Wolf Gnards

Kobayashi who? Joey Chestnut what? The best eaters have always and will always come from cartoons. Great eaters aren’t made, they’re drawn. Cartoon characters can eat massive amounts of food, often in one bite, with little to no ill after effects. Cartoon eaters came in two sizes: ultra fat and model skinny. Most are super strong, but all of them are supernatural eaters.

Great cartoon eaters come from all corners of the world, and represent different things to different cultures. In Japan, huge eaters are heroic… often lumped together as the good natured, slow witted strong man. Innocent, invincible, and with insatiable appetites. Large meals apparently fuel their punching power and fireballs. American and western animation often depict the big eater as the total opposite. Fat, slovenly, and cowardly, often clumsy and almost always comic relief. When bad guys attack, nine times out of ten they’re cowering in closet clutching a hoagie.

Top 12 Cartoon Eaters

12. Wayne Gretzky (ProStars) – Not much is known about the mythical Wayne Gretzky. We know he skates, on what or for what purpose anthropologists still have no clue. We know he’s blond and possibly Canadian. And that’s it, that’s all the data available. So, when they made ProStars (a cartoon about athletes who for some reason have to save the children) the producers had to make up all kinds of Gretzky tidbits like some fictional sport named “hockey” and his incredible appetite. I presume they made Gretzky such a big eater because of his vague resemblance to Shaggy.

11. Winnie the Pooh (Winnie the Pooh) – Winnie got his honey filled butt stuck in a tree trunk trying to eat more honey. That pretty much sums it all up. The view of most Winnie the Pooh fans is that heart disease is ok because it’s just plain adorable. Pooh bear (as they call him in the hood) ate so much honey, I assume that real bears must love honey. If a bear attacked me in the woods, I would throw honey at it and assume I’d be just fine as it gets its head stuck in the pot. Winnie the Pooh’s stomach has ruined my chances for wilderness survival.

10. Monkey D. Luffy (One Piece) – Luffy is perhaps the dumbest and hungriest fighters in anime. Perhaps the dumber an anime character is the more he has to eat to make up for said dumbness. Luffy has a rubber body and stomach that makes it easy to stuff in vast quantities of food (powers he got by… yes, eating. A magic fruit in Luffy’s case). Rubbery arms also makes it easier to steal from other’s plates. Luffy even eats when he’s sleeping.

9. Nibbler (Futurama) – Nibbler is actually not much of a nibbler. He’s more of a swallower. A swallower wholer… of mostly living animals. With skinny eaters, the joke, of course, is that no matter how much they eat—2x, 8x their body weight—they stay razor thin. Nibbler isn’t merely skinny, Nibbler is tiny. He makes a great pet though since you don’t need to cook his food (a whole zebra will do), his stool is dark matter, and he’s sentient. Let the The Feast of a Thousand Beasts begin!

8. Naruto (Naruto) – Naruto is a ninja and a ramen eating machine. Naruto is another simple minded, yet powerful Japanese character. And as eaters go, he’s just a couple of steps beyond what a real person eats, but he has a demon fox sealed in his stomach, so that has to count for something. The reason Naruto is so high is because he’s so indelibly linked to his food of choice. As ninja turtles are to pizza, Naruto is to ramen. His favorite ramen dish involves hard boiled eggs… that sounds like a great fat kid bet (as in, I dare you to eat this, fat kid). Remember that ramen is super high in calories, so it’s extra impressive he manages to stay so thin.

7. Monterey Jack (Rescue Rangers) – Monterey Jack has a fever and the only cure is more cheese. Monty actually has a pretty bad cheese addiction, a Chip N’ Dale intervention is probably in order. His severe cheese withdraws cause sweats, hallucinations, and the shakes. Not to mention, the mere scent of cheese makes Monty float, a quality of all good fat cartoon characters… that and sucking the meat off of chicken bones.

Follow up:

6. J. Wellington Wimpy (Popeye) – Wimpy is actually not terribly great eater. Yes, he would gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger today, but that’s the point. Wimpy is never eating hamburgers, he’s just always asking for hamburgers. He would be a much better eater if he gladly ate a burger, while you watched him eat a burger today. And Tuesday. If you think about it, Wimpy is how the world views the U.S.: bloated, stupid, and with an economy borrowing on the future.

5. Goku (Dragonball) – Goku is everything an anime fan wants in a cartoon eater. The most power. The highest hair. And the biggest appetite. And don’t forget child-like innocence, an anime hero just isn’t a hero if he isn’t partially retarded. In a lot of ways, Naruto and Luffy were both based on Goku, making him the godfather of all Japanese eaters. Though my favorite thing about Goku is he always eats pork buns, but they always translate it as fish tacos. Western culture can’t wrap their minds around a meat filled pastry, but eating 50 or so tacos in one sitting, that’s something we can all get on board with.

4. Cookie Monster (Sesame Street) – While not a cartoon per se, Cookie Monster was probably our first exposure to over indulgence. Every crack head in the world has to pay, at least, partial respect to Cookie Monster. If you’re overweight or over indulgent in any way, shape, or form, blame it on Cookie Monster. And if you’re a tax accountant that likes to suck blood, blame the Count.

3. Jughead Jones (Archie) – Jughead is to hamburgers as Wimpy is to hamburgers… no, wait that doesn’t work. Jughead is to hamburgers as the Hamburglar is to hamburgers. No. The point is, he likes hamburgers. In one eating contest in Archie comics, he had to eat a burger consisting of sixteen different burgers. As skinny as he is, Jughead does get bigger as he eats (giant extended belly and all), up to 300 lbs, but his cartoony metabolism seems to burn that right off.

2. Dagwood Bumstead (Blondie) – Kids today probably don’t remember Dagwood, but Dagwood was such a prolific sandwich eater, they named a sandwich after him. Before Dagwood, a triple decker sandwich was just some wild fat kid dream. A traditional dagwood is multi-layered—at least, three—made with a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, and condiments, and always topped with an olive skewered with a toothpick. And since Dagwood also has a wife that is far hotter than he should possibly get, his magnum sized sandwiches also represents his insatiable sex drive.

1. Shaggy & Scooby Doo (Scooby Doo) – This is the dream team of cartoon eating. When you see some freaking glowing ghost, the only way to calm down is a little weed (Scooby snacks), which inevitably leads to the munchies. They’re the next level of the Dagwood sandwich, feel free to throw a whole fish, a wheel of cheese, and several scoops of ice cream on top of your sandwich (optional: sprinkle liberally with doggy treats). The best way to eat a Scoobywood sandwich is to hold sandwich between each hand, squeeze and compress the sandwich until the bottom and top slices touch, cram and deep throat sandwich into mouth, and finish in one bite.

Honorable mentions: Garfield, The Flash, the cast of Death Note, Obelix (The Adventures of Asterix), and Pac-man (a video game about a pizza that eats food in order to power up to eat ghosts… only a fat kid could think of such digital delights).