The Brothers Grunt was an animated TV series starting in August of 1994, starring an ensemble cast of pale, rubbery humanoids distantly related to human beings, who are cast out of a monastery (comprised of most survivors of their species) in a quest to bring back one of their kind, Perry, who has abandoned his involuntary position of "Chosen One" -- leader of their order -- and is now living the High Life among human beings (who seem to deal with the bizarre nature of the grunts by ignoring them and pretending everything is normal, a-la muggles).
The characters of the series were named after members of the famous Rat Pack and their peers: Frank, Tony, Dean, Bing, & Sammy (searching for Perry), from Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Bennett, and Perry Como.
The series was created by Danny Antonucci (of Ed, Edd, n Eddy), and had a short-but-notorious life on MTV, which played the same few episodes repeatedly for a couple of months, then cancelled the series.
It was perhaps the climax of the trend toward genre-breaking, taboo-violating animated media, following in the footsteps of (sequentially) The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, and Beavis & Butthead, and also including the later South Park. Typically these are shows which appear on the surface to simply be icky, toilet humor descendants of The Three Stooges and The Benny Hill Show, but upon closer examination tend to have an agenda of exploring the arbitrary nature of taboos, social mores, stereotypes and the like, which The Brothers Grunt did to such an extent that it quickly alienated its own network and vanished from even rerun status, to be compiled on videotape by its cult following and exchanged in a sort of free bootleg system ignored even by its original makers.
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