Ed, Edd n Eddy was one of the longest-running shows Cartoon Network has ever had and is considered one of the best cartoons on the channel. The Canadian-American show ran from 1999 to 2009 and was directed and written by Danny Antonucci. Sadly, it was canceled and only lasted six seasons. The reason behind this hard decision was, in fact, the lack of animators to keep drawing the series.
The studio behind Ed, Edd n Eddy aka Cartoon, was right in the middle working on the sixth season when Danny Antonucci got the approval from the network to make the film Ed, Edd n Eddy's Big Picture Show. Unfortunately, the animation team was so small that Danny had to make the hard decision to pull his team off of making the sixth season so they could devote all of their time to working on the Big Picture Show. To keep the show action-oriented, the show was storyboarded before any dialogue was recorded.
The last season of Ed, Edd n Eddy only had two episodes: May I Have This Ed? and Look Before You Ed, which Cartoon Network built as an "especial event" back in the days.
The Big Picture Show was received enthusiastically by the audience. However, many fans would have loved to have gotten an entire sixth season with these fantastic characters.
Its Uniqueness
Not being a huge fan of digital work, Danny wanted the show to be hand-drawn to capture the classic look of cartoons from the 1950s.
Season 6 aired June 29, 2008, and was overall the 69 episode of the entire series. Let's take a look at the last two episodes of the show.
May I Have This Ed? is about The Peach Creek Jr. High school dance where Eddy is super excited about it meanwhile, Edd is nervous because he's a shy guy and doesn't know what will happen.
The second episode in season six, Look Before You Ed, is about Edd and Jimmy joining forces to run a safety club to curb wintertime hazards. These episodes were the making of what could probably have been a great season, but instead, the Big Picture Show wrapped up the Ed, Edd n Eddy saga. The series was actually the last major cartoon to use hand-drawn animation cells.
What Made the Series So Special?
Cartoons have always been defined by incredible feats of the impossible, like talking sponges and teenage robots. But amid that sea of digital animation was Ed, Edd n Eddy, an ounce of hand-drawn relatability.
Three lovable suburban kids were permanent fixtures of 31 million households across 29 different countries for ten years.
Ed, Edd n Eddy was Cartoon Network's most popular achievement ending as the network's longest-running show giving kids over 130 stories, four specials, and a feature-length TV movie.
The series stood out amongst the deluge of animation during that ten-year run by creating three lovably average and unremarkable characters and letting them live lives that were in many ways just like the ones of the kids watching the show.
Cartoon Network series creator Danny would spend decades climbing his way through the ranks of the animation industry. The creator of Ed, Edd n Eddy is an animator who was obsessed with the style of early animation and adult humor. Danny would make a name for himself throughout the industry with the 1987 four minutes short Lupo the Butcher. The story is about a foul-mouthed Italian who violently tears apart meat and eventually his own body.
However, he began the task of developing a children's show and doing one thing with animation he had never done by himself. Taking his experience working with Hanna-Barbera early in his career, he took three characters he had drawn up for a shoe commercial and got to work.
Ed, Edd n Eddy would be shopped in Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network before, finally premiering on the latter channel on January 4, 1999, quickly getting a slot in the Cartoon Cartoon Fridays block.
Surprisingly, it was a show that almost immediately came to dominate the network's ratings.
Creating Cult Icons
What made the series so unique and easy to fall in love with Ed, Edd n Eddy was just how average the everyday lives the show gave its viewers were underneath the slapstick. Many fans are now watching the series on HBO Max.
The characters were very normal kids, all created to be one part of Danny's personality. Eddy is an eccentric swindle and a scammer. Double D is an outsider, a kid who is too smart for his own good and suffers from severe OCD. Finally, Ed is a slow kid with a very active imagination. They are normal kids with everyday problems and typical realities.
So many pieces of entertainment attempt to connect with the audience by showing them a part of themselves, and Ed, Edd n Eddy succeeded wildly in this one way.
So much of the humor and the slapstick were grounded in character and because any kid watching it could relate to someone in the small suburb of Peach Creek, where the show took place.
The series didn't need a hook. Instead, it lived and died by its characters in their stories. The show knows something people too often forget: sometimes being unremarkable isn't such a bad thing after all.