Now this is a thread I can sink my teeth into.
I grew up watching the classics: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett. We had a local independent TV station that would run like 3 hours of Tom and Jerry, Droopy, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies every afternoon. It was glorious. I'm extending that on to my kids with the umpteen gigs of cartoons on the HD. My daugher is already a Tex Avery fan.
While perusing Netflix, she also got into a Fat Albert binge, which is just bizarre. I mean, I saw it when it was still relatively new, and even then I could sort of tell that I wasn't the intended audience.
Other cartoons I remember from early childhood:
Journey to the Center of the Earth (Filmation) -- I distinctly remember being pissed because this got interrupted by the news because some guy named Reagan had been shot.
Heckle & Jeckle -- Funny as a kid, kind of wince-inducing as an adult.
The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show -- I was never a huge fan of the main show, but the assorted cartoons that came with it were awesomesauce: Peabody's Improbable History, Fractured Fairy Tales, Aesop & Son and The World of Commander McBragg. Dudley Do-Right was meh. But I think the whole "playing with history" thing about Peabody & Sherman and Commander McBragg...that really appealed to me. And the bad puns. Oh dear god, the bad puns....
Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales -- actually a subsidiary toon of the Underdog show, but I preferred this to Underdog. In many ways a precursor to Pinky and the Brain: a bright, scheming (but often nonsensical) talking animal comes up with convoluted plans (which invariably fail) with the assistance of his dim-witted sidekick.
Then during the 80's, there was Saturday mornings (and afternoon TV). Too many to list, so I'll just rattle off some favorites:
Dungeons & Dragons
Mighty Orbots
Inhumanoids
The Adventures of the Gummi Bears
The Real Ghostbusters!
Thundercats
Silverhawks (which was basically Thundercats IN SPAAAAACE!)
TigerSharks (which was both of the above...IN WATER!)
Dragon's Lair/Space Ace
G.I. Joe (kind of mandatory)
Transformers (ditto)
Voltron (ditto)
US Acres (the side-run with Garfield and Friends...actually better than Garfield for the most part)
DuckTales
Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers
TaleSpin
He-Man
Muppet Babies (say what you will, it had better-than-average writing, especially the pop culture parody stuff)
Robotix (mostly existed as a animated pitch for the toysets...which I had)
Super Friends (the Wonder Twins--making the fistbump cool decades before their time)
We didn't have cable, so I only rarely caught gems like Dangermouse and Count Duckula.
Then came the 90's. Things got more ironic, hipper, edgier. I spent many, many hours in college watching:
Duckman
Animaniacs
Tiny Toons
Rocko's Modern World
The Maxx
Aeon Flux
2 Stupid Dogs
Cow and Chicken (and its spinoff, I.M. Weasel)
The Critic
Daria
Dexter's Laboratory
Gargoyles
The Tick
Pirates of Darkwater
Courage the Cowardly Dog
Histeria! (an oft-overlooked gem from the same team that did Tiny Toons and Animaniacs...had the same "fucked-up history" vibe as Peabody and Sherman or Commander McBragg)
Seriously...I remember two snippets of Histeria that absolutely sold me on this show. The first was a segment on Leonardo DaVinci, called "Renaissance Man" where he was basically the medieval version of Batman, using contraptions that he designed and built. The second was a segment on
Sherman's march to the sea. On a fucking
kid's cartoon. And it was done as cross between a Ken Burns documentary...and Pee-Wee's Playhouse. With your host, Pee-Wee Sherman. ("The secret word of the day is...TOTAL WAR!")