When it comes to kids’ entertainment, the Disney Channel has had a reputation for wholesome content, while Nickelodeon is generally associated with the weird, gross, and crazy. Not that there was anything wrong with that! As kids, we loved Nick for bringing us TV shows tailored to our sense of humor. But there were a few times when a Nickelodeon show left us wondering, “What the heck did I just watch?”

Everyone knows SpongeBob, Rugrats, All That, and the many other series that made Nickelodeon one of the best channels for kids. For every success, however, several shows didn’t catch on. Looking back at these forgotten shows, it’s easy to see that their wackiness often crossed over into straight-up surreal or downright annoying territory.

Here are six Nick shows that you’d forgotten about and probably thought were just a fever dream because of how totally out-there they were.

1. Cousin Skeeter (1998-2002)
2. Mr. Meaty (2005-2009)
3. Oh Yeah! Cartoons (1998-2002)
4. Kablam! (1996-2000)
5. Tak and the Power of Juju (2007-2009)
6. Fred: The Show (2012)

Cousin Skeeter (1998-2002)

Cousin Skeeter feels a bit like Nick wanted to recreate the success of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for a younger audience, and so they took a similar premise and threw in a puppet. Kids like puppets, right? The show never acknowledges that Skeeter is a puppet; he’s just “short.” Why? No one really knows.

Skeeter moves to New York to live with his uncle, aunt, and cousin, Bobby. He tends to get into trouble, leaving Bobby to clean up the mess. And Skeeter just happens to know a bunch of famous people from the ’90s like MC Lyte and Shaquille O’Neal. It might have seemed strange at first, but the show actually also provided important Black representation on TV.

Mr. Meaty (2005-2009)

Another Nick series with puppets was Mr. Meaty, but while Cousin Skeeter was strange, this show was just grotesque. The puppet designs look gross, and the events in each episode are even grosser. Dave Stopera from Buzzfeed wrote an article about this series and titled it “For Everyone Who’s Scarred For Life Because of Mr. Meaty.” Yeah, when you have a show that caused kids literal trauma from watching it, it’s probably best to take it off the air.

Mr. Meaty is about two teenage fast-food workers and the many strange and sometimes supernatural adventures they have while on the clock. These adventures involve cannibalism, demons, (puppet) nudity, and plenty of innuendo. The most traumatizing episode, though, was “Moochmaster P,” when Parker eats a tapeworm. It’s honestly best if you’ve repressed all memory of this one.

Oh Yeah! Cartoons (1998-2002)

Oh Yeah! Cartoons was actually an amazing concept that allowed quite a few animators to get their work produced. It was an anthology series that featured several cartoon shorts per episode. A few of the cartoon shorts were even popular enough to become series of their own, like The Fairly OddParents, My Life as a Teenage Robot, and ChalkZone.

Oh Yeah! Cartoons was all sorts of weird because episodes were made up of several shorts that were created by different teams. The show is considered TV’s biggest animation development program ever, with nearly 100 cartoon shorts featured in the series. Some of the weirdest cartoons featured a jacked Santa, a sentient donut, and a knock-off Mother Goose who twisted fairy-tales to be far more disturbing.

Kablam! (1996-2000)

Kablam! was another anthology series that used multiple animation styles, but it felt more like a sketch-comedy show like All That or The Amanda Show. It was hosted by two animated kids, Henry and June, who would introduce the different sketches.

Some of Kablam!‘s most random and crazy sketches were Prometheus and Bob, a stop-motion tale about an alien and a caveman; Action League Now!, another stop-motion animation about a league of superhero action figures; and Sniz and Fondue, a traditional animated tale about two ferret brothers.

Tak and the Power of Juju (2007-2009)

Do you remember how a bunch of ’80s cartoons were really just created to sell toys and merchandise? It seems like Nickelodeon had a similar idea when it came to their series, Tak and the Power of Juju. The show was based on the video game of the same title, and THQ, the company that made the game, worked with Nick to produce the show.

Tak and the Power of Juju follows an apprentice to the village shaman, Tak, who must use his magic to fix all the trouble he gets himself into. It only ran for one season, so it seems like THQ and Nickelodeon didn’t quite achieve their goal of getting more kids into their video game through the show.

Fred: The Show (2012)

Maybe you somehow managed to avoid seeing FRED (Lucas Cruikshank) on YouTube, but Nickelodeon wasn’t about to let you be “deprived” for long. Nick collaborated with Cruikshank to make three Fred movies and the series about one of the most annoying characters to exist.

In Fred: The Show, Fred Figglehorn is a sixteen-year-old now, though he’s maintained his high-pitched chipmunk voice and hyperactivity. Even if you were a Fred fan as a kid, it is a struggle to get through more than a few seconds of it as an adult. It’s a bit like Blippi on speed. The show got 24 episodes, but was cancelled the same year it was released because of low ratings.