Retrospective: Ugly Americans as a Trigger for Cartoon Nostalgia

I've been watching quite a bit of Ugly Americans lately - namely, the whole first season thanks to its instant streaming on Netflix. Despite my epic promotions for the show last season and the one before, I never really watched more than a couple of episodes of it for journalism's sake; I didn't really have the time, and no DVR to record it like I do now. But now that the show is readily available, I've really gone to town on catching myself up on the Comedy Central horror comedy cartoon.

If you don't know much about the series, it's a very funny comedy about a social worker named Mark who tries to assimilate monsters into the culture of New York City; each episode tends to feature a different monster from legend (or just a creature the writers think up) and the problems that they face in a monstrous world with so many cultural differences. It's a social worker's nightmare but a horror buff's wet dream.

Ugly Americans is vulgar, dark, and grotesque, but it has a heart that keeps the show from becoming too cynical. Most episodes end with Mark drawing a parallel between the often chaotic events that transpire in the show to real-life situations social workers face; just like America, the fictional monster-city in Ugly Americans is a melting pot of different cultures, one that must empathize to succeed.

But what's really drawn my attention to the show is its resemblance to cartoon shows from the '90s, ones meant for kids that also threw a lot of subtle adult humor over the heads of naive children. I'm talking shows like Rocko's Modern Life, Ren & Stimpy, or Cow & Chicken, shows that weren't afraid to get a little messy and toe the line.

I grew up with these cartoons, and I loved them for what they were: often gross-out humor combined with likable characters. Rocko's Modern Life was a big part of my childhood, and I would tune in to Nick just to watch Rocko and Heffer cook up some crazy scheme. Many times, that meant depicting something gross, like an appendix that accompanied Rocko on a jaunt to the theme park or eyeballs bugging out of heads; the same was true of Ren and Stimpy, who would often fart, spit, or vomit to my approval. As a kid, these juvenile pranks were gross, but they were also hilarious, and they were edgy to garner my interest more so than shows today might.

Ugly Americans, though meant for adults, has that same type of cartoonish, gross-out humor. In one episode, Mark is forced to pull a newborn head out of a two-headed monster's neck; suffice to say that there's a lot of pus and milky fluid that accompanies the labor. It's so grotesque that it can only be funny, and Ugly Americans emphasizes the roles of horror in its comedy. The artwork is stylized similarly to '90s kids' cartoons, too, and it all just takes me back to a time when I used to crack up at jokes about flatulence and spleens. I still do today, just a little less publicly.

So if there's anyone out there who wants to get back to those days where kids' cartoons might just have some adult connotations, give Ugly Americans a spin. You might find that there's a resemblance to those old cartoons, mixed in with all of the blood, gore, and sexuality of a maturer comedy.