Nostalgia Trip: Cartoon Network Groovies Vol. 3

Last week on Nostalgia Trip I brought you a second helping of Cartoon Groovies with all the Powerpuff goodness you could handle. This week, keeping with the theme of our Groovies collection, we'll be taking a look at the videos that were based around the brainiac boy with beats. I'm talking of course of the Dexter's Lab Groovies.

They Might Be Giants - Dee Dee and Dexter

Remember when Dee-Dee and Dexter turned in to '60s anime characters? Yeah me neither. For whatever reason the show that was the most Hip-Hop centered with its groovies decided a parody of old style anime accompanied the soft rock style of They Might Be Giants was going to be cool. Maybe it was for the robots or maybe because the staff members wanted something new to spank it to, but this video is a hidden gem I didn't remember at all until I found it.

Dexter's Lab - Back to the Lab again

Finally, good raps about a white kid. Following in the trend that was always fun to see is Dexter's apparent lineage to hip-hop, sick beats, and dope tracks. And no other prime example exists that shows this more than the video that seemed like it was played every hour on the hour, Back to the Lab again. 

Though this was brought to us during the...darker age of Dexter's Lab, we still get to enjoy all those fresh rhymes and robots and shit. Honestly it was one of the more iconic groovies out there. It just seemed Dexter got the best ones consistently. It's catchy, the verses work great, and the music video incorporates show elements as a collage of random crap. What else can I say except we're going back to the lab again. OH NO!

Coolio - Dexter (What's his name?)

They got mother fucking Coolio up in this bitch. Seriously, that's how big and influential Cartoon Network got. They managed to get one of the biggest names in hip-hop (at the time) to come in to do a track for them. And it blew our little minds.

Arguably though, this is a really crappy Coolio song. It doesn't last long at all, it's simple even for his lyrics, and it just sounds phoned in. However the fact that Coolio actually performed on stage in from of all our favorite characters made it so we didn't care at all. The only thing we knew is that Coolio was in the cartoon world and making the Kanker sisters and Dee Dee piss themselves from screaming. Truly epic and unforgettable, even if the song really is.

Will.I.Am - Secret Formula

I'm going to go ahead and say it. This is the best groovie Cartoon Network ever put out. This was a song I found in a cereal prize after seeing it on TV, downloading it to the family computer, and jamming out to it. If there was any song that was a gateway to hip-hop (at least the minimal amount I listen to), this would be it. It's that damn good.

Will.I.Am, who would later see major success with The Black-Eyed Peas and then immediately drift in to obscurity, kills every second of this song and it's something I never forgot about. I still have the mp3 somewhere and I've frequently sought this song out to listen to it. Kick ass jams, Dexter at DJ, and a word that sounds like "fuck," what more could a kid ask for? Pure early '00s music video style usually doesn't  age well, but some how it did here. It's as entertaining as it was when I first got a mini CD in my Fruit Loops all those years ago. 

sad, sad nostalgia feels

Nostalgia: It was fun then and it's fun to revisit. Join us next time on Nostalgia Trip for the fourth volume of Cartoon Network Groovies and the kind of thoughts and comments that make men want to move to Canada.