Why ‘Chowder’ Is Cartoon Network’s Most Underrated Modern Classic

In the decade after its debut, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants undeniably changed the landscape of American cartoons. On top of the series’ likably endearing and marketable lead, the Nicktoon’s unique out-of-the-box approach to cartoon comedy through mixed-media visual gags and quotable non-sequiturs have made it a cornerstone in the funny bones of generations ever since, essentially becoming as influential a comedy series as The Simpsons.

For years following SpongeBob, major networks were vying to recreate the “secret formula” of SpongeBob’s appeal by essentially going back to the Hanna-Barbera/Looney Tunes approach of classically character-based cartooning. The 2000s saw a push for series to have basic premise and madcap cast of characters that could reliably generate character-driven situation comedies with a bizarre and overall zany sensibility. While Cartoon Network, one of Nickelodeon’s chief competitors in children’s animation, had made their attempts at creating the next SpongeBob with series like Camp Lazlo and My Gym Partner’s a Monkey, 2007’s Chowder proved not only to be the most-worthy successor to the SpongeBob brand of comedy, but an evolution of it.

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Created by former Spongebob and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy storyboard artist C.H. Greenblatt, the series follows the adventures of young apprentice Chowder, voiced by Nicky Jones, as he learns the ways of the kitchen at the foot of his mustachioed cooking master Mung Daal, played by Dwight Schultz. A pseudo-workplace comedy/educational show, each episode follows Chowder as he learns to help Mung craft a new fantastical dish for his catering company in the culinary metropolis of Marzipan City, where food is omnipresent in nearly every aspect of everyday life and even comes to life. Rounding out the cast is the musclebound rock monster janitor Schnitzel (John DiMaggio), Mung’s dowdy pixie sprite wife Truffles (Tara Strong) and a wooly mammoth fruit monger named Gazpacho (Dana Snyder). Among the series’ stylistic inspirations of Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson, Chowder owes a lot of its identity to the art of animation itself and its classically comedic roots in Tex Avery and the Looney Tunes.

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Chowder’s greatest strength is in how wildly limitless its scope is in practically every aspect. Along with the show’s wildly elastic and expressive animation, the world of Marzipan City and the series’ imaginative approach to cooking leave itself open to be painted in a broad visual and conceptual brush of stories and settings that the characters must embark on to complete an order. Ingredients and dishes have fantastically punny names and magical properties that turn an everyday recipe into an adventure. Not only that, the series is not bound by any sense of logic or consistency, operating on a joyously fluid reality and childlike spontaneity to ensure that each episode and joke gets the biggest laugh possible from the viewer. Every visual flourish and line of dialogue is delivered in the service of being funny.

More than arguably any other Cartoon Network series of its era, comedy is the driving force behind everything Chowder puts fourth. Near the dawn of series like Adventure Time, Steven Universe and Regular Show that sparked a revolution of infusing cartoons with long-form dramatic storytelling and character insight, Chowder solely aimed to elicit big laughs in the cartoon tradition. While not short on moments with sincerity in its characters, Chowder’s first order of business is to be silly by employing insane facial expressions and relentless wordplay. The work put in by Greenblatt and company operated on the belief that cartoons should be fun and limited only by their own sense of humor as they utilized every medium of animation at their disposal, from puppets and stop-motion, to CGI and even live-action.

In a word, the series’ brand of comedy is unexpectedly meta. Like SpongeBob, the greatest laughs Chowder is able to achieve are through an assortment of verbal non-sequiturs and mixed media cutaway gags, but what makes Chowder especially funny is in how it utilizes these comedic elements and further animation techniques in the service of reality-bending meta-humor. Chowder’s bread-and-butter is in how self-aware its comedy is in openly acknowledging its very nature as a TV cartoon. An average episode will make casual reference to how the characters knowingly participate in an 11-minute episode format and that they reside in a goofy kids’ show, commenting on things such as expensive animation costs and diegetic voiceover. Animation tropes and production lingo will work its way into the story to poke holes in the plot and even break the fourth wall by speaking directly to the audience. One episode famously presented the dilemma of the show running out of an animation budget and showed the voice cast in live-action running a car wash to raise funds to get the cartoon’s animation back. While Chowder is far from the only series to utilize meta-humor, the extent to which the veil is broken and how the series does so make it charmingly post-modern for a Cartoon Network show.

Cut from the same cloth as SpongeBob and even featuring some of the same crew, Chowder’s comedy aimed further than to be another SpongeBob wannabe and became a modern Cartoon Network hit, if even for only a moment. Despite the show’s popularity, the series was abruptly canceled in 2009 after a change of executive leadership at the network wanted to focus less on cartoons and more on live-action variety programming, cutting its run shorter than most of the Cartoon Network hits that came before and after. While it does have its fans, Chowder has yet to achieve the level of nostalgic reverence, cult fandom or even second-life in internet meme culture that the shows of its era have achieved like Regular Show or The Amazing World of Gumball.

Chowder marked one of the last breaths of an era for Cartoon Network. Cartoons in the classic Looney Tunes tradition have been equated to freeform jazz in how elastically conceptual and fluidly visual its attempts at comedy were from moment-to-moment. Chowder’s board-driven approach to gag-focused cartoon comedy runs along the same lines as the golden age of animation, striving to get the biggest possible laugh in any given shot through character and dialogue-based jokes. While not officially under the original banner of Cartoon Cartoons, Chowder’s off-the-wall animated antics and meta humor made it one of the network’s most overtly cartoony series ever.