February 1, 1999 – April 1, 2000
Crashbox is a stop-motion animated edutainment children's television series co-created by Eamon Harrington and John Watkin for HBO Family that ran from 1999 to 2000 in the United States. It was HBO's second series (their first being Braingames 15 years earlier) focusing on educational skits.
Crashbox was one of the original programs for the relaunch of the HBO Family channel in February 1999. Although it has never been released on physical media like DVD or VHS, it was consistently rerun on HBO Family until the removal of its children's block in 2024 and is found on various streaming services.
Summary
The show takes place in the insides of a game computer where green game cartridges (which are sculpted out of clay) are created and loaded by rusty tin robots- occasionally with short sketches of them "repairing" damaged games. The format of each episode is The Electric Company-esque, with sketches not connecting to each other nor following a sequential plot. Each half-hour episode consists of seven 2-to-5-minute educational games, and occasionally an eighth bonus game, covering subjects like history, math, spelling, and nature.