Cubix: Robots for Everyone Deserved Better Than Being Forgotten

Every so often I'll remember a cartoon that barely gets talked about anymore, then spend far too long wondering if I imagined the whole thing. Cubix: Robots for Everyone is one of those shows.

If you grew up in the early 2000s, especially if Saturday mornings were sacred in your house, there's a good chance you'll remember the big blue robot with the glowing face and the theme tune that lodged itself in your brain for years. Folk remember Pokémon, Digimon, Beyblade and Yu-Gi-Oh!, but Cubix always seems to get left standing at the side. I don't think that's fair.

The story takes place in 2044, where robots aren't some rare bit of futuristic kit, they're just part of everyday life. Connor moves to Bubble Town, a city where robots are everywhere, and ends up repairing Cubix, a robot everyone else had written off as impossible to fix. That kicks off the adventure as Connor, Cubix and the rest of the Botties take on Dr. K and his increasingly dangerous robotic creations. Cubix: Robots for Everyone wasn't trying to reinvent storytelling, but it had a surprising amount of heart behind all the explosions and transforming robots.

What I appreciated watching it again years later is how much personality the robots actually had. The whole idea of Emotion Processing Units meant the machines weren't just walking tools. They had flaws, fears, loyalty and friendships. That gave the show something plenty of early CGI cartoons were missing. You actually cared when something happened to them.

The animation definitely shows its age. There's no point pretending otherwise. Early 3D television animation had a certain plastic look that couldn't compete with hand-drawn cartoons of the time. But weirdly, that's become part of its charm. It feels like opening an old Windows XP game or booting up a PlayStation 2 you've not touched in years. It's rough round the edges, but that's exactly why it feels nostalgic now.

Cubix himself is still a brilliant character design. He's basically built from cubes that constantly rearrange themselves into different tools, vehicles and weapons, yet he's instantly recognisable from a silhouette alone. That's harder to pull off than it looks. Plenty of cartoons chased the transforming robot craze after Transformers, but Cubix managed to carve out its own identity.

One thing I don't think the series gets enough credit for is its world building. Bubble Town actually feels like somewhere people live rather than just a backdrop for action scenes. Every robot seems to have a purpose, from builders to entertainers to emergency services. It makes the setting feel believable in a daft Saturday morning cartoon sort of way.

The villains helped as well. Dr. K wasn't the deepest bad guy ever written, but he was entertaining enough to keep things moving, and robots like Kilobot gave Cubix someone who genuinely felt dangerous instead of just another disposable monster of the week.

It wasn't just the TV series either. Like plenty of cartoons from that era, Cubix ended up with a few video game tie-ins. Race 'n Robots landed on the PlayStation and Game Boy Color, while Showdown arrived later on the PlayStation 2 and GameCube. Neither became classics, but if you were already into the show, they were exactly the sort of licensed games you'd end up renting for the weekend from the local video shop.

These days Cubix feels like one of those series that's quietly slipped into retro cult status. It only ran for 26 episodes across two seasons, so it never had the chance to build the massive following some of its rivals managed. Yet every time someone mentions it online, the replies are full of folk saying the same thing.

"I completely forgot this existed."

That's probably the biggest compliment a forgotten cartoon can get. It wasn't bad enough to be mocked, and it wasn't big enough to become timeless. It just sat in that strange middle ground where a generation watched it, enjoyed it, then gradually filed it away somewhere in the back of their memory until one screenshot unlocked the whole thing again.

I reckon Cubix deserves another look. Not because it's secretly one of the greatest animated series ever made, it isn't. It deserves another look because it represents a really interesting moment in television, when studios were experimenting with full CGI animation, toy-friendly character designs and surprisingly thoughtful ideas about artificial intelligence years before that became a topic everybody was talking about.

Sometimes that's enough.

If you've never watched Cubix before, give it a chance. If you watched it twenty years ago, you might be surprised how much of it comes flooding back. I hadn't thought about Bubble Town in years, then I heard the theme tune again and that was me lost for the rest of the evening.