Eek! The Cat
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Some Saturday mornings were built on a dare. A chubby purple cat with the world’s worst luck, a motto that reads “it never hurts to help,” and a running habit of getting shredded, flattened and hurled through solid objects for the crime of being nice. Eek! The Cat ran on Fox Kids from 1992 to 1997, five seasons of pain-comedy so committed to getting its hero hurt that Cartoon Network later reran it like a dare of its own.
The trick that keeps it watchable now is that Eek is not stupid, he is optimistic. Every episode asks how many times a good heart can be destroyed in 22 minutes and answers, honestly, a lot. Around him the show stacks segments like a variety bill: The Thunderlizards, two dim cavemen-slaying dinosaurs who never land a punch, plus a running parade of parodies that skewered Beverly Hills 90210 and The Untouchables before you could change the channel.
It also had a heart episode that still gets brought up: the AIDS storyline it gave a beloved character in 1992, on a kids’ block, at the height of the panic. Nobody else on Saturday morning touched that subject, and it aged far better than most of the shows that mocked it.
Getting to it is the annoying part. No streamer carries it right now; the catalog shelves have it buried behind DVD sets and occasional free-channel rotations. If it pops up on your free app, press play. If you hunt it down anyway, that says you already know it is worth it. Our score: 7.5/10.
