This episode explores ten of the strangest children's shows ever produced, spanning decades and continents. The list kicks off with Boohbah, a show where five faceless, gumdrop-shaped creatures communicate through squeaks and fart clouds in a glowing white void, designed to encourage physical movement but feeling more like a cult induction video. Next is LazyTown, an Icelandic creation where a villain in a purple velour jumpsuit is erotically obsessed with lethargy, contrasted with a relentlessly earnest acrobatic hero who eats CGI apples. The 1985 claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain makes the list for its infamous "Mysterious Stranger" sequence, where a polite Satan casually destroys a miniature civilization while explaining nihilism to children. Japan's Inai Inai Baa features a deeply unsettling dog puppet and psychedelic musical sequences with a floating cosmic entity. The East German The Singing Ringing Tree is a fairy tale with an aggressively unlikable princess, a sinister dwarf, and sickly color grading that gave British children nightmares for years. The episode also covers the fictional Candle Cove phenomenon, which created false memories in viewers, the Teletubbies spin-off Tinky Winky's Magic Bag, and the Canadian French-teaching show Telefrancais, which features a talking pineapple with sunglasses. The list concludes with the surreal claymation of The Amazing Adventures of Morph and the abstract, sensory overload of The Hoobs.
#3616: 10 Strangest Kids' Shows Ever Made
From fart-powered blobs to a claymation Satan, these kids' shows will make you question every decision that led to them.
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New to the show? Start here#3616: 10 Strangest Kids' Shows Ever Made
Daniel sent us this one — he wants ten of the strangest children's shows ever produced, anywhere in the world. And he's been on a bit of a kids' TV kick lately, so this feels like the logical endpoint. Not the worst, not the most controversial, just... the ones that make you tilt your head and wonder what series of decisions led to their existence.
I love this prompt because "strangest" is doing a lot of work. Are we talking conceptually strange, visually strange, existentially strange? Because I've got candidates in all three categories.
All of the above. If it makes a parent walk into the room and just stop, that's the metric.
I've got my list. You've got yours?
And I suspect there's going to be overlap, but let's see. You want to go first, or should I?
I'll start. Number one — and this is the one I think we'll both have — Boohbah.
Of course we both have Boohbah.
Boohbah aired from two thousand three to two thousand six, created by Anne Wood, the same woman who gave us Teletubbies. But where Teletubbies had a kind of gentle, pastoral logic to its weirdness, Boohbah is just... Five fuzzy, gumdrop-shaped creatures with no faces, no mouths, no discernible personalities. They live in a glowing white void. They communicate entirely through squeaks and farts.
We have to talk about the farts.
The show's central mechanic is that the Boohbahs store up "fart energy" by wiggling around, and then release it in a big glowing cloud that transports them somewhere else. This is canon. This is not subtext.
The fart cloud is presented with complete sincerity. There's no wink. No "isn't this silly." It's just... this is how travel works in the Boohbah universe.
What gets me is the pacing. A single Boohbah exercise sequence can last two full minutes. Nothing happens except a glowing blob slowly bending over. It's hypnotic in a way that verges on psychological experiment. I read somewhere that Anne Wood explicitly designed it to encourage physical movement in children watching at home — they were supposed to mimic the Boohbahs — but the result is something that feels like a cult induction video.
"Cult induction video" is exactly right. The void, the repetition, the non-verbal chanting. If you walked in on someone watching Boohbah with no context, you would assume they were being reprogrammed.
Then there's the Storypeople segment — live-action interludes with these silent, brightly-dressed characters who do things like repeatedly drop a stack of cushions or spin a giant top. It's the television equivalent of a dream where you can't move.
I'd argue Boohbah is the platonic ideal of strange children's programming because it's not trying to be weird. It just is. The weirdness is structural, not decorative.
Alright, your turn.
Number two — and I don't know if this made your list — is Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
Wait, that's not a children's show.
It's not. But it's about a fictional children's show that was so strange it became the thing itself. I'm disqualifying myself, aren't I.
We're doing actual children's programming. Darkplace is a parody of bad eighties television, and it aired at ten PM on Channel Four. The children were asleep.
Fine, struck from the record. Let me replace it with something real: LazyTown.
I wouldn't have pegged LazyTown as strange.
A show where the villain is a man in a purple velour jumpsuit who lives in an underground lair and is persistently, erotically obsessed with lethargy? Robbie Rotten is a cabaret performance artist trapped in a children's show. The entire aesthetic is aggressively saturated — the colors don't exist in nature. And the mayor has a cat puppet on his head that's supposed to be hair.
When you put it that way.
The show is Icelandic in origin, created by Magnús Scheving, who also plays Sportacus — a man whose entire identity is doing flips and eating what I can only describe as CGI apples. The contrast between Sportacus's almost unsettling earnestness and Robbie Rotten's camp decadence creates a tension that feels like it belongs in a different genre entirely.
The songs do slap, though.
"You Are a Pirate" is genuinely good. But that almost makes it stranger — this deeply odd show had legitimate musical talent behind it. It's like finding out that a fever dream was directed by someone with a film degree.
Okay, number three. And this one I think is under-discussed: The Adventures of Mark Twain, the nineteen eighty-five claymation film that aired as a TV special. Not a series, but it was marketed to children and it contains what is arguably the most existentially disturbing sequence in all of kids' media.
The Mysterious Stranger.
The Mysterious Stranger. Based on Twain's unfinished novella, this sequence features Satan — an angel named Satan, explicitly — showing children a miniature civilization he's created, only to casually destroy it and declare that life itself is meaningless. Quote: "Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you. And you are but a thought.
I saw this as a child and I can confirm it rewired something.
The film was directed by Will Vinton, the father of modern claymation — he coined the term "Claymation" — and it's technically extraordinary. But the decision to include a scene where a child watches hundreds of tiny clay people scream and die while Satan explains the void... for a children's film? In nineteen eighty-five? This wasn't some art-house experiment. This was in video stores. Kids rented it thinking they were getting a fun Twain adaptation.
The Satan character is voiced with this calm, almost gentle detachment. He's not cackling. He's not a villain in the traditional sense. He's just... matter-of-factly ending worlds while explaining nihilism to children. It's the tonal dissonance that makes it so unsettling. If he were obviously evil, you could dismiss it. But he's reasonable. He's polite. He's showing them something interesting.
The visuals in that sequence — the figures are these rough, half-formed clay people who don't quite have faces. When they die, they just crumble. It's not gory, but it's somehow worse. It's the banality of it.
That film also has sequences where Mark Twain himself pilots a flying riverboat through space. So the whole thing is tonally all over the place. But nobody remembers the riverboat. Everyone remembers Satan.
You want to go?
Number four — and I'm curious if you've seen this one — is Inai Inai Baa from Japan.
I've only seen clips. But yes, strange in a very specific way.
Inai Inai Baa — the title is basically Japanese peekaboo — has been running since nineteen ninety-six on NHK. It's a show for very young children, infants and toddlers. And the central character is a dog puppet named Wan Wan who is, by any objective measure, deeply unsettling to look at. He's got these enormous, glassy eyes and a fixed expression that reads as permanent existential alarm.
The Japanese children's show aesthetic is its own category of strangeness, because the cultural assumptions about what's comforting to a child are different. What reads as creepy to a Western audience is just...
Right, but even within that context, Inai Inai Baa has moments that feel untethered. There's a character named U-tan who is... I want to say a sort of cosmic entity? A floating, singing presence? And the show will cut from Wan Wan doing something mundane to these abstract, almost psychedelic musical sequences with U-tan that feel like they were designed by someone who just discovered After Effects and also has a philosophy degree.
The thing about Japanese children's programming is that it doesn't have the same guardrails against abstraction that Western shows do. There's an assumption that very young children can process non-narrative, sensory experiences without being frightened. And sometimes that's true, and sometimes you get a segment where a floating neon entity chants at you for three minutes.
Inai Inai Baa is beloved in Japan. It's not a failed show. It's been on the air for decades. But if you show it to someone with no context, their first reaction is almost always discomfort. And I think that's a good litmus test for this list.
And I'm going to bring up something from the UK that I think qualifies: The Singing Ringing Tree.
Oh, that's a deep cut.
Nineteen fifty-seven East German film, dubbed into English and broadcast by the BBC in the sixties as a children's serial. It's a fairy tale, technically — a prince tries to win the hand of a princess by finding the Singing Ringing Tree. But the execution is what makes it strange. The princess is played as deliberately, aggressively unlikable. When she's cursed, she becomes frightening — her makeup, the way she moves. The prince has to win her love, and she's just awful to him throughout.
The dwarf who lives in the tree, who is this malevolent trickster figure played with absolute commitment by an actor in prosthetics that fall squarely into the uncanny valley. He's not funny. He's not cute. He's sinister in a way that feels aimed at adults.
The BBC received complaints about it for years. Parents said their children were having nightmares. And the BBC kept airing it anyway, because it was one of those things where they'd paid for the rights and weren't going to waste them.
The color grading is also worth mentioning. It was shot on Agfacolor, the East German film stock, which has this particular quality — the colors are simultaneously vivid and slightly wrong. Reds are too red. Greens are almost sickly. The whole thing looks like a painting in a gallery you're not supposed to be in.
The Singing Ringing Tree is a good example of strangeness through cultural and temporal distance. It wasn't designed to be strange — it was a sincere adaptation of a folk tale, made by people who had a very different visual vocabulary than what British children were used to. But the result, dropped into sixties Britain, was disorienting.
Number six is Candle Cove.
Hear me out.
Candle Cove is a creepypasta. It's not real. It's a fictional story about a fictional children's show, published online in two thousand nine by Kris Straub. You cannot put a fictional show on a list of real strange shows.
I know it's not real. But here's why I'm including it anyway — Candle Cove has become so culturally embedded that people misremember it as real. There are documented cases of individuals claiming they watched it as children. The creepypasta was so effective at mimicking the aesthetic of actual low-budget seventies children's programming that it created false memories.
That's not the same as it being a real show.
It's not. But the phenomenon itself is strange. A fictional show that convinced people it existed. The descriptions — the puppet pirate ship, the screaming, the static — they're so specific and so perfectly calibrated to evoke the feeling of half-remembered childhood television that the line between fiction and memory blurred. I'd argue that's worth noting, even if we disqualify it from the official list.
Noted and disqualified. Let me replace it with a real one: Telefrancais.
Telefrancais was a Canadian educational series that ran from nineteen eighty-four to nineteen eighty-six, designed to teach French to English-speaking students. And the central character is a talking pineapple named Ananas. Piloted by sunglasses. A pineapple with sunglasses. And the pineapple speaks with this deep, unsettling voice, and it just... stands there, on a table, while children interact with it.
The sunglasses are doing a lot of work. Without the sunglasses, it's just a pineapple. With the sunglasses, it's a pineapple who's seen things.
The show also features a troupe of skeleton puppets that dance and sing. The skeletons are not explained. They're just there. One of them plays the saxophone. It's educational television produced on what was clearly a budget of about forty dollars and a dream, and the result is something that feels like it was beamed in from an alternate dimension where pineapples are our overlords.
Canadian children's television of that era is a rich vein of strangeness. The budgetary constraints combined with the educational mandates produced shows that were simultaneously earnest and deeply, deeply odd. There's no cynicism in Telefrancais. Everyone involved was trying to make a good French-teaching show. They just happened to land on "let's make the pineapple the star.
The pineapple became iconic. Canadians of a certain age will still reference Ananas. It worked, in the sense that people remember it. Whether they learned any French is a separate question.
I'm going to Israel for this one, since that's home base.
I was wondering if you'd bring that up.
Hapishpesh — the name is a nonsense word — aired on Israeli Educational Television in the late eighties and early nineties. It was a collection of short segments with no narrative connective tissue whatsoever. One segment would be a man in an apartment doing something mundane, then suddenly there's a giant talking shoe. Then cut to an animated sequence with abstract shapes. Then back to the man, who is now wearing a different hat.
It sounds like channel-surfing as a show.
That's exactly what it was. And the production values were so low that it looped back around to being surreal. The man — played by an actor named Shlomo Bar-Aba, who later became one of Israel's most respected comedians — performed everything with this dead-eyed commitment that made it impossible to tell if the show was for children or was some kind of elaborate performance art piece that had been mislabeled.
Was it popular?
Israeli kids loved it, partly because it was one of the only things on, and partly because children are more receptive to non-narrative weirdness than adults give them credit for. But if you watch it now, it feels like something David Lynch might have made if he'd been given a zero-budget Israeli children's slot and told to fill thirty minutes.
And I'm going to go with something more recent: Don't Hug Me I'm Scared.
Another one that's borderline — is it for children?
This is the debate. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared started as a web series in twenty eleven, created by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. It looks exactly like a children's educational puppet show — bright colors, felt puppets, singalong songs about creativity and time and love. But each episode gradually descends into body horror and existential dread. The first episode starts with a cheerful song about being creative, and by the end there's raw meat, dancing organs, and the puppets are losing their minds.
It was eventually picked up by Channel Four as a proper TV series, and that's where the question of audience gets complicated. It aired late. It's clearly not for children. But it uses the aesthetic language of children's television so precisely that it functions as a kind of commentary on the genre itself.
Children do find it. They always do. The YouTube algorithm doesn't distinguish between "looks like a kids' show" and "is a kids' show." There was a whole wave of parents discovering their seven-year-olds watching Don't Hug Me I'm Scared because it auto-played after something innocent.
The song about time is the one that gets me. "Time is a tool you can put on the wall or wear it on your wrist. The past is far behind us, the future doesn't exist." Set to a cheerful melody, with a talking clock that has human teeth. It's brilliant as a piece of surrealist horror. But a child stumbling onto it would be deeply confused.
I think it qualifies for this list precisely because it occupies the uncanny valley between children's television and adult horror. It's a show that understands the grammar of kids' TV so well that it can weaponize it. The way the puppets' eyes slowly widen. The way the songs never resolve. The way the sets gradually decay. It's the strangest thing Channel Four has aired in years, and that's saying something.
I'm going to France for this one: Téléchat.
I don't know this one.
Téléchat aired from nineteen eighty-three to nineteen eighty-six. The premise is that the news is delivered by household objects. The anchor is a cat-shaped telephone — that's Téléchat, literally "TV cat" — and the reporters are things like a pair of glasses, a broom, a shoe. They conduct interviews. They report on events. And everything is played completely straight.
It's a parody of news broadcasts, but with sentient objects.
Yes, but the parody is so deadpan that it reads as surrealism. The objects don't acknowledge that they're objects. The broom reports on a political scandal with the same gravitas as a human journalist. The shoe does field reporting. And the cat-telephone hybrid that anchors the whole thing has this plastic, unmoving face that stares directly into the camera while delivering headlines.
Created by who?
Henri Xhonneux and Roland Topor. Topor was a founding member of the Panic Movement, an absurdist collective that also included Alejandro Jodorowsky. So this wasn't someone who stumbled into strangeness — this was a deliberate surrealist making children's television.
That explains a lot. Topor also co-wrote The Tenant with Roman Polanski and did the art design for Fantastic Planet. The man had a vision, and that vision was deeply unsettling.
Téléchat is what happens when you give an actual surrealist a children's TV slot and say "go ahead." The result is a show that French children accepted as normal but that, viewed from outside, looks like a transmission from a civilization where objects gained sentience and decided to start a cable news network.
And I'm saving the one that I think takes the crown for this. Let me make the case for Adventure Time.
I was wondering when you'd get there.
Adventure Time ran from twenty ten to twenty eighteen on Cartoon Network, created by Pendleton Ward. And I know it's popular. I know it's beloved. I know it won Emmys. But I want to argue that its popularity has obscured how, foundationally strange it is.
Make the case.
The show takes place in the Land of Ooo, which is explicitly a post-apocalyptic Earth. The candy people are the mutated remnants of a nuclear war. The Ice King is a human antiquarian who was driven insane by a magical crown. There's an episode where Finn meets the Lich, an embodiment of nuclear annihilation, and the Lich gives a monologue about the heat death of the universe. This aired on Cartoon Network at four in the afternoon.
The Lich is voiced by Ron Perlman, and his speeches are written with genuine existential weight. "Before there was time, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing, there were monsters." That's not a joke. That's not a parody. That's cosmic horror delivered directly to eight-year-olds.
The show treats its own lore with complete seriousness. There's an episode called "Hall of Egress" where Finn is trapped in a time loop where he keeps trying to escape a cave, and every time he fails he has to start over, and the episode never explains what's happening. It just ends. It's a meditation on failure and perseverance that happens to feature a boy in a bear hat.
The episode "I Remember You" — where the Ice King's backstory is revealed through his old journals, and you realize he was once a normal man who lost everything, including his own identity, to the crown — is one of the most affecting pieces of television I've ever seen. And it's a children's cartoon about a blue man who kidnaps princesses.
Adventure Time is strange not because it's obscure or low-budget or culturally distant. It's strange because it smuggled profound existential and philosophical content into a brightly-colored cartoon and somehow made it work. The show has an episode about reincarnation. It has an episode about the nature of consciousness. It has an episode where the main character meets the literal embodiment of death and plays him in a musical duel. And none of this is treated as a joke.
The musical duel with Death is a direct reference to the folk song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," but played completely straight. Finn challenges Death to a music battle to save a friend's soul. Death is depicted as a chill, patient figure who's just doing his job. It's bizarre and beautiful and it aired between commercials for sugary cereal.
That's what makes Adventure Time the strangest successful children's show ever made. It wasn't a cult oddity. It was a massive hit. It ran for ten seasons. It spawned spin-offs. Millions of children watched it. And those children absorbed a worldview that includes the heat death of the universe, the mutability of identity, and the idea that even cosmic horror can be faced with kindness and a good song.
I think that's a strong closer. But I want to add one more, because we've been focused on the West and Japan, and there's a whole world of strange children's television out there. So let me throw in number eleven, as a bonus: Mighty Little Bheem from India.
The Netflix show?
And I know it's not obscure — it's one of Netflix's most-watched children's shows globally. But the premise is strange in a way that I think gets overlooked. The show is about a toddler with supernatural strength. He can't talk. There's no dialogue. It's entirely visual, following this impossibly strong baby as he wanders through an Indian village causing chaos and occasionally solving problems through sheer physical force.
It's basically a silent film about a baby demigod.
And the show's global success — it's been watched in over a hundred and ninety countries — means that millions of children worldwide are being exposed to an entirely wordless narrative about a super-strong Indian toddler. The cultural specificity combined with the complete absence of language creates something that's simultaneously deeply rooted and universally accessible. And that's strange. That's a strange thing to exist at this scale.
The animation style is also worth noting. It's lush, almost painterly. The backgrounds are detailed in a way that most preschool animation isn't. And the baby's expressions carry the entire narrative. It's a show that trusts children to follow visual storytelling without verbal hand-holding, which is rarer than it should be.
The physics are deliberately cartoonish in a way that feels like classic Looney Tunes but filtered through a very specific Indian aesthetic. Mighty Little Bheem doesn't look like anything else on the platform. It carved out a space that nobody knew existed.
Alright, so our list. Boohbah, LazyTown, The Adventures of Mark Twain, Inai Inai Baa, The Singing Ringing Tree, Telefrancais, Hapishpesh, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Téléchat, Adventure Time, and Mighty Little Bheem. That's eleven, but Candle Cove got disqualified, so we're at ten plus a bonus.
I'll take it. And what's interesting to me is the through-line. The shows that read as strangest are almost never the ones that set out to be weird. They're the ones where someone had a very specific, sincere vision and either didn't notice or didn't care that the result was deeply odd.
The sincerity is key. Boohbah is sincere. Téléchat is sincere — Topor wasn't mocking children's television, he was making the children's television he wanted to make. Adventure Time is sincere to the point of vulnerability. The strangeness emerges from commitment, not from irony.
The ironic strange shows — the ones that wink at the audience — don't land the same way. They date faster. They feel like they're embarrassed to be children's television, and children can tell when you're embarrassed.
There's a lesson in that for anyone making things for kids. Don't condescend. Don't wink. If you're going to make a show about a pineapple who teaches French, commit to the pineapple. If you're going to make a show about a post-apocalyptic candy kingdom, commit to the Lich monologue about the void.
Children have a much higher tolerance for strangeness than adults assume. They don't need everything explained. They don't need the edges sanded off. Some of the shows we listed are frightening in places, and kids watched them anyway. They processed the fear. They integrated it. That's part of what art does for us.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: A sixth-century burial site on Russia's Yamal Peninsula contained preserved textile fragments embedded with dust particles whose isotopic signature matches loess deposits from the Taklamakan Desert in western China — meaning a dust storm carried those particles over two thousand miles before they settled into the fabric of someone's burial shroud.
Hilbert: A sixth-century burial site on Russia's Yamal Peninsula contained preserved textile fragments embedded with dust particles whose isotopic signature matches loess deposits from the Taklamakan Desert in western China — meaning a dust storm carried those particles over two thousand miles before they settled into the fabric of someone's burial shroud.
Someone was buried in a garment that had, essentially, been seasoned by a dust storm from the other side of Asia.
The Earth's atmosphere just casually FedExing particulate matter across a continent. Thank you, Hilbert.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the show running and for facts that make you reconsider the concept of distance. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps other people find the show. We're back next week.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.