Creepy stopmotion short/man and a mantis fighting(CN EUROPE)

Hi all, sorry it took me a long time to reply, I don't check this forum super often.



Thanks for the suggestion. I've skimmed through a bunch of his stuff on YouTube and haven't found it in there so far, but I'll keep looking. I do notice that almost all of it is in black and white, and the short I'm looking for was definitely in full color.





It definitely would have aired no earlier than 1999 and no later than 2001, since that's when this specific version of Cartoon Network was available to me. I think it aired around 11 PM. The promo featured a night vision goggles effect with the camera scanning across this building; I think the idea was that it was a mysterious vault where all these cartoons were being kept. As I said before, I think it aired twice, because I have a vague memory of wanting to stay up to see the other shorts the second time and failing, so both times I pretty much just got to see the mantis one. It would've been one of the first ones in the special.

The only other short I can remember anything about is an even vaguer memory, because I woke up during it and then turned the TV off since it didn't look too interesting and I didn't want to get caught watching TV in the middle of the night. It was like a storybook sort of thing with still images being shown over narration by a soothing male voice, I think British. I think the images were all laid over this old wall or something, it gave it kind of an Ancient Egyptian vibe. Sadly that's all I remember--I didn't understand English nearly as well at the time and there were no subtitles, so it was hard to follow.

I've tried to find the title of the special by using the Wayback Machine, but not a lot of the old cartoonnetwork.nl site remains, so I only found a few broadcast schedules. One of them listed something called "CulToons", but I think that's a different program showing old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I found a promo of that a little while ago, but unfortunately a lot of the old CN continuity stuff people upload on YouTube and Dailymotion gets taken down.

If you mean that's where I saw it, that's not possible. Adult Swim didn't exist in the Netherlands (I was gonna say it never existed, but apparently it did for a little while in the early 2010s. Learn something new every day.)

Not in there as far as I can tell. But that wiki seems really US-focused, and we didn't have the same blocks over here. Besides, I'm positive this wasn't a regular block, it was a special event.

Another bump with a little bit of info:

Obviously it is not a ToonHeads thing as we can now conclude. However, while looking for stuff I stumbled upon "AKA Cartoon Network" and its segment "Cult Toons", which is also a thing I saw once on late-night CN back in the day and then could never find again. As it turns out, it was made in the UK, so perhaps that's why a lot of people don't know about it since they think of CN as being a purely American thing.

This makes me think that maybe the mysterious special also originated in the UK, and it might be somewhat easier to find clues searching for something from the UK than from the Netherlands. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything conclusive yet. The Wayback Machine unfortunately doesn't have old UK CN schedules archived because of how the site was coded, and simply looking through uploads of old UK CN content hasn't brought me anything. But I'm certain it's out there...