Appearing as one of the earliest shorts featured in the What a Cartoon! showcase series, Dexter's Laboratory was one of the first real success stories for Cartoon Network. But despite the show featuring the titular Dexter at the core of the show, he might not have actually been the best part of his own series.

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dexter's Laboratory, let's look back at the origins of the show -- and how the original concept for the series didn't even start with the titular scientist but with his sister and comic foil, Dee Dee.

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DEE DEE'S LABORATORY

Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory enjoying tea with he stuffed rabbit

Dexter's Laboratory centers primarily around a young boy named Dexter, who's far smarter than his youth would suggest. A super-genius living in suburbia, Dexter uses his top secret and super-advanced laboratory full of futuristic inventions to conduct experiments across space, time and even the very fabric of reality. While he runs into a number of threats across his various experiments, the most consistent threat to his scientific investigations was always his older sister Dee Dee.

A light-hearted and dim-witted ballet dancer, Dee Dee was just as important to the overall series as Dexter. Many episodes of the Cartoon Network classic pit the two of them against each other -- often with Dee Dee's well-meaning nature helping Dexter's own habit of self-sabotage ruin whatever new creation he's conceived of. However, it turns out that the earliest version of the project actually started from Dee Dee's perspective.

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The first idea for the series came from animator Genndy Tartakovsky. While experimenting with new ideas for animated stories while a student at the California Institute of Arts, Tartakovsky created a young ballerina character. Taking a liking to the concept, he decided to construct an entire short around her. Looking for a natural and funny contrast for the tall and artistically driven young girl, Tartakovsky thought of what would become the first version of Dexter -- a short and scientifically-minded sibling for the ballerina.

Luckily for Tartakovsky, the fledgling Cartoon Network was seeking out animated shorts as potential pilots for their network. Working with future notable animation creators Paul Rudish (Mickey Mouse) and Craig McCracken (Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends), the group created a new pilot based on Tartakovsky's CalArts animated short, which eventually became the first pilot for Dexter's Laboratory. The short helped define the tone for the network and led to other Tartakovsky shows for Cartoon Network, including Samurai Jack and Sym-Bionic Titan.

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WHY DEE DEE IS THE BEST

During an interview with The Times of Northwest Indiana, Tartakovsky said that "Dee Dee came first. She was really the star of the show to me. She was so much fun," before admitting that Dexter became more important only as the series progressed. Despite being named for Dexter, the series does actually work best when it focuses on Dee Dee. Her friendly and outgoing personality makes her a far more naturally likable character than the more petulant and aggressive Dexter. Many episodes explored conflicts from Dee Dee's perspective and how her actions would inadvertently protect the world from whatever mistakes Dexter almost wrought on the planet. Some episodes (notably including "Paper Route Bout") even largely ignored Dexter in favor of having Dee Dee as the driving force of the episode.

Even when she was a supporting player to Dexter, her emotional maturity compared to her brother proved a recurring element in many episodes. Episodes like "Way of the Dee Dee" even centered their philosophical divide at the core of a story, exploring how Dexter's drive is defined by explosive extremes while Dee Dee can find an inner peace he'll ever know. But all this surprising complexity and likability didn't detract from Dee Dee's comic potential. Her accidental path of destruction gave the creators plenty of the best pieces of slapstick in the entire show, with Dee Dee being both the motivator and target of that physical comedy. While she may not have her name in the title, Dee Dee was definitely the more interesting character and quietly the heart of the entire show.

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