Right now, there’s little doubt that Cartoon Network is the king of all-ages animated television. With Adventure Time having become a cultural phenomenon rivaled in its arena only by SpongeBob Squarepants and numerous other outstanding shows (Steven Universe, The Amazing World of Gumball) providing the programming lineup with some depth, CN has been not just the most successful cartoon-focused channel of the past few years, but also one of the most successful channels overall. In 2015, it showed the strongest viewership growth out of any basic cable network in the 18-49 demographic and also topped the 6-11 demographic for the first time.

So now’s as good a time as any to look back on an era when the network’s future was uncertain and to reminisce about its first classic show: Dexter’s Laboratory, which premiered 20 years ago this week and set the standard for the clever writing, pop culture savvy, and iconic characters that have defined Cartoon Network ever since.

When it was acquired by CN in the mid-1990s, Hanna-Barbera Studios was mired in a major slump; since The Smurfs went off the air in 1990, it had produced no hit series and had fallen far behind competitors like Nickelodeon, Warner Bros. Animation, and Disney. This was the heyday of Animaniacs, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, and other paragons of the era’s animation renaissance, and Hanna-Barbera had nothing new to offer; by extension, the fledgling Cartoon Network had hardly any exciting programming aside from reruns of old classics like Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and Scooby-Doo.

That changed in 1995, when, under the leadership of Fred Seibert, Hanna-Barbera unleashed a flurry of 48 animated shorts called the What a Cartoon! series. A throwback to the golden age of animation, it was essentially an incubator for creator-driven cartoons, and with the animators themselves offered a tremendous amount of control (including the rights to their characters), a tremendous number of ideas were submitted for the series’ coveted slots. While the What a Cartoon! program itself represented a step forward for Cartoon Network, its more important function was to serve as a platform for pilots—with the exception of Ed, Edd N Eddy and Courage the Cowardly Dog, all of the “Cartoon Cartoons” that comprised CN’s now-classic lineup of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s got their start as What a Cartoon! shorts. Dexter’s Laboratory won a popular vote among the first 16 shorts to air, and was then given the green light to develop into a full series. Creator Genndy Tartakovsky assembled his cast and crew, the show premiered in its own right on April 28, 1996, and the rest, as they say, is history.