by Rollin Bishop

I really shouldn't be surprised that Cartoon Network's Cartoon Cartoons animated shorts program has seemingly, after years of silence, been unceremoniously dumped to a satellite YouTube channel. And yet I'm torn between despair and elation. If nothing else, at least people can finally see the shorts, but really my tone is closer to, "Not like this… Not like this."

If you're not intimately familiar (read: obsessed) with the saga like I am, a quick recap: In April 2021, Cartoon Network officially announced a new animated shorts program called Cartoon Cartoons, named (if not modeled) after the classic, iconic Cartoon Cartoons of the mid-to-late '90s. Cartoon Cartoons was effectively the collective name for Cartoon Network Originals, which included the likes of Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, and more. (This all traces back to the What a Cartoon! anthology with its short animated segments which effectively served as pilots for these shows.)

Fast forward to 2021, the company went on to announce various creators and names for shorts — "Hungy Ghost" from Jesse Moynihan and "The Good Boy Report" from Kasey Williams, "Scaredy Cat" from JJ Villard and "Accordions Geoffrey & Mary Melodica" from Louie Zong, just to name a few. It's not unreasonable to think Cartoon Network might have considered these as pilots of sorts to build from, depending on their reception. The next Dexter's Laboratory or The Powerpuff Girls could have been in there, or so it seemed at the time. But then…

Cartoon Cartoons - YouTube

New Cartoon Cartoons Shorts every Monday!

Nothing. For years. Complete radio silence continued after the announcements up until a surprise appearance at SDCC 2025 for a brief panel, and then finally, 11 days ago, the animated shorts mysteriously began to appear on YouTube. Nearly five years after the program was announced, people are now able to actually watch new Cartoon Cartoons. Even if it is on a random, somewhat-unrelated YouTube channel that's seemingly largely been buried. As far as I can tell, the official Cartoon Network social channels haven't even acknowledged its existence; the recent posts on its Instagram are all fan art and Fortnite.

In a way, I guess, the company never actually promised distribution or promotion. It only promised support and mentorship to "explore, develop and refine" ideas. In fact, it would appear that Cartoon Network never even actually promised to finish them given the language used. "Finished shorts have the potential to be globally distributed by WarnerMedia across a variety of platforms including linear broadcast through Cartoon Network, streaming through HBO Max, online and much more," the original press release states in part, emphasis mine.

It's also worth zooming out on the larger timeline here. The new Cartoon Cartoons? Announced on April 15, 2021. A month later on May 17, 2021, AT&T announced that WarnerMedia was becoming a standalone company after also merging with Discovery, which ultimately created Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022 and brought David Zaslav into the picture. (A million words could be penned on the ways that Zaslav has been detrimental to animation as a whole, but that's for another time.) And now? Now it seems like Warner Bros. Discovery will once again break into pieces with Netflix set to pick up a big chunk of it — which is still ultimately probably a better result than Paramount ending up with it.

All of this is just context for a classic problem: the new boss is uninterested in what the old boss was doing. All of that corporate turmoil almost certainly couldn't have been good for any of the Cartoon Cartoons shorts. There's every indication that a whole bunch of them were completed the same year it was announced, only to then sit on a shelf. Despite this, Cartoon Network continued to promote the shorts on social media for some time after the merger. Even now that the shorts have been relegated to a YouTube playlists, there's no indication that the creators were even notified that this was happening.

In fact, it's unclear exactly how many will even release at all — the playlist had initially included seven videos total but now includes 15. From all of the announcements and reveals from creators, there seems to have been somewhere between 20 and 30 shorts in the program, such as it was, overall. How many got made? Who knows. How many will Cartoon Network be sharing on the squints Warner Bros. TV YouTube channel? Who knows.

But for what looks to be several months, there will be a new Cartoon Cartoons short to watch on Mondays. It's not much, but I'll take it. Begrudgingly.