Aaahh!!! Real Monsters is a show I think a lot of people forget but if you ask me I think this is the show that might have inspired the Monster Inc. movies from Pixar. The story is set in New York and follows the adventures of three young monsters attending a monster academy in one of the city’s landfills that teaches monsters how to be scary. We have Ickis your classic slacker who’s pretty skiddish but actually does make a capable leader of the group. We’re told his dad is a famous scarer so Ickis feels burden and overshadowed by his father’s greatness because everyone expects him to be like his dad. We have Oblina the class rep who is considered the best student and is somewhat of a shape shifter and finally Krumm Ickis’ best friend who’s main tool of scaring people is using his eyes that he carries around and his incredible armpit stench. In the show the three go out trying to scare the good people of New York and report their scares to the academy’s headmaster The Gromble who I have to admit was my favorite character because of his bipolar personality. Another funny aspect of the show that I liked was the monsters are scared of cute and clean things like Teddy Bears, soap, and other stuff. That’s actually a pretty interesting concept.
One of the best features of the show was the animation. For its time the animation was pretty good and I love all the monsters they showed us, these are some of the most created monsters I’ve seen and they’re voiced by some good voice actors who went on to do big things. Like the voice of Ickis is Charlie Adler the voice of Starscream in the Transformer movies, Oblina is Christine Cavanaugh the voice of Gosalyn from Darkwing Duck, and there’s even two monsters voiced by Jim Belushi and Tim Curry. While the show was decent and had a lot of created stories I think the reason why the show wasn’t as popular or well-remembered as the other shows at the time was because it wasn’t really sure what humor they wanted to do. Their humor was a like a cross between the Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy, and The Simpsons. It was like the Rugrats in that the characters would often discover a few new ways to scare people by finding human items that they don’t really understand. In one episode Ickis finds a thrown away remote controlled helicopter and uses that as a tool to scare people and in another episode the characters find a box full of old western movies and begin to act like cowboys to scare people. It’s actually kind of funny to see them use our everyday items to scare us. It was like Ren and Stimpy in that it was trying to be grotesque just like them with the monsters liking to eat trash, other nasty things, and using clipped off toenails as currency. Yeah, apparently toenails is like gold to monsters and there’s one episode where Ickis finds a whole jar of them and becomes the riches monster at the academy. It was like The Simpsons in that they were trying to have their comedic and clever writing but ultimately failing on that end. While it’s good they were trying to appeal to all audiences in the end when you try to copy all these popular shows you kind of lose the comedic appeal you want to get across. Like am I supposed to find them eating trash and enjoying it disturbingly funny because it’s gross or am I supposed to find it clever and funny because they’re monsters and this is what they do? Stuff like that, you’re really unsure what comedic effect they’re trying to convey to us. But despite this the show did have a creative premise in showing us that no matter what we are whether we be kids or adults, life is gonna give you hard times and it’s how you response and act in those hard times that defines who you are. Aaahh!! Real Monsters may not have been the most remembered of the Nicktoons at the time but it was a decent show that showed us it’s fun to scare people and doing it takes a lot more effort than we think.