From The Flintstones to Arcane, there have been plenty of great animated TV shows over the past 60 years. Animated movies go back a century, but animation has also been a staple of television for more than half that time. These are the very best animated shows from each decade of the past 60 years.
7 1960s: The Flintstones
Hanna-Barbera dominated the animation industry in the 1960s. Throughout this decade, every kid’s Saturday morning belonged to Hanna-Barbera. The studio created such classic shows as Top Cat, Wacky Races, Space Ghost, The Jetsons, and The Yogi Bear Show. A lot of these shows are timeless and still hold up today, but the most iconic and influential cartoon of the ‘60s was The Flintstones (and it’s not even close).
The Flintstones was the first animated series to air on primetime television. It took the basic premise of The Honeymooners — a working-class married couple contending with the relatable foibles of modern life — and placed it in a fictional Stone Age setting. The series is deliberately anachronistic, with both dinosaurs and cookie-cutter homes. The Flintstones’ neighborhood in Bedrock is basically a 20th-century suburbia made of stone.
Fred Flintstone quickly became a pop-cultural icon, and was the template for every beloved cartoon dad from Homer Simpson to Peter Griffin to Randy Marsh. The Flintstones’ everyday situations make it universally relatable, but the anachronistic prehistoric setting gives the animation a visual style of its own. Despite its widespread influence, there’s still nothing else quite like it.
6 1970s: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!
Technically, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premiered in the 1960s. The first season started airing in 1969, but it ended in 1970. The second season also aired in 1970, and the third season jumped from CBS to ABC and aired in 1978. So, while it started in the ‘60s, it feels more like a ‘70s show — and it’s the best cartoon of that decade.
It’s a juicy premise: four meddling kids and their nosy dog travel around in their van, dubbed “The Mystery Machine,” and solve mysteries. They’re basically a group of teenage Sherlocks, if every case involved a Hound of the Baskervilles-type monster. It’s such a great premise — and they’re such lovable characters, each with their own quirks — that it’s sustained a media franchise for half a century.
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! marked a lot of kids’ introduction to the horror genre. The show is never overwhelmingly scary, but it plays on a lot of classic horror tropes, and for all the laughs there are along the way, each episode has a palpably eerie atmosphere, with a thick layer of fog draped over every spooky environment.
5 1980s: The Simpsons
The 1980s were a golden age of high-concept cartoons — Transformers, ThunderCats, The Real Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe — but in 1989, a grounded family sitcom came along and blew them all out of the water. The Simpsons originated as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show.
But it wasn’t long before Matt Groening’s yellow-hued creations got a primetime series of their own. For its first 10 seasons or so, The Simpsons was the funniest show on the air. It inspired a new generation of comedy writers and reshaped the entire genre. The Simpsons’ heyday remains unbeaten as the greatest TV comedy ever produced.
With its ingenious, pitch-perfect blend of highbrow and lowbrow humor, The Simpsons is a best-of-both-worlds comedy cocktail. It’s a show that will have a broad slapstick gag in one scene, then have the sharpest political satire on television in the next scene. And at the center of it all is a relatable family that feels real.
4 1990s: South Park
After The Simpsons opened the door for adult-oriented animated shows, Trey Parker and Matt Stone came along and kicked the door down. As soon as it hit the airwaves, South Park sparked controversy for its shock humor, its frank discussion of hot topics, and its depiction of eight-year-old children with potty mouths (in other words, an accurate depiction of eight-year-old children).
Within a couple of years, Parker and Stone had turned South Park into the perfect vehicle for topical satire. The crude cutout animation style means that it doesn’t take six months to animate an episode. The South Park team can write, record, and animate a new episode in just six days, so they can address current headlines as quickly as SNL or The Daily Show.
From King of the Hill to Batman: The Animated Series, there were plenty of great animated shows on the air in the ‘90s, but South Park is the only ‘90s cartoon that’s still just as relevant today as it was when it premiered. South Park utilizes a lot of vulgar, off-color humor, but it’s also the sharpest, most uncompromising satire on TV.
3 2000s: Avatar: The Last Airbender
At first glance, Avatar: The Last Airbender might appear to be a fantasy martial arts show for kids, but it goes so much deeper than that. It’s not just influenced by other cartoons and other action fantasy stories; it takes its cues from cultures from all over the world. It’s a rich cultural tapestry, handled with care and respect.
Throughout its three seasons, Avatar dealt with some really heavy themes. It touched on war, genocide, authoritarianism, political corruption, the class divide, and freedom of choice. Considering its primary audience was impressionable children, it was unheard of (and very admirable) that the series didn’t shy away from addressing these tough but important subjects.
2 2010s: BoJack Horseman
When adult-oriented animated series like The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy had been on the air for a couple of decades, the tropes of those shows had started to feel stale and predictable. To combat this formulaic familiarity, in the 2010s, a new wave of creators came in to reinvigorate the medium with subversive new shows.
Netflix led the charge with this animation revolution. F is for Family brought a period setting and a serialized narrative to the typical animated family sitcom. Big Mouth brought a refreshingly frank and shockingly graphic depiction of puberty to the coming-of-age genre. And BoJack Horseman used a cartoon world full of talking animals to explore the dark side of the soul.
BoJack might be an anthropomorphized horse, but he’s more recognizably human than most of the other characters on television. He’s flawed, depressed, angry, filled with self-loathing, struggling with addiction, and unable to maintain lasting relationships with other people. It’s heartbreaking to watch BoJack suffer, but inspiring to watch him try to overcome his difficulties and become a better person.
1 2020s: Arcane
There’s been some really great animation in the 2020s. Invincible is a brand-new take on the superhero genre, Long Story Short reinvented the family sitcom with its nonlinear narrative, and Blue Eye Samurai is a visually striking, emotionally rich masterpiece of action-packed genre storytelling. But the best animated show of the decade so far is Netflix’s steampunk series Arcane.
Set in the League of Legends universe, Arcane tells the thrilling story of two sisters who get swept up in a widespread conflict between their seedy, oppressed hometown and the utopian city looming over it. It’s a masterclass in worldbuilding, sci-fi storytelling, and gorgeous animation. Hailee Steinfeld and Ella Purnell anchor the series with two brilliant voice performances.