When it comes to any cartoon show, you become adjusted to the style it has. You can understand a shift between seasons because the budget either got higher or lower, I'd say outsourcing has something to do with it but only half the time.
But what if for one episode, we're given something that looks borderline unfamiliar, not necessarily bad, but certainly different. I'm gonna go over a collection of episodes that have noticeably different animation styles that only happened in the one episode.
Note, I won't include pilot episodes that were otherwise unedited or were shown first, this is more about whiplash than anything else.
Rocko's Modern Life: Trash o' Madness
Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way. I'm well aware this is a repurposing of the show's pilot, but imagine if you have watched the entirety of Rocko up to this point and you catch this episode, you'd be thinking something is off. It seems the staff were feeling a little lazy at this point, as rather than redo the episode from scratch, they just decided to mix it with some new footage, and edit the pilot stuff to get Rocko to his definitive color scheme.
Let's be honest, it's incredibly obvious parts of these are different from the other. Aside from that it keeps with the spirit the show became established on, nothing more to say about it, but I kinda wanted to see what it would've been like if they redid the entire episode from scratch.
Not to mention funnily enough even by production order this wouldn't be the first episode, that honor goes to Carnival Knowledge, just thought I'd let you know.
Evil Con Carne: Ultimate Evil
Until this point, each season of Evil Con Carne had some level of consistency, both building off of the visual aesthetics of the style Maxwell Atoms created before giving this a shinier look, something The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy would do later on.
This episode was considered part of the first season, but technically was the second to last episode ever produced. It can be considered a transition between the visual styles both seasons have, we got the first season designs, but Dr. Ghastly has a look that seems to be a cross between what was normal for her in that season and what would be in the next, I dunno she looks weird when you pay enough attention.
Other than that this episode is nothing special. Only thing I can point out is that General Skarr had a surprisingly consistent visual appearance, even going as far back as the pilot, with Ghastly coming in second and Boskov in third as he technically had the most drastic.
Ren and Stimpy: It's a Dog's Life
I talked about this episode beforehand, but it bears re-discussion for the sake of this little list. This was one of two episodes to have been outsourced to Wang Film Productions. Other episodes were done in Canada, namely Lacewood Productions and Carbunkle Cartoons. Funnily enough, while Lair of the Lummox looks close to what was normal for the show at the time, when you really take a deeper look at the episode you can see some big differences.
These can mostly be seen on Ren, who does a bunch of cutesy looks otherwise not common in other episodes, notably in the first limo scene and his encounter with the late Ezekiel. It's funny how people consider this a bad episode, when it looks different enough to be something that can be called well out of its scope.
SpongeBob SquarePants: Hooky/Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy II
I get they hired a different overseas team for this one episode, but think about it. This is the only episode in the first season to be animated like this, and at least one episode happened to be the worst episode in the entire season, no matter what many simps will make you believe. It's an example of an episode that goes too far on teaching someone a lesson, and a big reason why I could care less about comeuppance.
Unless some people get a sick thrill out of humiliation.
The b-segment was good though.
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