Cow and Chicken

Cow and Chicken was an animated television series, running from July 1997 to July 1999. Cow and Chicken are sister and brother, a cow and a chicken, with human parents. The creators were faced with the question of whether and how to explain this scenario. Sometimes opening credits are cumbersome vehicles for an origin story. David Feiss approached this problem in the series' opening title sequence:

"Mama had a chicken Mama had a cow Dad was proud, He didn't care how!"

This is all that is ever offered in explanation, although in one episode, their father threatens to send both Cow and Chicken back to 'the orphanage'.

Cow and Chicken's extended family consists of various other types of animals, including Cousin Boneless, who is a boneless chicken (unable to walk or get up from the floor); Snail Boy, a snail; Cousin Black Sheep, a sheep; and Sow, an evil pig. They also have an uncle Longhorn Steer, who appears in "Professor Longhorn Steer". The episode "Happy Meat" also showed the ghosts of a pair of Cow and Chicken's ancestors, a male (human) farmer married to a female chicken. Friends and close associates include Chicken's two buds Flem and Earl, and a loud and obnoxious school teacher. And then of course, there's the Red Guy, who they run into frequently in various guises.

Initially, the show included a Three Shorts format with two Cow and Chicken episodes and one of I Am Weasel. Later on, I Am Weasel was spun off into its own series.

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""It all began when I was a little boy of nayn...""
 * Abusive Parents: Red
 * All Just a Dream - An episode of "I Am Weasel" where Weasel was in prison for life turned out to be Cow's dream (which wasn't the first time).
 * Aloof Big Brother- Chicken is a parody of this.
 * Ambiguously Gay - Pretty much everyone at one point or another, but especially the Red Guy.
 * Animated Actors
 * Animeland: this Got Milk ad.
 * Art Evolution: While the show was always pretty well animated, as the series progressed the color palette became richer and the line work was stronger. Compare the look of Season 1 and the look of Season 4 and you'll see the difference.
 * Big Red Devil: The Red Guy.
 * Big Screwed-Up Family
 * Black Sheep: Cow and Chicken have a cousin named Black Sheep, who's actually a kind, smart guy. The other characters are so stupid that they mistake his big words for insults.
 * Book Dumb
 * Boot Camp Episode
 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: There are times when the characters address the viewer.
 * Brother Chuck: The Red Guy's three-headed dog pet/henchman.
 * Bumbling Dad- Cow and Chicken's dad, mom too.
 * Butt Monkey: Chicken. Especially in the episode "P.E.". The bullies in the new class at Junior High first give Chicken, Flem & Earl a bad thrashing in dodgeball, then steal their clothes while they're in the shower, and finally reveal their nudity while the three are on a stage in front of a big audience. Talk about humiliation.
 * But You Screw One Goat!: Implied on "Happy Meat" to have been the origin of Chicken.
 * Calling Me a Logarithm: Black Sheep's words are often met with this reaction.
 * Catch Phrase
 * "END!"
 * "I've been practicing and practicing and practicing, for years"
 * "Well, hello. It's me..."
 * "Supercow al reciente!"
 * "Can you be helped?"
 * "I'm sorry, I thought you was my Grandma".
 * "Is that a crime!"
 * Everyone seems to like saying "Piehole".
 * Crapsack World
 * Cross-Dressing Voices- Charlie Adler as Cow.
 * Deus Ex Machina: "Supercow al reciente!"
 * Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: Chicken once had no choice but to allow his cousin Snail to join his team for a relay race. Snail's adversaries fell into this trope. Chicken even told them they could just keep running.
 * Discretion Shot: Milking discretion shots.
 * Dressed to Heal: The Red Guy whenever he's a doctor.
 * Drill Sergeant Nasty: Sergeant Weenie Arms and The Red Guy in certain episodes.
 * Dude, Where's My Respect?: Red.
 * Edited for Syndication:
 * The episode, "Comet!" was edited in reruns to mute out the Dad yelling, "Divot!" (which sounds an awful lot like "Damn it!") when he hits the golf ball into the observatory.
 * Ironically, in the episode "Piano Lessons", Red Guy actually DOES say "damn", and for some reason, it ISN'T censored. See Getting Crap Past the Radar
 * The End: "END!"
 * Everything's Better with Chickens
 * Everything's Better with Cows
 * Evil Is Petty: The Red Guy is supposed to be Satan, yet he has nothing better to do with his time than constantly mess with a cow and a chicken (and occasionally a weasel and a baboon).
 * Expy: Mom and Dad are all too similiar to Mr. and Mrs. Pipe, Cow is a lot like Stimpy, and Chicken has some visible likeness to Ren. Also, the Red Guy and how he changes jobs and roles depending on what is needed for the plot is very much like Mr. Horse. Granted, Dave Feiss worked on The Ren and Stimpy Show, and John Kricfalusi doesn't seem to mind how much influence he took from it, openly admitting he likes Cow and Chicken.
 * Many other ex-Ren and Stimpy artists also worked on the show, such as Bob Camp and Chris Reccardi.
 * Freudian Excuse: Red had a slew of these late in the series.

""I threw my boneless cousin too high and we got stuck on the roof. And now we need... need what?""
 * Fully-Absorbed Finale: The I Am Weasel episode "Who Rubbed Out Cow and Chicken?"
 * Furry Confusion - Jesus, so much. Just read the opening.
 * Gender Bender - "Which Came First?" revolves around Chicken being convinced that he is a girl because he laid an egg (when in reality, it was just a bird egg that the Red Guy put in Chicken's bed sheets overnight as a prank). Of course, Flem and Earl jumped the gender barrier once they find out Chicken's current gender identity.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: So very, very much, but what do you expect from a show that's the Cartoon Network Expy of Ren and Stimpy (and has some of Ren and Stimpy's animators and writers)?
 * Cracked.com's The 6 Creepiest Things Ever Slipped Into Children's Cartoons mentions a great example.
 * In the episode "Piano Lessons", Red Guy brings Cow and Chicken's piano concert to a halt, to which Chicken asks him what's the problem; Red Guy responds with, "What's the problem?! WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?!! WHAT'S THE DAMN PROBLEM?!!" So... "divot" is censored because people thought it sounded like "dammit", but the actual word "damn", heard clearly, is left intact?
 * Gratuitous Spanish: Supercow and Wonder Wattle speak this.
 * Inversion - the Spanish-language version has Supercow and Wonder Wattle speaking Gratuitous English.
 * Must be some Latin-American dub, because in the European Spanish dub the Wonder Wattle speaks with a Gratuitous Mexican accent.
 * Gross-Out Show
 * Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: The Red Guy, who never wears pants. His aliases are always puns referring to his dress (Ben Pantzd) or his prodigious heinie (Mr. Derriere).
 * Hanna-Barbera
 * Happily Married- Mom and Dad seem WAY too happy.
 * I Am Not Weasel - The Red Guy often thought Chicken was a duck or turkey and Cow as a moose, horse or antelope. Weasel from the Trope Naming I Am Weasel was often referred to by The Red Guy as a squirrel, a gerbil, a ferret and several other species of rodents, despite weasels not being rodents, I.R. Baboon got this treatment too. Being often mistaken for other species of primates
 * In the episode "Duck, Duck, Chicken" The Red Guy (as a door to door doctor) thought Chicken was a Duck and surgically altered him into a non-sapient one.
 * One episode had Chicken perform a magic trick and pull Weasel out of his hat. After being referred to as a squirrel, Weasel responds, "I am not a squirrel. I am Weasel!"
 * I Have Many Names: the Red Guy. Aka Baron von Nien Lederhosen. Aka Lance sackless. Aka Seargent Wedgie Aka just Red. Most of his aliases have to do with the fact that he hardly ever wears pants(the Seargent Wedgie thing was before he faught over The Dad for the mom, at the end of which he was flung into a tree, yanking his pants off. He then said he was happy his perpetual wedgie was gone, and thanked The dad by
 * Interspecies Romance- Cow and Chicken's great grandfather was married to a non anthropomorphic hen. Try not think too hard about that.
 * One of their relatives being married to a normal sized, but talking snail.
 * Cow has some flings with human boys too, and Boneless Chicken attempts to date a human girl.
 * Inexplicably Identical Individuals - the Red Guy seems to have a lot of identical, er, "relatives," including a beige version of him known as "The Scab Fairy," who collects scabs for money the same way the Tooth Fairy (or in this show's case, the Molting Fairy) does.
 * Island Help Message: Parodied with a message that is way too long.

"Cow: Sometimes, I question their sanity."
 * Jerkass: The Red Guy
 * Ho Yay- Flem and Earl who once spent an entire episode in a bathtub together. Naked.
 * One "I Am Weasel" episode ends with Weasel telling Baboon "We must never marry," and Baboon said they should only remain good friends. It Makes Sense in Context...barely.
 * There's a lot of gender-bending and Ho Yay in this series (not as much as Time Squad, but pretty close). And the many times that Dad has alluded to the fact that he used to be a woman (or that Mom is more of a man than he is).
 * Large Ham: The Red Guy
 * World of Ham
 * Laughing Mad: Mom & Dad's laugh by default.

"Boneless: I'm serious! Boneless: What is wrong with you people?"
 * Les Yay - The banned episode "Buffalo Gals" features a gang of rowdy biker women who invade peoples' homes to literally chew their carpets.
 * Lions and Tigers and Humans, Oh My!
 * Meatgrinder Surgery - Used for plastic surgery during a plastic surgery contest.
 * Missing Episode: Besides "Buffalo Gals", the pilot episode "No Smoking" showed Chicken going to Hell for smoking cigarettes. The Red Guy is openly referred to as The Devil here.
 * Multiple Demographic Appeal
 * Naked People Are Funny: The Red Guy is portayed as both a halfdressed demon and a butt naked demon.
 * He also was a regular character on I Am Weasel as I.B. Red Guy.
 * Name and Name
 * New Transfer Student
 * No Animals Were Harmed
 * No Sense of Personal Space: Cow is ridiculously fond of her older brother, and expresses it by squeezing him tightly or even licking him. (She IS a cow, though.
 * Poorly-Disguised Pilot: Started as an episode of the "What A Cartoon" show.
 * Potty Emergency - A very strange one on the episode, "Chicken in the Bathroom," where
 * Punny Name - the Red Guy's Running Gag: Ben Panced, Ivan Panced, Rear Admiral Floyd, Bunny the Flight Attendant, Mrs. Barederriere, Louie B. Bare, The Great Pantzini, Dr. Hineybottom, Cleo-Pantless, Red Hiney, Larry Lack-A-Pants, Tallulah Bottoms, Sir Pantceroff... yeah, we get it. He's not wearing pants.
 * Mrs. Beaver, the sensitivity trainer and Lance Sackless, the referee
 * Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Parodied.
 * Raised by Humans: The basic premise. More or less.
 * Running Gag
 * Chicken keeps telling the audience he's got to be adopted.
 * Cousin Boneless asks for bones. Everyone laughs, thinking he was joking.
 * everyone laughs again *


 * Appearances of "Milk Bars", where milk is drunk like an alcoholic beverage.
 * Milk bars, you say?
 * Dad making references to either his former life as a woman or how much of a man Mom is compared to him.
 * Red referring to everyone as "men" or "ladies" almost at random.
 * Pork butts and 'taters!
 * Chicken's need for socks.
 * Satan - The pilot episode called the Red Guy "The Devil". But he's a petty moron and mostly harmless.
 * School Play - The Ugliest Weenie
 * Show Within a Show- several, one being I Am Weasel
 * "Manure the Bear! Manure the Bear! Something ain't right in his shorts that draw flies!"
 * Spin-Off - I Am Weasel
 * Stephen Ulysses Perhero: Cow and Supercow
 * Superhero- Cow's alter ego, Supercow. When Chicken dons Supercow's costume, he becomes Wonder Wattle.
 * Clark Kenting- Parodied when anyone entertains the thought that Cow and Supercow could possibly be the same cow (being the only Sentient cows in the Universe no less) that idea is always shot down by the fact that Supercow speaks Spanish.
 * Talking Animal
 * Talking to Himself - Much like Billy West, Jim Cummings, Tress MacNeille, Seth MacFarlane, Cree Summer, Kath Soucie, and other past and present cartoon voice actors, Charlie Adler voices a large amount of characters (Cow, Chicken, The Red Guy, I.R. Baboon, and some one-shot characters) who all interact with each other in any given episode.
 * Temporary Bulk Change - The Red Guy attempts to sell a product he calls 'Fat Sauce' to the kids by showing its effects on Chicken, who almost immediatly becomes fatter than Cow. Even the Red Guy is surprised it actually works.
 * The Faceless- Mom and Dad from the waist up (they actually have no upper bodies at all).
 * The Renaissance Age of Animation
 * Those Two Guys - Flem and Earl
 * Three Shorts - Alongside I Am Weasel before it spun off.
 * Toilet Humour
 * Transsexualism: Played for Laughs. Some episodes imply Dad was once female.
 * WHAT Series
 * Why Do You Keep Changing Jobs?? - The Red Guy, although there may actually be many Red Guys (as seen in "The Molting Fairy," when it's revealed that the Red Guy has a beige brother who works as The Scab Fairy). And the warden of Folsom Prison made a cameo in a story where another Red Guy had more onscreen time and the two of them appeared together. I Am Weasel had a story where a female Red Guy had three Red Guy kids.
 * The intro for Cow and Chicken has several Red Guys.
 * And when he can't get a job, he just makes one up. Office Mountie, anyone?
 * Wondrous Ladies' Room
 * Yawn and Reach- Done by Flem and Earl on Chicken in "Which Came First?"

"END"