Buffalo Gals won't you come out tonight?

Anybody else remember Cow and Chicken? It's a bizarre cartoon from the late nineties that sprung from a anti smoking short featured on the What A Cartoon cavalcade, a format that launched many fan favorites including Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Lab and the sketch that would later evolve into Family Guy.

The show itself is littered with double entendres, absurdist humor and was no stranger to the odd controversy. There have been a few Cartoon Network produced shows with banned episodes in the past, including a famous episode of Power Puff Girls in which they fight a communism spreading gnome, yes, that is a thing and even several episodes of Adventure Time have received bans and heavy edits in certain country's.

But years before that Cow and Chicken set the benchmark with a banned episode with a premise that flew right over my head as a kid, it's about a gang of bikers, all female, that burst into your house and eat your carpet. 

You got it? Right? Yup, lesbian biker gang. Is it funny? Not really. Is it something the kids will understand?  *shrugs* I didn't as a kid. Is it worthy of it's ban? Lets delve into the thick of it and you can decide for yourself.

The episode starts with the characters having breakfast just as the Buffalo Gals, a gang of short haired, muscular  female bikers burst in the door and get to work, eating carpet. 

Cow then approaches one of the bikers and asks who they are, referring to a biker as 'sir' and after a brief exchange Cow is given a calling card from one of the bikers called 'Munch Kelly', the card also featuring two female Venus symbols. Cow then ventures out on her tricycle to join the gang at a flaming fortress in the woods, they then proceed to sing sing the song of their name sake and frequently repeat the line 'come out tonight'.

After Chicken is discovered spying on the group for Cows safety the group declare in chorus 'we hate chicken' and the proceed to use Chicken as the ball in a game of baseball, a scene I'm sure is just there so they can make a terrible pitcher and catcher joke as well as the double bagger gag. After Cow attacks the gang in her Super Cow disguise in an effort to save chicken the episode ends abruptly when she flies out of scene and another recurring character, The Red Guy (a naked devil), reveals that there is a moral to this story, but it's a secret.

So yeah, that's six minutes and fifty two seconds of Cow and Chicken in a nutshell, do they ever outrightly state that the Buffalo Gals are lesbians? Well no, but they throw enough stereotypes in there to drown a Michael Bay movie and I'm pretty sure the hating Chicken thing is either a reference to the hating men stereotype or the hating cock(rel) stereotype, but that's for you to decide.

You can still find the episode on YouTube if you look hard enough, I definitely wouldn't recommend it for the younglings. If I was a parent I certainly wouldn't want to cloud kids minds with these offensive stereotypes and gags, but it is an interesting example of what used to be able to get past the Cartoon Network quality control back in the day. 

Be sure to come back next week when we dive into the story one of my personal favorite characters, Robert Kirkman's Monster Girl.