Work in progress, this shrine should have the stylesheet different than Lankarta Project page.
Last update: 28th August 2025

Back to shrines ←

Examples of urbanism in silly cartoons and other shows

There was a bunch of memorable cities in various cartoons. I'm not going to watch all of them to get a proper characteristic and context of each fictional city as I don't have time and they are too silly to watch them thoroughly. I'd rather give my faint memories of some of the more memorable places that played significant role in the stories for kids.

Ed, Edd and Eddy - Peach Creek: cul-de-sac and suburbian utopia

I don't really know how to explain why I like that Ed Show so much. One of the reason, but definitely not the most important one, was that iconic Cul-de-Sac all the kids were living on. If the show was meant to be suburban living propaganda by some overseeing agency of Canada, I'm falling for it.

One of the most memorable episode and highly relevant to that shrine was Edtropolis in which the Eds crafted very convincing big city vibe out of just one 'street' full of cardboard skyscrapers.

Spaced Out - flat Earth space station

This show about floating space station managed by an omnipresent evil 'K' corporation and populated by a two families was always very weird for me and when I tried to research it a bit now, even weirder. The whole character and animation style is so distorted and unappealing for some reason, so it definitely wasn't my favourite show. That space station however caught my imagination as a map nerd kid and now after all those years I realised how crazy that idea is.

Recreating in space a full blown suburb with single family houses and lawns for just a bunch of untrained people would be insanely cost inefficient for any company that would want to convey such experiment. Also how the gravity supposed to work on that thing is a mystery for me and I'm not bothering to watch all the episodes or research it diligently enough to find explanation.

Thomas The Tank Engine - rail transport in Sodor Island

I haven't watched that much of the funnny show with trains with faces but it caught my attention because of this episode of John Oliver story and then I found out about this fun map of Island of Sodor that is a fictional Isle between Liverpool and Isle of Man.

Powerpoof Girls - Townsville: every American city ever

...even though the real Townsville is in Queensland, Australia. The city of Townsville felt like very happy version of Gotham.

Pat and Mat... and that's It! - Czechoslovakia at its finest

I don't know why I wanted to say anything about the place where "The Neighbours" (as in Poland the show was called) were living. I guess I just vividly remember that typical socialist architecture of their detached houses.

Postman Pat - Stone walls on every road

There are two possible explanations for this: either the animators recreated the typical British hilly village or they made those stone walls everyway so they didn't have to animate the rolling of the wheels of Pat's van. Anyway, I liked the show, very cozy and that postman's red van was super cool and rectangular.

Smurfs - Critique of Le Corbusier in Smurfs' Village

Smurfs was quite enjoyable show on TV, it was aired back in early 00's in national Polish television channel TVP 1 at 7PM and was meant to make kids go watch it and then sleep.

Anyway, the episode that I remember in particular was about the large apartment building, called Smurfominium, that meant to be one giant home for all smurfs. It turned out to be bad idea from the same reasons as to why many people don't like to live in unrenovated commie blocks that are still present in Polish cities.

Codename: Kids Next Door

That tree that they were living was so massive in comparison to the rest of the urban area it always blew my mind.

Koala Brothers

The setting of that fun little show that for some time was a staple show of Polish television line-up at 7PM (famous 'Wieczorynka' - the kids' evening show) has nothing to do to urbanism as the inhabitants were living in a small community in the middle of Australian desert. I'm mentioning it however as it was the first show ever that made me think about commuting via plane and that in some real life cases it's actually possible.