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Description
You are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, and don't forget: you are stupid

UPDATE ON 3/25/2023: I randomly found the incentive to write a full description-- maybe it's because in due time I'll be doing a PPG scorecard, but I don't think I'll tackle everything in-depth because Dexter's Laboratory can easily be summed up as S1-2 are good, and S3-4 are bad. There's a bit more to it than that, though nothing truly worth mentioning-- it's going to be one of my briefer and less in-depth reviews.

HISTORY: I really loved Dexter's Lab as a kid, it was one of my favorite things to watch late at night between 2011-2014, and literally everything I saw came from S1-2. The only episodes from S3-4 that I saw were the Wacky Races episode and... oh wait, that's it. I guess they may have played the S3 shorts during breaks, but rewatching them didn't bring back any memories. I never felt incentivized to rewatch this show, in spite of my positive thoughts on it, and the only reason why I ended up doing this scorecard was because I happened to binge it with several friends via a Discord stream. What I initially did was watch S3-4 separately as a part of a deal with and then it just-so-happened that some others were streaming this show in a Discord channel, and I watched all of S1 and most of S2 with them in late 2020. They ended up finishing everything without me because of our timezone differences, though I did eventually cover everything I missed by August 2021. I ended up enjoying my watch all the way through, as it was a nice trip down memory lane.

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON DEXTER'S LABORATORY: I decided to gloss over the animation since I don't know how to talk about it-- I really love it, and I consider it visually striking and animated well in much the same way as Johnny Bravo, but the colors aren't as vibrant as that nor as subdued as PPG's-- it's a perfect hybrid in that sense, and one that captures the tone Dexter's Lab goes for (more on that later).

  When we delve into what the cartoon offers, however, it's a treat. I think the most unique thing about Dexter's Lab is how it manages to cram a lot of eventful moments in what only is a 7 minute runtime, contrary to the name that Genndy has made for himself today. His work after Dexter's Lab is a lot more immersive and they have triple the runtime and have a slower pace to them, with less episodes to offer, whereas Dexter's Lab is a sea of bite-sized content that's still able to leave a strong impression, though not as much as its contemporaries. That means that I personally prefer the highs of PPG, Johnny Bravo, Courage, and maybe Ed Edd n Eddy, but the funniest thing is that I come back to both EEnE and Dexter's Lab the most because they're more fit to be revisited than the others, which made it rather easy to sit through everything, including S3-4 which I knocked out in about 6 days time. I never got bored watching this show, minus the movie, and it's not just because of the fact that episodes are short and sweet.

It's also because everything about this cartoon brims with personality-- the characters and locations Dexter's Lab crafted are some of the most memorable ones I've ever come across, which leads us to a nice segue about the characters. Even though they are by definition flat characters, I still love them all regardless, with my favorites in particular being Dexter's dad, Mandark, and Dexter himself. Since the Justice Friends and Monkey also exist in this universe, they're also among my favorites too I find them a lot more interesting than the heroes they're parodying, but back to the main characters: My favorite part about all of them is that they all have such great performances and certain moments and/or lines that tell you everything you need to know about them, and that's not even mentioning their designs that also do an excellent design at doing that.

  Take for instance Dexter-- he's puny, yet his intellect is huge, and the one quote I associate him with is "You are stupid". Mandark, by contrast, is bigger than Dexter and has a misshapen head (I see this as a design choice to show how his ego's larger than Dexter's), with a syncopated speech manner, and of course the thing I associate with him being his iconic laugh. I also love their dynamic, it's just fun to see how they try and out-do each other, with the biggest irony of it all being that what they're doing is a complete waste of time and always amounts to nothing. Dexter's dad, on the other hand, is carried by Jeff Bennett's performance-- he's one of my favorite voice actors and he plays the role of the oblivious yet unhinged father so well. I also must give kudos to how neither Dexter's mom or dad ever cross the line from "oblivious" to outright neglectful since both of them pay attention to keen details, like in World's Greatest Mom when Dexter's mom suddenly remembered she forgot their lunches, yet miss the most obvious ones in a myriad of episodes. I swear, even when I know the punchline to the jokes about Dexter's lab possibly being discovered, the deliveries from Dexter's dad (and mom too for that matter) always send me.

The only character I've ever taken issue with is Dee Dee, but even that's not consistent. It's reasonable for me to say that her roles in episodes become more bothersome as the series goes along, but she didn't start off as an utter nuisance. At the end of the day, Dee Dee's role is to serve as Dexter's foil, and I think they mostly did a good job with that, as even though a majority of episodes' conflicts are caused by Dee Dee being inattentive, I never felt she was being malicious. Quite the opposite, an episode like Way of the Dee Dee showcases that she always checks in on Dexter just so that he can stop being cooped in his lab all day and genuinely cares about him, and I ultimately see her as the one that breathes life into a lot of episodes. When she's not around, the lab is rather quiet and dull, but when she shows up and you hear her theme play, things suddenly become a lot more lively. I'm perfectly fine with her role in a lot of episodes, but I only take issue when you get an episode like Misplaced in Space or Dee Dee Be Deep where she lacks a brain at all and blows out your ears for the entire runtime (though the latter did become funny in its 2nd half).

So the characters are overall very good, but what ultimately makes Dexter's Lab such a good show shouldn't be something I have to say because it's in the god damn title: its the lab itself. Dexter's laboratory is vaster than what meets the eye, and every episode showcases something new and creative about it. There are so many episodes that display the various entrances the lab has, the contraptions that lie underneath and around it, and even an entire episode, Lab of the Lost, that shows us that there exists an entirely separate world in this lab.
  My interest, more than anything else, hinges on just how many different ways they can toy with my expectations of what this lab is capable of. I especially love the episodes where foreigners are taken into the lab because you never know what their reactions will be or how they'll interact with it. By the way, consider this a late addition to my brief overview of the animation, but the sound design of the lab is so atmospheric-- they make all the beeps and gadget sounds more apparent than normal, and I think Dexter's Lab in general has amazing sound design, since they pull a lot from the Hanna Barbera library and have their own variations on them (I love what they did with the running sound and having it slowly pitch up).

There should be a lot more for me to say, but there really isn't. I love this show precisely because of its strong, memorable characters, the creativity of Dexter's lab in general, and the different ways the characters interact with it. I also consider the Justice Friends and Monkey segments to be nice changes of pace, as the former is entirely comedy driven and the latter deals more with storytelling. I don't have any major problems with S1-2 altogether, the number of episodes I dislike is sparse and they were overall extremely consistent in quality, thus being consistently fun and enjoyable. I don't share the same sentiment for what comes next, however.

SEASONS 3-4 SUCK ASS: That subtitle is a bit of an overstatement-- I don't like S3-4 but they weren't hard for me to watch or ones I utterly despise or anything. I ended up rolling my eyes at them more than anything else because the person whose name is ultimately behind their quality shouldn't be a surprise to anyone: Chris Savino. If you see his name on anything, its quality should be questioned because a lot of his work kinda blows. Anyways, why exactly are S3-4 such a downgrade from everything that came before?

Well, the first thing to note is that the animation got nerfed so hard. I don't know if they made the jump to flash, but the character designs became overly simplified, and the background art took a massive hit too, with some backgrounds merely being solid colors with nothing to separate the grounds from the walls or anything-- they also look barren and lack detail. I'd love to post pictures for examples, but this is a DA review and not a Google Doc, so the best you can do is look at what they changed about the character designs from S2 to S3. Better yet, look at the damn title cards for S3-- they're all blank backgrounds with the same 1 or 2 images, none of that color and vibrancy that came with S1-2's title cards. Suffice to say, the visuals took a hit, and the writing did as well.

I can't particularly remember what it was about the era that was bad outside of its visuals, which I guess they fixed in season 4 since the backgrounds are textured even more than they were in the previous seasons, despite them not changing the character designs back to what they were.


  I'm just going to speculate that they carried a lot of Savino-isms, like delving into cliche plots and having awkward as hell execution.. and I can already see that in episodes like Beau Tie and Chess Mom, episodes that drag shit out for an eternity, which is the case for like 90% of this era, with the biggest examples being A Quackor Cartoon and A Third Dad Cartoon (I refuse to rate this not just because of the fact it has ironic value, but in general I don't know whether it's the most brilliant or worst thing ever), and those are shorts ffs.

  The last thing that you can expect from Savino is for episodes to be as obnoxious as possible, which augments the previous two points and the episodes I mentioned in them, but also encapsulates others like Sore Eyes, which is both a visual atrocity and an annoyance, Comedy of Feathers, which is Dee Dee screaming for 11 minutes, They Got Chops, which is by definition 1 scene on loop with the same annoying soundbyte, and I can keep going with the examples for days. I can also reasonably conclude that a lot of these episodes barely had anything to do with the lab setting whatsoever, which explains why a lot of their plots are unremarkable and cliche, but they weirdly didn't fill me with as much vitriol as the worst episodes from most other cartoons.

   In fact, my feelings towards the Savino era are pretty much the same as EEnE's fifth season-- it sucks, but it's so short and not even that difficult to sit through that I can't find it in me to chastise everything about it, mostly because I don't think about this era when I think of Dexter's Lab, and it's easy for me to divorce these eras when S2 is extremely long. I think I'll just end things here because there's not that much to say-- all I can tell you is that I think Savino's involvement in S5-6 of PPG are a lot worse than here.

CONCLUSION: Dexter's Laboratory is a pretty fun cartoon. The fact that every episode is at most 11 minutes besides 1 special and the movie made it one of the easiest shows to watch in recent memory, and is a testament to how Genndy's range in creating cartoons is vaster than any other creator I know of. He went from making a show as comedic and lighthearted as this to genuinely beautiful and immersive cartoons like Samurai Jack and Primal (from what I've heard about it), and we know that he still has that creative backbone that he gave Dexter's Lab through that Popeye movie teaser that was shown to us nearly a decade ago.

  In spite of how short a lot of episodes are, I came out with a lot to appreciate about them because of just how rich they were in terms of ideas, funny interactions between our two main leads, Mandark, and Dexter's parents, and of course, the lab. I cannot overstate just how much I adore the laboratory and how it brings everything together so nicely, making it so that I remembered a lot of Dexter's Lab episodes like the back of my hand over a decade later. Seasons 3-4 are sadly a downgrade, but not to a point where I consider Dexter's Laboratory anything less than a GOOD show, and aren't hard to sit through at all, which is more than I can say for many other cartoons, especially ones where Savino's DNA is embedded within them. In the end, I recommend sticking to S1-2, they're genuinely great stuff with not much to speak of in terms of duds, and may be some of my favorite CN content to revisit because they have a lot of rewatch value.

Here's a (slightly outdated) Top 50 list:

50. Tuber Time
49. Game for a Game
48. Ice Cream Scream
47. Topped Off
46. Chubby Cheese
45. You Vegetabelieve It!
44. Snowdown
43. Reparanoid
42. Ratman
41. Star Spangled Sidekicks
40. Spacecase
39. Valhallen's Room
38. Hunger Strikes
37. The Bus Boy
36. Catch of the Day
35. Rushmore Rumble
34. Dexter Detention
33. TV Super Pals
32. The Continuum of Cartoon Fools
31 A Mandark Cartoon
30. Accent You Hate
29. Dexter's Rival
28. Lab of the Lost
27. Paper Route Bout
26. Labels
25. Changes
24. Beard to be Feared
23. Dollhouse Drama
22. Just an Old Fashioned Lab Song
21. Decode of Honor
20. Huntor
19. Monstory
18. World's Greatest Mom
17. Say Uncle Sam
16. Can't Nap
15. Things That Go Bonk in the Night
14. Techno Turtle
13. DiM
12. The Big Cheese
11. Hamhocks and Armlocks
10. Dexter and Computress Get Mandark!
9. Filet of Soul
8. Mock 5
7. Dexter Dodgeball
6. Bee Where?
5. Trapped With a Vengeance
4. The Muffin King
3. Rude Removal
2. Last But Not Beast
1. Morning Stretch

Description
You are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, you are stupid, and don't forget: you are stupid

UPDATE ON 3/25/2023: I randomly found the incentive to write a full description-- maybe it's because in due time I'll be doing a PPG scorecard, but I don't think I'll tackle everything in-depth because Dexter's Laboratory can easily be summed up as S1-2 are good, and S3-4 are bad. There's a bit more to it than that, though nothing truly worth mentioning-- it's going to be one of my briefer and less in-depth reviews.

HISTORY: I really loved Dexter's Lab as a kid, it was one of my favorite things to watch late at night between 2011-2014, and literally everything I saw came from S1-2. The only episodes from S3-4 that I saw were the Wacky Races episode and... oh wait, that's it. I guess they may have played the S3 shorts during breaks, but rewatching them didn't bring back any memories. I never felt incentivized to rewatch this show, in spite of my positive thoughts on it, and the only reason why I ended up doing this scorecard was because I happened to binge it with several friends via a Discord stream. What I initially did was watch S3-4 separately as a part of a deal with and then it just-so-happened that some others were streaming this show in a Discord channel, and I watched all of S1 and most of S2 with them in late 2020. They ended up finishing everything without me because of our timezone differences, though I did eventually cover everything I missed by August 2021. I ended up enjoying my watch all the way through, as it was a nice trip down memory lane.

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON DEXTER'S LABORATORY: I decided to gloss over the animation since I don't know how to talk about it-- I really love it, and I consider it visually striking and animated well in much the same way as Johnny Bravo, but the colors aren't as vibrant as that nor as subdued as PPG's-- it's a perfect hybrid in that sense, and one that captures the tone Dexter's Lab goes for (more on that later).

  When we delve into what the cartoon offers, however, it's a treat. I think the most unique thing about Dexter's Lab is how it manages to cram a lot of eventful moments in what only is a 7 minute runtime, contrary to the name that Genndy has made for himself today. His work after Dexter's Lab is a lot more immersive and they have triple the runtime and have a slower pace to them, with less episodes to offer, whereas Dexter's Lab is a sea of bite-sized content that's still able to leave a strong impression, though not as much as its contemporaries. That means that I personally prefer the highs of PPG, Johnny Bravo, Courage, and maybe Ed Edd n Eddy, but the funniest thing is that I come back to both EEnE and Dexter's Lab the most because they're more fit to be revisited than the others, which made it rather easy to sit through everything, including S3-4 which I knocked out in about 6 days time. I never got bored watching this show, minus the movie, and it's not just because of the fact that episodes are short and sweet.

It's also because everything about this cartoon brims with personality-- the characters and locations Dexter's Lab crafted are some of the most memorable ones I've ever come across, which leads us to a nice segue about the characters. Even though they are by definition flat characters, I still love them all regardless, with my favorites in particular being Dexter's dad, Mandark, and Dexter himself. Since the Justice Friends and Monkey also exist in this universe, they're also among my favorites too I find them a lot more interesting than the heroes they're parodying, but back to the main characters: My favorite part about all of them is that they all have such great performances and certain moments and/or lines that tell you everything you need to know about them, and that's not even mentioning their designs that also do an excellent design at doing that.

  Take for instance Dexter-- he's puny, yet his intellect is huge, and the one quote I associate him with is "You are stupid". Mandark, by contrast, is bigger than Dexter and has a misshapen head (I see this as a design choice to show how his ego's larger than Dexter's), with a syncopated speech manner, and of course the thing I associate with him being his iconic laugh. I also love their dynamic, it's just fun to see how they try and out-do each other, with the biggest irony of it all being that what they're doing is a complete waste of time and always amounts to nothing. Dexter's dad, on the other hand, is carried by Jeff Bennett's performance-- he's one of my favorite voice actors and he plays the role of the oblivious yet unhinged father so well. I also must give kudos to how neither Dexter's mom or dad ever cross the line from "oblivious" to outright neglectful since both of them pay attention to keen details, like in World's Greatest Mom when Dexter's mom suddenly remembered she forgot their lunches, yet miss the most obvious ones in a myriad of episodes. I swear, even when I know the punchline to the jokes about Dexter's lab possibly being discovered, the deliveries from Dexter's dad (and mom too for that matter) always send me.

The only character I've ever taken issue with is Dee Dee, but even that's not consistent. It's reasonable for me to say that her roles in episodes become more bothersome as the series goes along, but she didn't start off as an utter nuisance. At the end of the day, Dee Dee's role is to serve as Dexter's foil, and I think they mostly did a good job with that, as even though a majority of episodes' conflicts are caused by Dee Dee being inattentive, I never felt she was being malicious. Quite the opposite, an episode like Way of the Dee Dee showcases that she always checks in on Dexter just so that he can stop being cooped in his lab all day and genuinely cares about him, and I ultimately see her as the one that breathes life into a lot of episodes. When she's not around, the lab is rather quiet and dull, but when she shows up and you hear her theme play, things suddenly become a lot more lively. I'm perfectly fine with her role in a lot of episodes, but I only take issue when you get an episode like Misplaced in Space or Dee Dee Be Deep where she lacks a brain at all and blows out your ears for the entire runtime (though the latter did become funny in its 2nd half).

So the characters are overall very good, but what ultimately makes Dexter's Lab such a good show shouldn't be something I have to say because it's in the god damn title: its the lab itself. Dexter's laboratory is vaster than what meets the eye, and every episode showcases something new and creative about it. There are so many episodes that display the various entrances the lab has, the contraptions that lie underneath and around it, and even an entire episode, Lab of the Lost, that shows us that there exists an entirely separate world in this lab.
  My interest, more than anything else, hinges on just how many different ways they can toy with my expectations of what this lab is capable of. I especially love the episodes where foreigners are taken into the lab because you never know what their reactions will be or how they'll interact with it. By the way, consider this a late addition to my brief overview of the animation, but the sound design of the lab is so atmospheric-- they make all the beeps and gadget sounds more apparent than normal, and I think Dexter's Lab in general has amazing sound design, since they pull a lot from the Hanna Barbera library and have their own variations on them (I love what they did with the running sound and having it slowly pitch up).

There should be a lot more for me to say, but there really isn't. I love this show precisely because of its strong, memorable characters, the creativity of Dexter's lab in general, and the different ways the characters interact with it. I also consider the Justice Friends and Monkey segments to be nice changes of pace, as the former is entirely comedy driven and the latter deals more with storytelling. I don't have any major problems with S1-2 altogether, the number of episodes I dislike is sparse and they were overall extremely consistent in quality, thus being consistently fun and enjoyable. I don't share the same sentiment for what comes next, however.

SEASONS 3-4 SUCK ASS: That subtitle is a bit of an overstatement-- I don't like S3-4 but they weren't hard for me to watch or ones I utterly despise or anything. I ended up rolling my eyes at them more than anything else because the person whose name is ultimately behind their quality shouldn't be a surprise to anyone: Chris Savino. If you see his name on anything, its quality should be questioned because a lot of his work kinda blows. Anyways, why exactly are S3-4 such a downgrade from everything that came before?

Well, the first thing to note is that the animation got nerfed so hard. I don't know if they made the jump to flash, but the character designs became overly simplified, and the background art took a massive hit too, with some backgrounds merely being solid colors with nothing to separate the grounds from the walls or anything-- they also look barren and lack detail. I'd love to post pictures for examples, but this is a DA review and not a Google Doc, so the best you can do is look at what they changed about the character designs from S2 to S3. Better yet, look at the damn title cards for S3-- they're all blank backgrounds with the same 1 or 2 images, none of that color and vibrancy that came with S1-2's title cards. Suffice to say, the visuals took a hit, and the writing did as well.

I can't particularly remember what it was about the era that was bad outside of its visuals, which I guess they fixed in season 4 since the backgrounds are textured even more than they were in the previous seasons, despite them not changing the character designs back to what they were.


  I'm just going to speculate that they carried a lot of Savino-isms, like delving into cliche plots and having awkward as hell execution.. and I can already see that in episodes like Beau Tie and Chess Mom, episodes that drag shit out for an eternity, which is the case for like 90% of this era, with the biggest examples being A Quackor Cartoon and A Third Dad Cartoon (I refuse to rate this not just because of the fact it has ironic value, but in general I don't know whether it's the most brilliant or worst thing ever), and those are shorts ffs.

  The last thing that you can expect from Savino is for episodes to be as obnoxious as possible, which augments the previous two points and the episodes I mentioned in them, but also encapsulates others like Sore Eyes, which is both a visual atrocity and an annoyance, Comedy of Feathers, which is Dee Dee screaming for 11 minutes, They Got Chops, which is by definition 1 scene on loop with the same annoying soundbyte, and I can keep going with the examples for days. I can also reasonably conclude that a lot of these episodes barely had anything to do with the lab setting whatsoever, which explains why a lot of their plots are unremarkable and cliche, but they weirdly didn't fill me with as much vitriol as the worst episodes from most other cartoons.

   In fact, my feelings towards the Savino era are pretty much the same as EEnE's fifth season-- it sucks, but it's so short and not even that difficult to sit through that I can't find it in me to chastise everything about it, mostly because I don't think about this era when I think of Dexter's Lab, and it's easy for me to divorce these eras when S2 is extremely long. I think I'll just end things here because there's not that much to say-- all I can tell you is that I think Savino's involvement in S5-6 of PPG are a lot worse than here.

CONCLUSION: Dexter's Laboratory is a pretty fun cartoon. The fact that every episode is at most 11 minutes besides 1 special and the movie made it one of the easiest shows to watch in recent memory, and is a testament to how Genndy's range in creating cartoons is vaster than any other creator I know of. He went from making a show as comedic and lighthearted as this to genuinely beautiful and immersive cartoons like Samurai Jack and Primal (from what I've heard about it), and we know that he still has that creative backbone that he gave Dexter's Lab through that Popeye movie teaser that was shown to us nearly a decade ago.

  In spite of how short a lot of episodes are, I came out with a lot to appreciate about them because of just how rich they were in terms of ideas, funny interactions between our two main leads, Mandark, and Dexter's parents, and of course, the lab. I cannot overstate just how much I adore the laboratory and how it brings everything together so nicely, making it so that I remembered a lot of Dexter's Lab episodes like the back of my hand over a decade later. Seasons 3-4 are sadly a downgrade, but not to a point where I consider Dexter's Laboratory anything less than a GOOD show, and aren't hard to sit through at all, which is more than I can say for many other cartoons, especially ones where Savino's DNA is embedded within them. In the end, I recommend sticking to S1-2, they're genuinely great stuff with not much to speak of in terms of duds, and may be some of my favorite CN content to revisit because they have a lot of rewatch value.

Here's a (slightly outdated) Top 50 list:

50. Tuber Time
49. Game for a Game
48. Ice Cream Scream
47. Topped Off
46. Chubby Cheese
45. You Vegetabelieve It!
44. Snowdown
43. Reparanoid
42. Ratman
41. Star Spangled Sidekicks
40. Spacecase
39. Valhallen's Room
38. Hunger Strikes
37. The Bus Boy
36. Catch of the Day
35. Rushmore Rumble
34. Dexter Detention
33. TV Super Pals
32. The Continuum of Cartoon Fools
31 A Mandark Cartoon
30. Accent You Hate
29. Dexter's Rival
28. Lab of the Lost
27. Paper Route Bout
26. Labels
25. Changes
24. Beard to be Feared
23. Dollhouse Drama
22. Just an Old Fashioned Lab Song
21. Decode of Honor
20. Huntor
19. Monstory
18. World's Greatest Mom
17. Say Uncle Sam
16. Can't Nap
15. Things That Go Bonk in the Night
14. Techno Turtle
13. DiM
12. The Big Cheese
11. Hamhocks and Armlocks
10. Dexter and Computress Get Mandark!
9. Filet of Soul
8. Mock 5
7. Dexter Dodgeball
6. Bee Where?
5. Trapped With a Vengeance
4. The Muffin King
3. Rude Removal
2. Last But Not Beast
1. Morning Stretch