When I was a little kid, I used to watch cartoons on VHS tapes alot. Most of you probably remember VHS players, but it's so ancient and obsolete now that you younger guys might only remember seeing it as a big black dusty old box in their grandparents' basement. This strange device used to play videos.

Anyhow, there was a distribution company in the late 80s and early 90s called Celebrity Home Entertainment, that had a line of kids cartoons and movies called Just for Kids. Whenever you pushed the tape in and pressed play you got this.

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Man, remember the tracking buttons?? Most later VCRs had auto tracking.

These videos, from this fairly small distribution company that subsequently went bankrupt in 1997, were cool because most of them were obscure kids' cartoons from all over the world- Germany, Japan, Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, Denmark, The Soviet Union, and more. I don't know if they're obscure in their home countries too, but it's hard to find info about most of them on the internet.

So from time to time when I'm feeling nostalgic I dig up some old tapes and pop them in the VCR.
It's hard for me to say if I'd like these cartoons as much if they didn't have the nostalgic value, but I think they're kinda charming.

This one is called Gallavants and somebody uploaded the whole thing to Youtube. I've been looking for the VHS forever and couldn't find it so I shit my pants the other day when I saw this:

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It's like a coming-of-age story about ants. This one ant can't grow a "kabump", which is a bump that grows out of an ant's butt when it gets old enough. I couldn't find a trailer or anything so I just posted part 1. You don't need to watch the whole thing, cause it's long and it's about ant butts.

The next one is super depressing, it's about whales D:

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I think this one is Danish. A young white whale goes searching for the legendary Moby Dick so he can protect his herd from poachers. This movie is particularly dark (in color and mood) but it's got a really unique look to it, it looks like the color was done entirely in colored pencil.

This one's one of my favorites. It's a Dutch cartoon that's like the Smurfs but in space and kinda gay

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The bad guy is a huge gluttonous pink blob that commands smaller green blobs to feed him and he's always antagonizing these pink yoshi-like people that are all based off of zodiac signs.

This one is Japanese, and it's just really cute

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I like this one, it's about a bunch of animals who live on an island and the main character is a platypus. A PLATYPUS. How many cartoon platypuses are there? This one was Belgian/French Canadian, and this is the Swedish intro:

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This show had a formula: the bad guy would see something on TV and get a sinister idea. Then the good guy would find out his plan by watching the same TV show and would come up with the solution.

This was an interesting find- I was looking for info on a movie called "Quark the Dragon Slayer", about a troll who slays dragons, but couldn't find anything on Youtube. Then, in a completely unrelated search I found this:

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The fat little troll at 44 seconds, that's Quark! I have never heard of this before but I'm gonna watch it when I'm done typing this.

This last one wasn't even part of my childhood or on any of these tapes as far as I know but holy crap is the song catchy:

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That's it for now, but I'm sure there's others I'm not thinking of. I feel like there's a million foreign cartoons I've never seen before and now I'm interested in finding what exists. The related videos on Youtube for alot of these has cool looking stuff I've never heard of. Some of these shows and movies you can actually find on Youtube, but for most you're on your own. I wish I could find Vicky the Viking in English but I'm not sure if it exists.

My next cartoon features a guy who has severed hands for eyes