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aka: Cracked

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Parenting is a full-time job!

If you've ever had to babysit someone's kids or are a parent yourself, you'll know that it's not easy looking after little ones. Few know that truth better than Ed, an anxious red-feathered ostrich living in the middle of the desert who spends his days devotedly tending to his brood of eight eggs. While most birds would find sitting in the desert on a nest of unhatched chicks to be a simple job, Ed has a weird way of making it the most difficult thing in the world for himself. An overprotective perfectionist cursed with the worst luck in the animal kingdom, Ed always finds himself either causing or encountering problems that threaten the safety of his precious eggs, and thus puts himself through all kinds of pain to keep all eight of his eggs from being turned into a pile of splattered yolk and shell. But thankfully, his brood seems to have it much better off than him, and no matter what sort of suffering Ed goes through to protect his eggs, he can always be assured that they'll always come out completely safe in the end.

Cracked (known as Cracké in French) is a 2016 Canadian All-CGI Cartoon produced by Squeeze Studio, an animation studio based in Quebec City specializing in 3D animation. Consisting of 52 one-minute shorts, the series originally aired on Teletoon in its native country as interstitials during commercial breaks but has been broadcast in over 200 countries and territories, thanks to its shortness, lack of spoken dialogue, zany slapstick humor, and high-quality CGI animation giving it universal appeal and multi-platform potential. Indeed, the series has acquired over 400 million views on digital platforms worldwide and spawned both a mobile platform game and a mobile animated comic book. Official compilations of episodes can be found online on Youtube.

Not to be confused with a humor website and magazine or a 2013 Canadian crime drama series that aired on CBC.


Cracked provides examples of:

  • All-CGI Cartoon: Being a creation of Squeeze Studio, Cracked is animated entirely in 3D.
  • Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Ed is a ostrich with bright red feathers, rather than the black-and-white ones that real-life male ostriches have.
  • Amusing Injuries: Ed frequently gets injured for comedy in his efforts to protect his eggs, although given the nature of the shorts, even his gravest injuries have no impact on his ability to protect his brood and nearly all of them are very comically over-the-top in nature.
  • Born Unlucky: Nothing ever goes right for Ed, which is why he always ends up having to save his eggs from various predicaments. Thankfully for him, his eggs seem to have the opposite luck and always come out safe.
  • Butt-Monkey: Ed. His terrible luck and neurotic personality lead to tons of misfortune for him, and he frequently endangers his eggs through his own tendency to overthink things.
  • The Chew Toy: Ed. Most of the show's humor comes from the absurd and over-the-top ways in which he gets injured while protecting his eggs.
  • Eye Scream: One of the more common forms of injury Ed tends to suffer from. Many shorts will have his eyeballs pop out of his skull, blinding his body and forcing his eyeballs to act on their own.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be: A couple shorts see Ed get sliced in half, only for the two halves of his body to continue running around.
  • Informed Species: Ed doesn't look particularly ostrich-like, as he has red plumage and a yellow, more parrot-like beak. And then there's the fact that he lives in a desert instead of the African plains.
  • Iron Butt-Monkey: Ed will put himself through uncountable forms of pain and suffering to protect his eggs for the amusement of the viewers, but he always ultimately succeeds in his goals.
  • Losing Your Head: Happens frequently to Ed, which usually results in his body blindly fumbling around while his head tries to protect the eggs.
  • Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: Asides from the occasional squawk or screech from Ed, none of the 52 shorts feature any verbal dialogue.
  • Mushroom Samba: A fruit does this to Ed in Buzz-Ed, After swallowing it Ed severly trips out, hallucinating an eye in the sky, materializing cacti, and changing colors.
  • Never Smile at a Crocodile: A significant number of shorts involve Ed having to protect his eggs from hungry crocodiles.
  • Organ Autonomy: Ed's body can perfectly function without a head and move on it's own. It's also shown that Ed can detach his own body parts and have them move independently from himself.
  • Papa Wolf: Ed will do anything to keep his eggs safe, even if it means risking his life to fight predators, letting himself take blows that would kill him in real life, and even sacrificing his own body parts. And the best part is that he always succeeds in saving his eggs.
  • Pulling Themselves Together: Ed's body parts have a tendency to fall off his body as a result of the slapstick he goes through, but Ed nonetheless finds ways to make things work, thanks to their cartoonish autonomy.
  • Rhino Rampage: Rhinos are another hazard that Ed frequently faces. Strangely they can be found in trees and in one case can hatch from eggs.
  • Toon Physics: A prominent part of the series. Numerous shorts feature Ed performing cartoonish feats of body contortion to save his eggs or being injured in ridiculous manners.
  • Wild Take: In true Zany Cartoon fashion, Ed tends to pull these whenever his eggs are in danger.

Alternative Title(s): Cracked

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