The cast included heroic colleagues such as Bat-Bat and his sidekick Tick the Bug Wonder and the League of Super-Rodents,[3] and introduced antagonists like Petey Pate, Big Murray, Madame Marsupial and the Cow.

The tone of the show was much more irreverent than previous incarnations; the character of Bat-Bat, for example, was a bat who dressed as Batman and drove the "Man-Mobile" – a human-looking car with legs instead of wheels.

Some episodes offered parodies of shows like The Honeymooners ("Mighty's Wedlock Whimsy") and the 1960s Batman series ("Night of the Bat-Bat" and "Bat with a Golden Tongue"); movies like Fantastic Voyage ("Mundane Voyage"); Japanese monster films (the opening of "Mighty's Wedlock Whimsy"); and comic books ("See You in the Funny Papers").

The series resurrected other Terrytoons characters, but acknowledged the passage of time: perennial menace Oil Can Harry returns to chase Pearl Pureheart once more ("Still Oily After All These Years"), the 1940s characters Gandy Goose and Sourpuss and the 1960s character Deputy Dawg are revived (with Gandy and Dawg frozen in time in blocks of ice) in "The Ice Goose Cometh", "Gaston Le Crayon" has a cameo ("Still Oily After All These Years") and Bakshi's own 1960s creations the Mighty Heroes appear, aged, in the episode "Heroes and Zeroes".

In April 1987, Bakshi set up a meeting with Judy Price, the head of CBS's Saturday morning block.

Price rejected Bakshi's prepared pitches, including one featuring John Kricfalusi's Ren & Stimpy characters,[4] but asked what else he had.

They ended up hiring Jeff Pidgeon, Rich Moore, Carole Holiday, Andrew Stanton and Nate Kanfer.

This haste required the crew to be split into four teams, led by supervising director Kricfalusi, Fitzgerald, Steve Gordon and Bruce Woodside.

Although the scripts required approval by CBS executives, Kricfalusi insisted that the artists add visual gags as they drew.

Kricfalusi said that he restored the "old time-director-unit system" in which three or four directors theoretically supervise all of the creative aspects of each individual cartoon.

"[6] In order to bring down the budget so that layouts could be completed in-house, the show opted to build three entire cartoon segments from vintage Terrytoons cartoon stock footage: "Mighty's Musical Classics", "Animation Concerto" and the bulk of "Scrappy's Playhouse".

Additionally, three segments were clip-shows that re-used animation from previous episodes: "Stress for Success", "Anatomy of a Milquetoast" and "Mighty's Tone Poem".

On January 5, 2010, CBS Home Entertainment (distributed by Paramount) released the complete series on three DVDs, with every installment of the Saturday morning cartoon uncut and presented in the original full screen video format.

[14] During the production of the episode "The Littlest Tramp", editor Tom Klein expressed concern that a sequence showing Mighty Mouse sniffing the remains of a crushed flower resembled cocaine use.

Following Kricfalusi's advice, Bakshi told Klein to restore the scene, which had been approved by network executives and the CBS Standards and Practices department.

[7] On June 6, 1988, Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association (AFA), alleged that "The Littlest Tramp" depicted cocaine use, instigating a media frenzy.

[7] Bakshi agreed to the removal of the offending 3½ seconds from future airings of the episode because of his concern that the controversy might lead children to believe that what Wildmon was saying was true.

[12] The series was a springboard for many cartoonists and animators who would later become famous, among them John Kricfalusi (creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show), Bruce Timm (creator of Batman: The Animated Series), Jim Reardon (writer for Tiny Toon Adventures and WALL-E, and director for The Simpsons), Tom Minton (writer and producer for many Warner Bros.

[21] Kent Butterworth supervised the second season, after John Kricfalusi's departure to work on the similarly short-lived 1988 animated series The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil.