YMMV / Cow and Chicken

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Pork butts are an actual meal, although they don't resemble a human buttocks as they do in the show. In fact, it's a part of a pig's shoulder, rather than its rump.
• Awesome Music:
  • The "Ugliest Weenie" song.
  • Momma had a chicken! Momma had a cow! Dad was proud! He didn't care how!
  • The short piece of music that plays at an episode's Title Card. It will still be in your head years after you've watched an episode.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: This show had a number of them... hell, this series had entire episodes that fit into this category, such as:
  • "Intelligent Life?": Cow somehow builds a milk-powered rocketship out of cardboard boxes and metal trashcans, lands on a planet composed entirely of mud, meets Red Guy who claims to be an alien, brings her home where she's treated like a god, then later becomes a jean model... then Chicken turns off the TV and comments how stupid that show was.
  • Some of Flem and Earl's fake flashbacks and Imagine Spots from "Lost at Sea" are pretty... odd...
  • "Monster in the Closet": Cow befriends a monster hiding in her closet, who's invisible to everybody except her, though he's obviously not imaginary, because Mom and Dad eventually see him, and order Cow to banish him to the closet out of fear of him; in the end, Chicken finds him in another closet (even though he was invisible to Chicken as well) and they become pals after Cow finally dismisses him as a figment of her imagination.
• Demographically Inappropriate Humour: The show tended to utilize this often.
  • For example, Two of Cow's dolls are named Crabs and Piles. "Piles" is slang for hemorrhoids, while "crabs" is another term for pubic lice.
• Faux Symbolism: The red flag at the beginning of "Buffalo Gals" was a sign that the episode's content was going to go beyond even what Cow and Chicken normally gets away with.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the bumper short where Red challenges Cow and Chicken to a race, there's a Funny Background Event of the Hanna-Barbera building being demolished by a wrecking ball. This was around the time Hanna-Barbera was actually being dismantled, as it would be absorbed into Cartoon Network Studios and Warner Bros. Animation three years after this episode aired (Cow and Chicken is the second-to-last series to bear the studio's name).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Japanese dub got a really funny one if you know who're voicing both the Red Guy and Chicken and if you're a fan of Macross: The Red Guy is voiced by Katsumi Suzuki (aka Hayao Kakizaki, another fat guy): Poor Kakizaki possibly ended in hell after being Dropped a Bridge on Him in his own series and become a demon. Extra hilarity for Chicken's Japanese VA, Takumi Yamazaki (aka Isamu Alva Dyson) who was a Ace Pilot in his own series, and now he's a chicken, and as such, being unable to fly.
  • The gag of Mom and Dad only being two pairs of disembodied legs with no upper bodies? Pixar made that into an entire movie.
  • Cow's play, "The Ugliest Weenie", is about a wiener that is so ugly that a big human hand, which the wieners treat like a god, refuses to pick it up. In the end, however, the Ugliest Weenie learns that his ugliness was actually a blessing since all the other wieners were picked in order to be cooked and eaten. Several years later, an animated movie with a pretty similar premise came to be.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Chachi the Chewing Gum Seal. He might have turned from The Eeyore into an Ungrateful Bastard but when he tries to apologize to Cow, he gets stuck under the table and has to hear Cow and Chicken trash talk him for a month.
  • Chicken too, he may be rude, greedy, and abusive towards Cow, but you can see what he has to go through on a daily basis, he has to deal with an abnormal sister and two parents who are mentally-insane and other people who act like complete idiots and he's the Only Sane Man with common sense.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Hellooooo, it's meeeeee!!"
  • "FREEEEEEEEE TRAIIIILEEEEEEERR!!!!!"
  • "It says 'Eye Screem' on my truck, not 'Ice Cream'! Get it? Cause EYE SCREEM!!!"
  • "Dear Diary, you ain't never gonna believe what I am about to write down on yous."
  • "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you was my Grandma."
  • "Now I can die happy!"
  • After someone made an animation of Sonic and Tails doing Cow and Chicken's dance from the intro on a parody of the songs from the Friday Night Funkin' mod Vs Sonic.exe, it's become popular to make other characters, especially Sonic characters, do the dance.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Red Guy (as Rear-Admiral Floyd) crosses this in the episode "Part-Time Job" when he tries to cook Chicken alive for his chicken-on-a stick restaurant. Of course, given that the Red Guy is supposed to be Satan, it's possible that he's crossed this at least once before offscreen.
• One-Scene Wonder: Cow & Chicken's cameo in Ben 10: Omniverse.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Maxwell Atoms, creator of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, got his start on this show as a prop designer, eventually working his way up to a regular writer and storyboard artist. Many other staff members ended up migration over to his show, including David Feiss, who drew some layouts for the pilot.
  • Future prime-time animation superstar Seth MacFarlane, then a writer for Johnny Bravo, wrote for some of the season one episodes.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The show was accused of doing this to The Ren & Stimpy Show, though, unlike most cartoons that tried to be as gross and shocking as Ren and Stimpy, this show actually had some former animators and storyboard artists who worked on Ren and Stimpy (the John K. episodes that weren't from Adult Party Cartoon), meaning they had people who knew from experience how to write for such a show. John K. even called Cow and Chicken "the best drawn and animated cartoon of the 90s".
• Ugly Cute: Cow. The show bends over backwards to make her seem vulgar and disgusting, but she's such a Cheerful Child that it's easy to find her more adorable than anything else. Chicken also qualifies, less because of his behavior, and more because he's a fluffy little bird.
• Values Resonance:
  • The show contains very frequent gender-bending references (Pronoun Trouble, cross-dressing, inverted gender roles gonky femmes—including women with five o'clock shadows—and a whole episode about Chicken thinking he's a girl) and although these are are played for inherent absurdity, the jokes clearly lack malice and the characters are so casual and matter-of-fact about it that it comes across as acceptant towards potentially queer characters.
  • Sergeant Weenie Arms telling Chicken, Flem and Earl that "real men aren't afraid to play with sissy dolls!" might just be irony coming from this stereotypical Drill Sergeant Nasty, but it lines up with similar earnest messages one finds in later cartoons.
  • One episode has a Imagine Spot with Cow marrying both Flem and Earl and spending the rest of her life happy with them. It's similarly played as a joke, but obviously any person or culture that accepts polygamy would be very comfortable with the idea.

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