain Buzzy Cheaply puts getting his laundry done over rescuing his robot sidekick and repairing his ship.
• Slasher Smile:
  • The aforementioned psychotic Colonel Sanders Ghost from "Podunk Possum" wears a perpetual one while smashing eggs and delivering completely nonsensical catchphrases. Chickens are terrified of him for good reason.
  • Johnny from "Tales Of Worm Paranoia" manages an impressively demented and huge grin after his first Sanity Slippage.
• Southern-Fried Genius: In "Hillbilly Blue", Eustace talks and acts just like any other of the hillbilly characters, but he normally cannot stand stupidity, and apparently likes to talk about physics in his spare time.
• Spin-Off: Famously, the whole point of the block was to act as a starting point for future cartoons. Successful cases include Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, and Courage the Cowardly Dog (and, to a lesser extent, Family Guy and Codename: Kids Next Door).
• The Speechless: Shake & Flik. Though Shake often screams a lot. Even the opening doesn't have either of them saying "What! A! Cartoon!", instead has Flick's roar ("What!"), Shake's scream ("A!"), and Flick's belch ("Cartoon!").
• Surprisingly Super-Tough Thing: The short "Yuckie Duck in Short Orders" has the title character serve a steak that absolutely refused to be cut not matter what tool he used.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: How Shake destroys Flick's giant harp: first he smashes it with a catapult hammer, then he flattens it with a steamroller, and finally he blasts it with a lightning cannon before sweeping away the ashes. Unfortunately for him, Flick had jumped clear of the harp before he had brought in the first machine.
• Tastes Better Than It Looks: In "The Kitchen Casanova", a man attempts to cook a lovely dinner for his visiting girlfriend; however, a series of different comical mishaps in the kitchen result in every dish he tries to prepare getting ruined. Even attempting a salad ends in failure. Finally, he presents her with a gross-looking mound of mush consisting of various different animal parts (and presumably human as well). The man finally has an emotional breakdown, so the woman samples the dish out of sympathy, but she finds it to be tasty, much to his surprise. The more they eat, the more animalistic they become. They finish the dish and eat up the plates, silverware, and even the table.
• Theme Tune: There were two of them. The first was a heavy metal piece. Reruns of the show used the Cartoon Cartoon Fridays theme.
• Thick-Line Animation: Some of the cartoons utilized this design style, such as Boid n Woim, Sledgehammer O Possum, Pizza Boy in No Tip, Godfrey and Zeek, The Powerpuff Girls, and Dexter's Laboratory.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: The Colonel Sanders-expy ghost in "Podunk Possum" who keeps bothering the title character by trying to serve him fried chicken, scaring Podunk's chickens, and smash their eggs.
• Threatening Shark: Completely averted by Pfish in the Pfish and Chip shorts. He's a shark, but he's a friendly, clueless eccentric who has feet and is somehow able to live on land.
• To Serve Man: Gramps lampshade this when a character runs to Gramps with a book reading "To Serve Man" and exclaiming that it's a cookbook before he is hit with a golf club by Gramps, exclaiming, "That's been done!"
• Trauma Button Ending: "Pizza Boy in: No Tip" ends with the eponymous Pizza Boy ending up in jail after flipping out on a couple who refused to give him a tip after a long and dangerous delivery. After relating his tale of woe to the prison parson, the parson unwisely offers to give Pizza Boy a "tip", which sets him off again.
• Trick Bomb: The Pfish and Chip shorts have the title characters (mainly Chip) end up on the receiving end of several of these. "Short Pfuse" has a whole montage of ludicrous trick bombs, including a Muscle Bomb, Blues Bomb, Elvis Bomb, Fat Bomb, Ugly Bomb, Clown Bomb...
• Troll: The titular character of Sledgehammer O'Possum spends both of his shorts messing with someone for no good reason. He torments a dog trying to enjoy a drive in "Out and About" and he screws with a postal worker named Ethel for trying to evict him from a mailbox in "What's Goin' On Back There?"
• Urine Trouble: In "Swamp and Tad: Mission Imfrogable", Tad tries to spy on a dog by disguising himself as a fire hydrant. The plan backfires when the dog starts sniffing him and then raises his hind leg.
• Vanity Plate: used the first logo of Cartoon Network Studios on a colored background with information about studio ownership underneath, accompanied with the sound effects of the 1990s Hanna-Barbera Studios logo.
• Verbal Tic: Woim of "Boid n' Woim" has a tendency of making goofy exclamations in ingressive speech (i.e. speaking while inhaling instead of exhaling), typically some variation of "yay!"
• Visual Pun: In "Larry and Steve", Larry gets distracted while driving and Steve notices a sign saying "Fork Ahead", when he sees the road, there are two lanes to follow, and a giant fork between them.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In the Yuckie Duck cartoon "Short Orders", Yuckie vomits after sampling his soup, which he then declares "perfect".
• We Are Not Going Through That Again: In "Help?", after injuring his finger while doing a needlepoint, Jof goes through medical hell in an attempt to get treatment. At the end of the short, he's doing another needlepoint, only to end up injuring his finger again. But this time he outright refuses to even yell of pain, deciding to just remain home.
• With This Herring: In "Gramps", a grandfather tells his grandchildren a tale of how he supposedly saved the world from an alien invasion. The President asked for his help and told him to choose between door number 1 or door number 2. Had he chosen door number one, he'd have received several big weapons but he chose door number 2 and received his mule.