YMMV / What A Cartoon! Show

• Awesome Music
  • The hard rock opening and closing theme from the shorts' original run. That slightly-out-of-tune electric guitar lets you know right away that this is going to be wild and weird.
  • The variation of the Cartoon Cartoons theme used in reruns is pretty catchy, too.
• Older Than They Think: "Wind-Up Wolf" was originally devised by Tex Avery as a pitch presented to Hanna-Barbera for a potential series before his death in 1980. It was passed over in favor of Avery's The Kwicky Koala Show. With the What a Cartoon Show fifteen years later, Bill Hanna dusted off the unproduced pitch to make into a short for the series and directed it himself.
• One-Episode Wonder: While a couple of shorts got sequels, nearly every one that wasn't Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, The Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo or The Chicken from Outer Space became a one-shot cartoon, and everyone has their favorites.
• Nightmare Fuel: Johnny's Sanity Slippage in "Tales Of Worm Paranoia", capped off when his girlfriend Sally desperatly tries to talk him out of resorting to violence.
  Sally: Johnny, dont do it! You'll go to prison!!
  Johnny: *glass shatter sounds as Johnny's fragile sanity literally breaks* DON'T TOUCH MEEEE!!! CAN'T YOU SEE MY SOUL IS ON FIRE?!?!
  • In the same short, Johnny gets disfigured with the acid he was planning to use for his revenge. His scarred face is shown with a Gross-Up Close-Up.
• Tear Jerker: For as crazy as Mama Mia is in "Foe Paws" you can't help but feel sorry for her when she breaks down and starts singing in Italian.
• Values Dissonance: Hillbilly Blue features more shots of the Confederate flag than one might be comfortable seeing in a cartoon meant for young audiences after The New '10s, when the flag is now universally considered an image of white supremacy and any non-negative depictions of it are all but banned from American TV.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Some of the shorts (Such as Malcolm and Melvin and its sequel, Babe, he calls me by Ralph Bakshi) had plenty of adult content, such as suicide jokes and lots of suggestive moments, yet the show never got any content rating higher than "TV-Y7" and is considered a family show.
• The Woobie:
  • O Ratz from "Rat In A Hot Tin Can". All he wants to do is find a place to stay warm cause he's freezing, and he gets trampled, beaten and abused throughout the short. Although because of his bitter attitude, he can also be seen as a bit of a Jerkass Woobie, when he loses pretty much everything at the end of the episode, there's no denying he needs a good cuddle.
  • Johnny from "Tales of Worm Paranoia", who wants revenge on the human who trampled him, but only injures himself as a result. When he tries to apologize to the human, he gets crushed by the door as a result and ends up the Nervous Wreck we see at the beginning of the cartoon.

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