If you’re a 90s kid, you just have to know about Dexter’s Laboratory: the first of Genndy Tartakovsky’s great animations. Not that they aren’t all great. What we mean is that they’re all great and it’s a default word used. The man deserves all the praise he gets and then some. Cartoon Network hit the jackpot when they hired him, as he brought to the channel shows like Samurai Jack and Sym-Bionic Titan…outside Dexter’s Lab, of course. He also had a lot of input in another classic 90s kids enjoyed: The Powerpuff Girls, created by Craig McCracken. Fun fact: they were roommates in college. Craig also had a lot of input in Samurai Jack. But we’re not here to talk about the collaboration of these two legends. We’re here to talk about Genndy’s Cartoon Network debut: Dexter’s Laboratory.
Dexter’s Laboratory tells the story of a young boy genius who has a secret lab in his room which only he can access, other than his older sister Dee Dee, his parents on occasion and even Mandark: his arch nemesis. Dexter goes to Huber Elementary school and is often praised by his teachers. His relationship with his fellow students is a typical kid’s relationship with their peers at school. There are some who like him and some who hate him. He is very short, even for someone his age, and he has shown insecurity about it. He even uses a ladder to climb onto his bed. He has red hair like his mother, and wears glasses like his father. He is very brave, heroic, resourceful, and kindhearted, although he still has moments of childlike selfishness and curiosity which contrasts his incredible intellect. He spoke his first words in the hospital he was born in.
Dee Dee is the most prominent supporting character of the show. She’s airheaded but resourceful. While Dexter is book smart, Dee Dee is street smart…most of the time. While Dexter is an indoors person, and anti-social (he even has pale skin unlike the rest of his family), Dee Dee is an outdoors person, outspoken, loud, carefree and open to talking to anyone and everyone when the opportunity arises. Though she gets on her brother’s nerves most of the time, he still loves her and goes through great lengths to protect her. The most obvious occasion was when he handed her over to aliens who wanted to take her for experimentation, then missed her and felt bad, so he went to space in order to find her. He was ready to fight, but the aliens were happy to hand her over. You can imagine why.
Next up is mom and dad. Their names aren’t given in the show, but they are given plenty of personality. Mom is a germ freak, very stern when she speaks, but also very sweet and gentle. She doesn’t have a job, so she spends all day taking care of the children and cleaning the house. Dad is laid back, relaxed, and a bit of a psycho over muffins…okay, he’s a complete nutcase when it comes to muffins. He’d go to any lengths to get some muffins. He even tricked the whole family once…even mom, and she knew about how tricky he was, but he still managed to get her. He’s also prone to obsessions and delusions, such as when he was ‘the best snowball fighter in the world’ according to himself. He had been hitting people with snowballs his whole life, and one day, mom threw one at him and it hit him. She just threw it for fun. He took it as a humiliating defeat and never threw a snowball again. He is the head of the family and his job was never mentioned. We only learned in season 3 that he was a stuntman. We don’t even know if it was true or if he just wanted to make sure Dexter had a cool dad to talk about. Either way, it was really cool of him to show the school his stunt. He and mom were turned into babies in one episode, and it was shown that dad was a very troublesome kid. He liked hurting mom. Mom was a victim the whole time. It kind of reflects the relationship their children would have in the future, since Dee Dee is always destroying Dexter’s things and ruining his day. Dexter often loses in the end when it comes to going up against Dee Dee.
Next up, we have Mandark. He started off as a minor inconvenience in the show, but we got to learn more about him over time and saw that he may actually be the biggest threat Dexter ever faces…and he actually does. He is the most evil person the world will ever see. He’s narcissistic, conniving, sneaky, underhanded, despicable and a social climber who is always trying to prove that he is smarter and better than Dexter. The most important thing about him is that he has a crush on Dee Dee. That crush has been used to foil him many times.
The show is pretty simple. It doesn’t exactly tell a linear story, but it’s not just filler content for children’s TV entertainment either. It’s best to call it a blend of both. While some of the outcomes of the show leave unanswered questions, a lot more of the outcomes are just normal. The characters are well developed and we get to know them well enough to enjoy even single episodes about them. Genndy had planned to end the show with the TV movie Ego Trip, so that he could start work on possibly his greatest creation: Samurai Jack. Cartoon Network had not had enough of Dexter’s Lab, so they pushed for more seasons, and Chris Savino took over. Genndy Tartakovsky was still credited, since he was the creator after all, but he was not involved in seasons 3 and 4. We can notice the difference between Genndy’s work and Chris’ not just because of the visuals, but because of the way the seasons were structured and the overall feel of the show. Savino’s era felt a bit more stale in comparison to the layered and colourful aesthetic Genndy introduced. While he tried to keep the same thing going, he messed up with Dexter’s characterization. Dexter became more of a mad scientist type. He was no longer the take charge kind of hero. He wasn’t someone who was strong-willed anymore, and he took a lot more losses than in Genndy’s era. Of course, this could all be the build up to his future, where he would end up working for Mandark and be abused physically for small mistakes, and lose all his nerve. This was established in Ego Trip, which was meant to show us the definitive future of the characters. The movie showed us that Dexter and Mandark would grow up and work in the same company, and Mandark would steal Dexter’s inventions and take credit for them until he took over the company and abused Dexter to the point that he was driven mad and dug underground for years, only to come back to the surface and find that using one of his inventions, which was meant to increase the intelligence of humanity to the point where humans don’t need to work for anything anymore, Mandark made the whole world stupid due to his lack of knowledge on how to handle the invention. Present Dexter teamed up with his employee self, his post-apocalyptic self, and his senior self from the point in time when the world was at peace, in order to stop Mandark, who had banned all science around the world. In the end, it was Mandark’s crush on Dee Dee that saved the world. Feeling cheated out of his destiny, Dexter sent robots to the past, setting the events of this whole adventure into motion. It was a nice way of wrapping up the show, but due to its high success, it was prolonged until the show lost its flavor and just…ended. The voice actress who played Dexter didn’t return for season 3. The voice actress who played Dee Dee didn’t return initially, but came back towards the end of the show. Their replacements were good and convincing enough, but now that you know this, try watching the show and see if there’s any difference. The show originally ended in 1999 under Tartakovsky, but then concluded in 2003 with a rather unsatisfactory episode.
The most epic episode was the one when Dexter and his family fought a giant monster in Tokyo, Japan. His parents finally found out about the secret lab and were not happy about it. Dad was going to punish Dexter for it. I guess we now know why Dexter was so afraid of them finding out about it. The question of where he gets all the space for his lab was answered in the Savino era episodes. Where he gets his power from in not answered, but we have to assume that he has his own power source.
All in all, Dexter’s Laboratory is a prime example of having to let a show be, once the creator is done with it. The quality certainly went downhill when Chris Savino took over, and it really hurt the legacy that the show could have had.
Did you like the article? Let us know in the comments.
Kommentare