The AV Club just put out an alphabetized list of the best (in their view) animated TV shows, and it's already getting crucified in their comments section. Listicles are often hamstrung by this veneer of ultimate authority, and tends to be why I avoid the format. Or, to be more accurate since I've written over a hundred listicles here on GB, why I tend to stick to unordered "here's a bunch of notable suggestions" rather than "these are the best, in order" presentations.

Anyway, animated shows are the one thing I know most about after video games, so I figured I'd have a go too. Feel free to follow suit if you're a fellow fan of toons; it's not like I'm being particularly original here. (I'd love to see some more anime-focused lists, for example.)

A - Archer

I adore Archer. Adam Reed's been sharpening his comedy tools for years now with shows like Frisky Dingo and Sealab 2021 (both honorary mentions for this list), combining esoteric learned references with the sort of in-jokes, running gags and callbacks that made Arrested Development so much fun to watch in binges. The chemistry between the ensemble cast of the show is what makes it, with office drones as sharp and layered and funny as the glamorous field agents, though that's not to dismiss the exceptionally well directed action scenes that often take the stage between scenes where everyone's bickering about bear claws and ants and danger zones.

Honorary Mentions: Avatar: The Last Airbender (which deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for bridging the divide between western animation fans and anime fans), Aqua Teen Hunger Force (or whatever they're called these days), Adventure Time (this show keeps getting better, somehow), Azumanga Daioh (I wish I were a bird), Animaniacs (continuing where Tiny Toons left off, and Freakazoid would eventually follow).

B - Bucky O' Hare

Because I realize a lot of this list will be nostalgia picks, I am going back to check these 80s/90s toons just to make sure I'm not exaggerating their quality. Bucky O' Hare still holds up. It's essentially a proto-Star Fox, following a bunch of anthropomorphic critters as they take on the nebulously evil Toad Empire as the last defense of a beleaguered United Animal Federation. Great universe, great characters, great action and one of the better TMNT imitators to appear in that wave of copycats. Definitely better than Biker Mice from Mars, yeesh. It even had a decent NES licensed game.

Honorary Mentions: Beavis and Butthead (some great counter-culture animation when MTV could actually pull it off, and the only Mike Judge TV show I can stand); Batman: The Animated Series (the best known of the "Timmverse" DC adaptations with his typically striking/angular art style).

C - Clerks: The Animated Series

The sadly short-lived Clerks: The Animated Series took full advantage of the animated format to put Kevin Smith's apathetic store clerks through their paces, sending them on wild adventures often inspired by pop culture as much as their inane conversations in the original movie. The show also made plenty of meta "Duck Amuck" animation gags, where the second episode was a clip show that only had the first episode to draw from (specifically, a single gag based on the 1960s Batman serial). It was definitely a show ahead of its time and far more intelligent and less pandering than the Clerks movie sequel that would follow.

Honorary Mentions: Clone High (before the Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, Chris Miller and Phil Lord created this subversive Canadian highschool cartoon filled with clones of famous historical figures, and is still the funniest thing they've ever made); City Hunter (an action-packed anime that often played up the licentiousness of its titular private eye for comedy, but the guy could throw down when necessary); The Critic (a sharp and reference-heavy comedy based on the life of a pretentious NYC film critic, enhanced by the oddballs he bounces off); Cowboy Bebop (one of the best gateways to anime around, an effortlessly cool sci-fi show involving a pack of space bounty hunters and their various marks); China, IL (a trippy and usually violent parody of a college campus comedy told from the perspective of the staff, created by the guy who made that memorable "Wizard People, Dear Reader" commentary for the first Harry Potter movie).

D - Danger Mouse

Danger Mouse is an institution here in the UK, but it's still one of the most brilliantly subversive spy parodies ever. DM's a typically "on top of things" James Bond ersatz, but he's not necessarily bulletproof. His put-upon and often abducted assistant Penfold is a bit more relatable, serving as the audience surrogate in the bizarre and vaguely espionage-related adventures the pair are dropped into by their mumbling walrus boss.

Honorable Mentions: DuckTales (one of the handful of truly superlative Disney adventure serials of the late 80s/early 90s, following Scrooge McDuck and his nephews on various adventures); Dr Katz: Professional Therapist (featuring the deadpan charms of Jon Katz, an early H Jon Benjamin as his layabout son and a revolving door of contemporary comedians); Duckman: Private Dick/Family Man (pretty much the most 90s show ever, filled with subversive and satirical storylines regarding modern society); Darkwing Duck (another Disney adventure serial, this time based loosely on Batman, and like the third toon on this list on honorable mentions to have ducks in it); Dragon Half (really only a two-part OVA, Dragon Half is a comedy fantasy anime that skews closer to western spoof humor than most anime tend to).

E - El Hazard: The Magnificent World

There's not a whole lot of E shows, but El Hazard: The Magnificent World fortunately isn't some random thing I plucked out to fill a troublesome spot. An anime where a quartet of folk in a Japanese high school (including: a likeable but unremarkable protagonist; his bitter rival filled with ressentiment; the rival's entrepreneurial sister; and their souse of a history teacher) all end up in a fantastical realm and are thoroughly perplexed by their predicament. All are given mysterious powers, though some more useful than others, and they simply make the best of their situation (or are forced to crossdress for political reasons) and end up embroiled in a war between the insectoid Bugrom and the humans of El Hazard. The entire story is based on a causal loop involving the powerful ancient weapon of the Gods-slash-mysterious waif Ifurita. It's another fun adventure serial that has its moments of levity and drama (though, yeah, it has a few unfortunate elements of "harem anime" too. At least the hero eventually decides on one of his admirers).

F - Futurama

David X Cohen's and Matt Groening's love letter to B-movies and speculative sci-fi has had a rocky production run, at one point dying and coming back not unlike Mr Spock. Though not quite as brilliantly sharp as The Simpsons was in its heyday, Futurama regularly surprises with its clever satire and emotional core all the while being a goofy cartoon filled with weird space monsters and mad science. It's also secretly a workplace comedy, but don't tell anyone.

Honorable Mentions: Freakazoid (Freakazoid, along with The Tick, had fun tearing into what was then a golden age for animated silver age comic book adaptations, creating daft heroes, villains and stories in brief skits in much the same way as the Animaniacs); Frisky Dingo (the show that Adam Reed created before Archer, filled with the same sort of recurring gags and witty dialogue, involving a homicidal alien conqueror and a witless Bruce Wayne ersatz only half-determined to stop him. Would regularly jump off the rails in its second season).

G - The Adventures of the Gummi Bears

I've already discussed the Disney animation block of the late 80s, when someone at Disney saw the sorry state of Saturday morning TV animation, filled with awful Hanna Barbera reruns and lackluster toy commercials, and decided to inject four or five of the best animated serials of all time into that time slot to wrest the market away from the undeserving. The best, at least as far I'm concerned, was the entirely novel attempt to create a show around gummi bear candies. The bouncy and brightly colored ursine were reimagined as a secretive race of forest guardians, custodians of a great and technologically advanced civilization that preceded that of the (literal) Dark Ages humans, and the magical fantasy world - inspired largely by Dungeons and Dragons - was filled with surprises and material for episodes. It also created a great cartoon villain in Duke Igthorn, a despotic and egotistic former knight of the benevolent King Gregor, and his army of dim-witted but incredibly strong ogres. I'd love to say it was all the first-person dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder and the Infinity Engine games that got me into D&D, but really it was this show.

Honorable Mentions: Great Teacher Onizuka (an anime version of The Substitute, more or less, with a former street tough hero who regularly found irregular ways of reaching his students); GI Joe: A Real American Hero (while usually formulaic and laden with moral PSAs, the GI Joe cartoon was packed with memorable characters and some often bizarre storylines); Gargoyles (a smart show about ancient sentient statues and the rich industrialist who finds ways to exploit them, it's best remembered for its moody gothic visuals); Ghost Stories (a generic supernatural anime for school kids enhanced somewhat by an ADV gag dub "figuratively written by Reddit").

H - Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law

Part of the early wave of Adult Swim shows that repurposed old Cartoon Network properties for a more mature audience (at least in terms of physical age), Harvey Birdman is a retired superhero that made the lateral switch from fighting crime on the mean streets to upholding the law in court. Though usually capable enough to win cases, he's out of depth when it comes to his mercurial and depth-perception-challenged boss, hostile judges and prosecutors and his various other supervillain nemeses that still hold a grudge.

Honorable Mention: Home Movies (Loren Bouchard followed up Dr Katz (alongside eventual Metalocalypse showrunner Brendon Small) with this similarly witty dialogue-driven show about a bunch of grade schoolers and their movie creations).

I - Invader Zim

Really aren't too many choices for I, so I'll concur with the AV Club here and say Invader Zim was the best for this letter. Invader Zim, like Jhonen Vasquez's other works, is both dark and disturbing, though Invader Zim often plays up body horror and the unimaginable terrors beyond the veil of reality for laughs. Zim intends to enslave and rule the human race, but he's not making a very good job of it. However, the majority of the humans depicted in the show - slovenly, gross, selfish and profoundly stupid - aren't really worth ruling over either.

J - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors

Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors is pure Saturday morning cartoon hokum, about a roving band of heroic space mercenaries attempting to locate half of a locket while fighting biomechnical shapeshifters. It's the sort of bizarre, high-concept sci-fi cartoon that were all over the place in the 80s, alongside the likes of Silverhawks, Visionaries, BraveStarr and Galaxy Rangers. I don't miss the crass commercialism of 1980s cartoons, but I sure do miss their imagination.

Honorary Mentions: Justice League (another Timmverse superhero show and one that really gets deep into DC lore, especially concerning matters on the cosmic stage, which was usually the only way they could find foes that could stump all of the Earth's best heroes, including Superman); Jem and the Holograms (an updated Josie and the Pussycats with a sci-fi twist, it was one of several "cartoons for girls" that was better than any cootie-decrying schoolboy cared to admit. Too bad the modern MLP cartoon has the opposite problem).

K - Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor

While the "Kidou" (mobile) anime of choice was Kidou Senshi Gundam, I could never find a way into that series' intimidatingly expansive mythos. Patlabor is a relatively down-to-earth serial about policemen (and women) in a near-future Tokyo who employ bipedal mech suits (called Labor, as most are used for difficult construction work) to work the rare cases where criminals get their hands on Labors of their own. It's quite similar to Dominion Tank Police, just without quite so much flagrant sexual pandering and goofiness.

Honorary Mention: King Rollo (very much a show for tiny babies, King Rollo has some simple goodnatured charm to it and is like Gummi Bears in that it really invigorated my love of the fantasy "kings and dragons" genre early in life).

L - The Life and Times of Tim

A sort of animated Curb Your Enthusiasm style comedy of errors, where the wishy-washy and inconsiderate Tim is often thrust into untenable social situations and can only meekly protest the chaos that ensues. The show makes it clear that while Tim's kind of an asshole, he's never fully responsible for or deserving of the enormous faux pas he ends up involved in. The animation may be crude, but it was a fantastically funny and well-written show.

M - Monkey Dust

Though often a little too formulaic for its own good, something that seems to occur with most sketch shows, the darkly funny Monkey Dust employs numerous animators to create a set of recurring characters and skits that satirize the pretentious, the corrupt, moral crusaders, the egotistical and the easily misled as well as the generally crappy existence that is living in a modern UK. It's not for optimists.

Honorary Mentions: The Maxx (like Aeon Flux, part of the MTV animation crowd that went for something a little more cerebral and challenging. The Maxx is set in a fictional and metaphorical wild world of the mind, kinda, and can be a little hard to parse if you don't pay attention); The Mysterious Cities of Gold (a French-Japanese co-production about a trio of 16th century kids chasing the titular Incan legend, this adventure serial had a very enigmatic air to it due in part to its unusual parentage); Magical Witch Punie-Chan (another parody, this time of magical girl animes, the disarmingly cute yet entirely malevolent title character is something to behold when her hackles are raised).

N - Neon Genesis Evangelion

Gainax's trippy mecha anime, both an attempt to take the usual mech/kaiju formula into a weird new direction and a deconstruction of that same formula, is both heavy with religious symbolism and angst. It made for eye-opening viewing as a teenager, and I still kind of respect its unapologetically pessimistic tone, its well-choreographed action scenes and the outlandish concepts for its "Angel" monsters to this day. Seriously, introduce any angsty and emotionally sensitive teenager to Shinji Ikari and they'll be tossing a pigskin around in the backyard and talking about the new Chevrolet model's increased horsepower before the day's end.

O - O'Grady

Another Soup2nuts joint (the animation company set up by Tom Snyder, who created Dr Katz), albeit one far more focused on a younger audience than even Home Movies was, O'Grady is about a highschool where odd things just kind of happen due to an imperceptible force of weirdness and the students roll with it. Not quite as fun as Clone High and very much focused on an audience that are the same age as the characters, but it's another vehicle for Melissa Bardin Galsky and H Jon Benjamin's voice talents.

P - Paranoia Agent

The sadly departed Satoshi Kon left us with a eclectic group of some of the most thoughtful and thematically-rich anime movies ever made, and also with this animated series about a pre-teen, bat-wielding serial assaulter who may or may not be real. Each episode explores the backstory of one of his victims and the series later starts exploring the fallout of these attacks and how societal alienation, media sensationalism and psychological trauma can create a (literal, in this case) monster out of the smallest seed.

Honorary Mentions: Pinky and the Brain (a reference-heavy and always amusing cartoon about a pair of lab mice attempting to take over the world, usually foiled entirely accidentally. A spin-off of the excellent Animaniacs skits involving the same characters); Pokemon (an exceptionally long anime series based on the adventures of one Ash Ketchum, a young man who wants to be the greatest Pokemon master. Though built to shill the game and expand the popular franchise, it took on a life of its own and is probably the most accessible anime there is).

Q - Quick Draw McGraw

Though I'm loathe to include a Hanna Barbera cartoon, given how they held the entire animated genre to ransom in the 70s and early 80s with their poorly animated mass-produced junk, Quick Draw McGraw had at least an entertaining premise of a Wild West sheriff who was conveniently also his own horse. He's probably better known for his alter-ego, the Zorro-esque guitar-wielding El KaBong.

R - The Real Ghostbusters

There's a few great cartoons beginning with R, but my favorite has to be the Ghostbusters cartoon. The real one, that is. The animated setting made it easier to create all sorts of terrifying and imaginative spooks for the 'Busters to bust, and the show would often take unusual detours into other types of horror fiction, including a memorable episode centered around Cthulhu and the Lovecraft mythos. I was pleasantly surprised by the 2009 Ghostbusters game because it tried to bridge the Real Ghostbusters and movie universes together.

Honorary Mentions: ReBoot (one of the earliest CGI cartoons, set inside a digital world filled with early 90s computer references, that had a deeply involved narrative thread going on); Ren and Stimpy (John K's often ugly, often hyperactive goofball tales of an irritable chihuahua and his ever cheerful cat companion); Rocko's Modern Life (one of those early Nicktoons that got away with more adult material than most would think possible, and one of the many ways in which it was more intelligent than its peers).

S - The Simpsons

There really isn't any beating the Simpsons, if we're being honest with ourselves. That block between Seasons 3 and 10 (or 4 and 8, or whatever your particular demarcations may be) is simply the smartest, most trenchant and funniest material ever put to animation cells. That it still lumbers on as a shadow of what it once was is testament to just how game-changing those early seasons were.

Honorary Mentions: SeaLab 2021 (Adam Reed's first big gig, the continuing adventures of a poorly animated bunch of scientists conducting research at the bottom of the ocean, originally seen in the far more straightforward Sealab 2020. After a year, many have clearly turned insane); South Park (the venerable show that often relied on shock value, but was also considerably more intelligent and topical than most non-animated shows could be); Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (the off-beat talk show that begat an entire sub-genre of irreverent animation for older audiences with borrowed art assets, there was a time when Space Ghost was the coolest show on air); Superjail (the colorful and insane Superjail was always a visual (and visceral) treat); Samurai Pizza Cats (another ho-hum anime best known for its outrageous gag dub, repurposing the show to be a version of TMNT with far more one-liners and meta jokes).

T - The Trap Door

The Trap Door had a simple premise: don't open the Trap Door, as there's *something* down there, but the claymation show was perfect for kids who like their TV to have a gruesome and unnerving edge to it. It wasn't hard for imaginations to run wild when picturing the kind of monsters that lay below the eponymous portal, and the show also had a dry wit and an attention to detail, even if those details were often restricted to a bunch of animated creepy crawlies squirming around in the background.

Honorary Mentions: The Tick (a superhero parody that poked fun at the breadth of superhero shows around at the time, filled with great gag villains and other memorable goofs); Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the biggest thing in animation for a while, the TMNT cartoon was packed with action and surfer speak); Tiny Toon Adventures (the precursor to Animaniacs that borrowed liberally from their Looney Tunes ancestry and tried to modernize it far better than that Loonatics Unleashed show did); Tom and Jerry (a classic tale of a mouse and a cat that despises him, one of the first absurdly violent cartoons despite its venerable age); Trigun (an anime serial about a happy-go-lucky gunslinger with the largest bounty ever recorded on his head, due to being an incidental force of destruction wherever he goes. He's also an exceptionally skilled shootist, however, and the show delves deep into his backstory in later episodes).

U - Ulysses 31

Ulysses 31 repurposes Homer's Odyssey as the swashbuckling adventures of a dashing starship captain, who is forced to find his way out of a precarious region of space after he defies the Greek gods by destroying their cyclops (depicted as a colossal robotic beast busy devouring sacrifices). His crew are all suspended in a death-like sleep, and his only companions are his young son, an equally young alien girl he rescues from the cyclops and his son's sentient toy robot Nono. While unusual enough already, there's a very leisurely paced energy to the show that gives it the same kind of enigmatic and occasionally eerie atmosphere that the Mysterious Cities of Gold has. It's not always a lot of whiz-bang action, and its kind of hard to put into words just how affecting this tone is. It's a bit like other sci-fi stories that try to relay the profound sense of uneasy silence and existential terror that space travel involves. A little out there for a kid's cartoon, that's for sure.

V - The Venture Bros

Venture Bros is simply getting better and better as it continues to escape the elevator pitch origins of "what if Johnny Quest grew up and was psychologically scarred by the dangerous 'adventures' he had as a kid?" and nurtures an ever expanding universe of adventure serial heroes and villains in a world that's moved on from the black and white (figuratively speaking) adventures that used to be the norm. Most of the world's characters have either developed into costumed nervous wrecks filled with neuroses, or functioning adults who have tried to leave the lifestyle of superheroes, mummies, pirates, mad science experiments and the supernatural behind. While it continues to be a great deconstruction of the sort of animated adventure serials this list is already filled with, it's also got some of the best written dialogue and esoteric references this side of Archer.

W - Watership Down

I don't think I'll ever know just how much Watership Down affected me as a kid, as it's certainly not a cartoon for the squeamish. On the face of it, it's a tale about a warren of talking rabbits who decide to leave their home once one of them receives a psychic premonition that everything will be destroyed by fire and encroaching humans. It then follows this family of rabbits as they find a new warren, encountering all sorts of dangers and losing members along the way. Whether it's hungry raptors (that would be the bird kind, not the dinosaur kind), deranged farm dogs or despotic rabbit psychopaths, the series is fraught with the danger and ugliness of trying to survive when you're low on the food chain. Goddamn is it harrowing. Maybe wait until your kids hit the double digits before letting them watch it.

X - X-Men: The Animated Series

Even if it wasn't one of about three extant animated shows that begin with X, I'd still happily recommend the X-Men cartoon of the 1990s. It does a good job expounding on the comic's setting, developing all its major characters and delving into many of the comic's more famous arcs. It also does the 1990s thing of often making societal and environmental issues an episode's center. It's the Star Trek: The Next Generation to the Superfriends's Star Trek, in other words.

Y - Yu-Gi-Oh!

Is it cheating that I only consider Yu-Gi-Oh! worthwhile because of its excellent Abridged parody web-series? Though YouTube "Abridged" serials are a dime a dozen these days, LittleKuriboh's take on a world where every major conflict is decided on a mystical card game that's impossible for regular humans to understand or follow takes an already inherently hilarious premise and builds on it with recurring gags, snarky commentary and dumb meme jokes.

Z - Zoids

Ain't a whole lot of Z-stuff out there, so we'll go with an anime about giant robot dinosaurs. Even if the show's kind of generic and bad, you can't really go too far wrong with giant robot dinosaurs in my book.

Thanks for reading this list, and may there be giant robot dinosaurs in all your futures. Friendly ones, hopefully.