Ickis and Krumm

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters is an American animated television series developed by Klasky Csupo for Nickelodeon. It is the fifth Nicktoon after Doug, Rugrats, The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko's Modern Life. The show focuses on three young monsters—Oblina, Ickis, and Krumm—who attend a school for monsters under a city dump and learn how to frighten humans. Many of the episodes revolve around their zany hijinks after making it to the surface in order to perform "scares" as class assignments. and aired until November 16, 1997. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters continued to air in reruns on Nicktoons until November 26, 2007.

The episodes follow the suspenseful adventures of Ickis, Oblina, and Krumm, three young monster friends attending a monster school whose headmaster is The Gromble.

The show is set in New York City where monsters co-exist with humans, demonstrated throughout the series by the presences of the Empire State Building and the IND Subway System, and in the episode "Monster Make-Over" when Ickis refers to himself as "the ugliest, slimiest, razor fanged, sharp clawed, monster menace this side of Newark!" The dump where the monsters inhabit is implied to be Fresh Kills Landfill, but never explicitly named in the series. The monster community includes a working economic system using toenails as currency.

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was created by Gábor Csupó and Peter Gaffney, and was the third animated series produced by Csupó's company Klasky Csupo, which also created the animated shows Rugrats and Duckman on USA Network. Before the final title was chosen, which took over five years, the series had the working titles Monsters and Real Monsters. The show was conceived after Csupó and his wife and creative partner Arlene Klasky were approached by the network Nickelodeon to create a follow-up series to Rugrats. Csupó was inspired to write a show about monsters because his own young children loved them. He also said he knew Nickelodeon would not want a series about human characters because everybody else was pitching shows about animals. Csupó drew some sketches of possible monsters on a piece of paper and successfully pitched the idea to the network: "I wanted them silly and not too skillful – and the idea worked."