Crashbox: The Greatest Children's Show of All-Time
HBO Family's avant-garde masterpiece deserves its metal coiled flowers.
“Children’s television” — carries a dull connotation, doesn’t it? Deeming any form of media as intended for children bludgeons the product into a pigeonhole plagued by banal concepts.
In popular media, successful breeds imitation. When a network, studio, or publisher’s risky project becomes successful, it establishes a precedent for the industry to replicate the pioneering work’s financial success and cultural impact.
Since popular media is, well, popular, it is also intrinsically well-remembered. The more people consume said media, the more people remember said media, and keep subsequent releases, spin-offs, and merchandise alive and financially thriving for half-centuries (*cough* the Star Wars franchise regardless of any panning from critics and butthurt fans *cough*).
Despite being a widely-released work that was a clear and deliberate alternative to its contemporaries, that still, 25 years later, stands-out like a barbed-wire-wrapped scarecrow in a field of lilies — Crashbox is well-forgotten.
Was it high-concept? Heck no. But compared to children’s television at large, especially in programs made for school-aged kids, Crashbox transgressed a caliber of intellect and edginess to execute the impossible: making learning fun. Crashbox was to the educational genre what ECW Hardcore TV was to the cheesy professional wrestling world of the Mid-90s: a brash, yet lovable, alternative.
The premise is simple. Your brain, yes YOUR unrotted1 brain, is sleeping, snoring in fact. Why? Because what do kids love more than high fructose corn syrup? Naps. In the midst of your slumber, a supercomputer known as “Crashbox” careens from Heaven, crashing onto your brain. The blow does not kill you, but swallows your encephalon (a warm welcome indeed). Inside the box, a robot cavalcade works tirelessly in their own little cyberpunk Temu Factory to build green game cartridges. In between employee brushes with death, power outages, and stereotypically (or accurately) lazy foremans, cartridges are loaded onto motherboards that launch various educational games/segments for viewers to consume.
I’ve always been a game show nerd. I can rifle on and on about obscure Mark Goodson - Bill Todman Productions. But as the 1999 promo notes, “Crashbox: it’s not a game show, it’s a brain show.” Unlike Blockbusters or Now You See It, each game, within each episode, is visually, conceptually, and intellectually, different from each other; keeping young goobers entertained.
Like rooting for your favorite contestant on The Price is Right, eagerly anticipating your favorite games to appear in one of Crashbox's 7 to 8 segments is still dopamine production at its most innocent.
Crashbox’s 18 games run the gamut of grade school curriculum: multisyllabic vocabulary, lateral thinking skills, lie spotting, and of course: “Psycho Math.”
“Revolting Slob” teaches you 17 ways to say: exploded, while portraying the obliteration of a cranky (yet still innocent) man.
“Distraction News” provides the world’s most primitive ADHD test by presenting a story, only for that story to be visually overrun by a barrage of flashing, fluttering, and boomeranging images. Your task is to recall information from that story, or accept you fate as doomed to have 60+ browser tabs open.
“Sketch Pad” forces you to understand complex problems by forsaking logic, and lends us one of the slyest truisms ever spoken:
“Just because you got eyes, doesn’t mean you always see.”
-Sketch, (written by Andrew Cypiot, Steve Oakes, Sultan Pepper, John Watkin, and Steve Young)
Unlike actual school, Crashbox caters to its learning population by incorporating captivating nuggets for everyone:
Puns? CHECK
Riddles? CHECK
Humorously animated cardboard cutouts of historical figures? CHECK
For the precocious child:
Sensationalized French, Patois, and Valley Girl accents? TOTALLY
Verbal assault from a decomposed corpse ABSOLUTELY
Thinly-veiled slights depicting electricians as inept brutes DUH
And for the perceptive:
Mocking the criminal justice system by reducing detective work to sentencing people to prison based on the fact that they’re poorly educated HELL YEAH
The last statement refers to one of my favorite segments: “Mug Shots.” Wherein, you and Billie Eilish’s mom (yes really; I cannot unhear it) weed out criminals from everyday reprobates based on the suspects’ knowledge of trivial facts.
Some segments were lukewarm, “Paige & Sage,” a spot-the-difference game featuring two dollar-store-brand Barbie dolls, and “Lens McCraken,” a help the imbecilic gumshoe identify objects based on zoomed in photographs game, were duds at best. However, even these segments, like the two weakest players on an All-Star Team, provided some entertainment value.
Every Crashbox game nests in a cherished place within my soul. Except…
“Riddle Snake.”
My knee-jerk reaction, TO THIS DAY, is to flip that wretched creature two middle fingers (with thumb extension). The riddles were either absurdly simple or painstakingly convoluted. The pungi player looked like a dope, and since it was usually the last segment on the show, hearing the robot narrator announce, "Riddle Snake! Riddle Snake! Hoo-Ha!" was an exercise in anger management. It also didn’t help that the appearance of “Riddle Snake” meant another last-segment game, my all-time favorite "Word Shake,” or as I called it, "The French Guy,” would not air.
The silly aspects of Crashbox are what make the show reverent. Heck, this entire article is inspired by a sandwich I cut2, in which the two halves resembled the grotesque ears from “EARR WE ARE.”
The educational components of Crashbox were neatly tucked within the zaniness of the fictional environment. Crashbox did not say to the audience: “In this segment you will learn this,” go into long explanations, and then quiz your comprehension. The creators knew not to patronize or coddle the snot-nosed audience; instead treating them as intelligent creatures (aka. “Super Duper Pooper Scoopers”). Conceptually, Crashbox was not designed to teach anything. Instead, it challenged viewers to apply pre-existing knowledge (regardless of age or grade) to unorthodox scenarios that cultivated new insights.
“Captain Bones” did not give a damn about your mathematical prowess; he just wanted you to concentrate, interpret a visual arrangement, and apply a touch of basic arithmetic to correct an equation.
Sure, encyclopedic knowledge of various wildlife would greatly help in deciphering which animal devours “Eddie Bull.” But as long as you pay attention (something you should’ve learned to do by watching “Distraction News”) you either figure it out, or learn some fascinating tidbits about marsupials you never heard of.
Bringing Crashbox’s dynamic personalities to life is a plethora of decorated voice talent. Including: Dee Bradley Baker (Olmec from Legends of the Hidden Temple, Klaus from American Dad, and many Nickelodeon, Disney, and Warner Bros. IPs), Nancy Cartwright (Bart “Freakin” Simpson), Danny Wells (Charlie from The Jeffersons), and the legendary Jerry Stiller, who needs no introduction.
A round of applause is also warranted for the character design department. Thanks to their efforts, silent characters also leave a lasting imprint. Including the geriatric security guard in “Dirty Pictures” (which I feel is a name suitable for a Hollywood True Crime series) who looks EXACTLY like a school security guard I used to see sleeping at his desk, day-after-day.
Crashbox was developed as a venture between Planet Grande Pictures (whose recent projects include the Max series: The Event: Inside Wolfgang Puck Catering, and aptly titled documentary: Catholic School Confessions), and Canadian production company: Cuppa Coffee Animation. It is no surprise, stylistically or comedically, that after Crashbox, Cuppa Coffee served as the animators of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, and Comedy Central’s Ugly Americans (a peculiar show indeed).
Crashbox emerged during the late 90s renaissance of networks investing in programming for children. In 1998, 20th Century Fox launched the now long defunct Fox Family Network and its even shorter-lived branches: The Boyz Channel, and The Girls Channel. Nickelodeon, with its aptly-warranted chokehold on kids and teens, launched Noggin in partnership with Sesame Workshop; bridging the gap between Sesame Street and Hey Arnold! Home Box Office, Inc. (Subsidiary of Time Warner Entertainment) joined the “kids craze” by debuting HBO Family. From 1996 to 1999, HBOF was as it is today: a repository for films rated PG-13 and under. At the cusp of the millennium, HBO revamped “Family” into a network with original, and diverse, children’s programs; premiering Crashbox on February 1, 1999.
Perhaps the reason we have never seen a show like Crashbox before or since is because Time Warner was willing to gamble on innovative concepts for their “new” network, and the need for such a gamble is long gone. In a tale as old as television, as soon as HBO Family found stable footing, Time Warner reverted to complacency. Crashbox, like every other show on HBO Family’s slate, had a criminally short original run: two seasons, totaling 52 episodes. However, re-runs of Crashbox and its ilk: A Little Curious3, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, HBO Storybook Musicals, and interstitial: El Perro y El Gato, aired every weekday on HBO Family until February 29, 2024.
Despite the fact that Crashbox aired daily for a quarter-century, the few people online discussing Crashbox describe it as a repressed fever dream they’ve suddenly realized was in fact, a real show. Crashbox remained adjacent to the forefront of my mind because of its indelible mark on my personality, penchant for synonyms, and trademark snarky humor. Gags and lines from the show remain in my internal conversational repertoire, including two of my favorite quips: “Well, now that we’ve got your attention…” and, “I could’ve been a doctor, or a mechanic.”
In today’s TV world of Cocomelon, Paw Patrol, and whatever the heck Nickelodeon is pumping out for kids and teens post-Dan Schneider reckoning, I will posit the straw-man argument that there is no production comparable to this educational freak show I love so dearly.
In an interview with YouTuber Will Schwartz, Cuppa Coffee Animation’s founder Adam Shaheen said this about the unique nature of his animated spectacle:
I have always been interested in all sorts of design and artistic influences - A magazine formatted game show, with dozens of different types of games felt like the perfect place to introduce a multitude of styles of animation that acknowledged the variety… A show like this will never been seen again in my opinion. Networks are 100% driven now by tapping existing brands and unfortunately have a lesser group of visionary creatives open to pushing new boundaries.
- Adam Shaheen, “Does Anyone Remember HBO's Crashbox?”
Now that Warner Bros. Discovery mucked up one of the last bastions unfazed by the many corporate changeovers “The Brothers Warner” underwent in the past 25 years, Crashbox can rest easy in the memories of highly-intelligent weirdos with off-beat senses of humor.
Two other HBO Family programs that deserve some brief recognition: George and Martha and Kindergarten. The former, a wholesome animated series based on the book series of the same name showcased the most loyal TV friendship of all-time, and taught valuable lessons like compromise is key, and gold teeth are in fact: cool. Kindergarten, a show I was not particularly a fan of as a child, because in spite of my academic excellence, I was never a big fan of school, so I considered coming home from school to watch other kids in school to be truly revolting. However, the program’s cinéma vérité documentary style with a real Kindergarten class in upstate New York is a remarkably delivered concept.
I hope those children are doing well.
The same goes for all the creative forces, behind-the-screen talent, and crew members who can claim, by my declaration, that they were part of the greatest children’s show of all time.
The only other program that can tie for such a moniker is Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Although, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is the greatest show for all humankind.
Crashbox is for the children.
“You think I’ll let go for a little— EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION?!? Ohh No! (AHHHHHH)”
-Spongebob Squarepants (written by Aaron Springer, C.H. Greenblatt, & Mr. Lawrence)
For more info on the current state of “Brainrot Content” refer to my previous article: You Can't Stop The Brainrot.
The joy of life as a creative in a nutshell.
A show whose three main characters I confused the cast of Aqua Teen Hunger Force for, and despite the shows being NOTHING alike, I am grateful for that confusion.
My sister and I used to skip all the math games. No regrets. (I have an MFA now.)