gaijin88 When I first saw this show, I thought it was marginally funny, but very PC. Then one morning before work I caught an episode that tried to depict Joseph Stalin and his crimes in a humorous light. How do you make light of someone who sent millions to their deaths in the Gulag? Of course, they would never try the same thing with Hitler, but it's OK if it's a communist murderer. What's next, cartoons about Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il, etc.? The people who wrote this episode are probably the same idiots who are now going around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts without even knowing or caring about Guevara's crimes.

Randall Bart Hysteria is a cross between a cartoon show and a history class: Like a cartoon it doesn't inform, and like a history class it doesn't amuse. Okay, that wasn't true all the time, but it was true too often. Sometimes it goes a long time between gags because it's trying to teach, but it's dull and loses the audience. It has too many factual errors (and gags that a child can misinterpret as fact) to be considered educational. It screws up facts that can easily be done right, like a map of the USA as of 1861 which shows the Pacific coast, but doesn't show California and Oregon as states. It's a great concept, but hard to do right, and they didn't put the detail work into doing it right.

mrc1149 This show was so funny, I mean it's even funny in another language! This show was my favorite for so long like one year but the way they took historical characters and made it funny took talent. Trust me there was a lot of talent in this show and it showed because many, many children enjoyed it and they learned from it.

Victor Field This attempt to mix history with comedy in cartoon form didn't quite work, though not for lack of trying. Tom Ruegger and Co filled the series with too many characters (as listed in the opening song by Ruegger and the late Richard Stone) - Father Time, Big Fat Baby, Loud Kiddington, Pepper Mills, Charity Bazaar, Aka Pella, Toast, Miss Information, Froggo, World's Oldest Woman... and they all basically had to take a back seat to whichever people, places and things were at the heart of that particular episode. Of course, "Animaniacs" and "Tiny Toon Adventures" had a ton of characters as well, but they weren't all seen every week.This was pretty funny, but in at least one instance (the episode featuring slavery and the Underground Railroad) the need to educate overtook the need to entertain - I think this had more to do with the subject matter than the country it was in, as the series was overall just as irreverent about American history as the rest of the world's. But it did strike an odd note. (And this may be the only animated series to turn Lizzie Borden into a comic figure - nothing like playing a murderess for laughs to win over the kiddies, eh?)"Histeria!" is neither the best animated series from Warners (although it's still better than "Road Rovers" or "The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries") nor the best historical animated series (France's "Once Upon A Time..." shows beat this hands down), but until I get a chance to see if the "Schoolhouse Rock" shows are as good as they reportedly are this'll do. And it certainly beats "The Magic School Bus," even if the latter does have Little Richard singing the theme song.