ego trip media

agency-landing.banner_title

Agency-landing.banner_subtitle, agency-landing.about_title, agency-landing.about_subtitle.

agency-landing.about_employee

agency-landing.about_projects

agency-landing.about_client

CREATING . ELEVATING . MARKETING . BRANDING YOUR COMPANIES ONLINE IMAGE

Social Media

Management & marketing, we develop and execute your social media marketing strategy, we are a digital marketing & media agency. we live & breathe creativity. and we are committed to meeting your company’s needs..

EGO Trip Media provides affordable and quality Multi-Media Marketing, Virtual Assistant, and Event Management Services to promote your business and take your brand to the next level!

Whether you are an author, speaker, entrepreneur, small business or non-profit, EGO Trip Media serves as your online marketing department; and assists with the development and management of your internet marketing, online visibility and social media strategies, to help you grow and engage your clientele on a consistent basis. We specialize and take pride in our ability to provide a unique mix of marketing and web design services to our clients.

EGO Trip Media understands what you need to make your business succeed, and our comprehensive range of services are designed around this. We offer our clients a personal service which is totally unique and of exceptional quality. Our mission is to deliver products and services efficiently, at an affordable price, and on time.

Marketing is an essential part of building and maintaining ones business and establishing a brand. Effectively integrating a variety of social media platforms with your traditional marketing allows you to grow your brand and garner greater visibility in the market place. 

We love to condcut traings and workshops. Teaching businesses on how to use theri social media more effectively is essential in really executing a successful marketgin strategy. From day long workshops to simple webinars we make social media easy to understand and provide the basic concepts and tools to help you manage your own brand online even easier.

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me 

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

new bullseye NPR hide caption

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Gaberiel Alvarez and Brent Rollins are members of the hip-hop media collective Ego Trip. The group produced the acclaimed magazine Ego Trip in the 1990s, and has since written two books and created several series and specials for VH1, the most recent of which is Ego Trip's Miss Rap Supreme.

Follow Polygon online:

• Follow Polygon on Facebook
• Follow Polygon on Youtube
• Follow Polygon on Instagram

Site search

• Dragon’s Dogma 2
• FF7 Rebirth
• Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• PlayStation
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Magic: The Gathering
• Board Games
• All Tabletop
• All Entertainment
• What to Watch
• What to Play
• Buyer’s Guides
• Really Bad Chess
• All Puzzles

Filed under:

• Entertainment

Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip is a lost TV masterpiece

Creator Genndy Tartakovsky discusses the making of the hour-long special

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip is a lost TV masterpiece

Even two decades after the finale of Dexter’s Laboratory , the landmark sci-fi comedy created by Genndy Tartakovsky ( Samurai Jack , Primal ), the series still maintains an avid fan base and a pillar of the Cartoon Network brand. On the brand’s HBO Max hub page, Dexter’s Laboratory sits prominently alongside Powerpuff Girls , Ed, Edd ‘n Eddy and Adventure Time .

However, one particularly interesting installment of the series, the 1999 television special Ego Trip , is not only conspicuously absent from the streamer, but has all but evaporated since it first premiered on air nearly 23 years ago.

Dexter’s Laboratory aired for two seasons between 1996 and 1998, and an additional two seasons from 2001 to 2003, gradually becoming one of the network’s high-rated original series and garnering three Annie Awards and four Primetime Emmy nominations. The series followed Dexter, a precocious and self-serious boy genius with an extravagant laboratory hidden inside his room, and his various misadventures with his bubbly older sister Dee Dee, and his occasional clashes with his rival Mandark. Tartakovsky oversaw the production of over 52 episodes before departing the series to work as a supervising producer on his colleague Craig McCraken’s series The Powerpuff Girls and eventually his next original series, 2002’s Samurai Jack .

Produced following the conclusion of the half-hour series finale “Last But Not Beast,” Ego Trip was Genndy Tartakovsky’s final Dexter’s Laboratory’s production and the first Cartoon Network television movie ever produced. The hour-long film follows Dexter who, after foiling his rival Mandark’s plot to steal an immensely powerful device known as the “Neurotomic Protocore,” is attacked by a group of red robots declaring their mission to “destroy the one who saved the future.” After defeating them, Dexter is overcome with excitement at the thought of growing up to become such an important figure à la The Terminator ’s John Connor that someone would go so far as to travel back in time to get rid of him. Impatient to experience his own future greatness, Dexter uses his own time machine to travel to the moment in which he becomes a legend.

Though produced for TV, Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip is an impressive feat of traditional hand-painted cel animation. The opening title sequence in which Mandark, adorning a cape, flamboyantly moves throughout his own Burton-esque laboratory before infiltrating Dexter’s own feels inspired by the silhouette animations of German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger. Ego Trip ’s premise, that of Dexter travelling through time to meet various versions of his future self and in doing so inadvertently setting in motion a series of events culminating in him having to save the world, seems almost prescient in light of recent timeline-hopping fare like 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , 2019’s Avengers: Endgame , and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home . On its own, Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip is a hilarious and entertaining self-contained adventure that easily sits beside the very best episodes of the series. A fact which makes the conspicuous absence of the special not only across streaming, but any home video format since it was initially released on VHS back in 2000, all that more peculiar. (Polygon reached out to Cartoon Network and HBO Max as to whether there are any plans to bring Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip to the platform, but neither was able to comment at the time of publication.)

Despite it being described as such in animation circles, Genndy Tartakovsky asserts that Ego Trip was never intended to be the end of the series, only a stand-alone television special. “[Cartoon Network] had a desire to do a Dexter’s Laboratory movie,” Tartakovsky told Polygon in an interview last year. “I had never done long-form back then, and so I was like sure; I’ll do it.” Rather than films like The Terminator or Back to The Future Part II , Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip was instead inspired by a Calvin & Hobbes strip of Calvin meeting his past and future selves, and was produced while working on the show’s second season.

As for why the special hasn’t been re-released since 1999, Tartakovsky offered one possible reason. “I don’t think people know about it, honestly. Like, as far as the people who run HBO Max and Cartoon Network, I don’t think it’s been on their radar since we released it. The executives who run the network have been replaced twice or three times over or whatever at this point, so it’s been lost in the shuffle of time. But I would love for it to be released, I don’t have any issues with it.”

The next level of puzzles.

Take a break from your day by playing a puzzle or two! We’ve got SpellTower, Typeshift, crosswords, and more.

Sign up for the newsletter Patch Notes

A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon

Just one more thing!

Please check your email to find a confirmation email, and follow the steps to confirm your humanity.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Bungie is reversing its decision to sunset weapons for Destiny 2: The Final Shape

A new Escape from Tarkov special edition finally offers offline PvE, for just $250

• Dragon’s Dogma 2 guides, walkthroughs, and explainers

Dragonsplague causes, symptoms, and cures in Dragon’s Dogma 2

GTA Online update for the week of April 25

This Fallout bundle is a critical hit and at its lowest price ever

Fortnite Avatar event quests and Elements rewards

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The Sound of Young America: Apr 22 2008: Ego Trip

Audio with external links item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

Download options, in collections.

Uploaded by Jason Scott on January 23, 2012

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Explaining the News to Our Kids

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Ego trip's the (white) rapper show, common sense media reviewers.

Idol moves to the Bronx ... sort of.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this TV show.

The show purports to teach lessons to white people

Lots of verbal attacks, with intense cursing and p

There's a good deal of sexual language in the

Steady stream of expletives -- the harshest ones a

Brands associated with New York (like Sabrett'

Occasional heavy drinking to the point of intoxica

Parents need to know that this reality show focuses on a group of white rappers competing for $100,000 and a shot at fame. The subject of race is at the forefront, and some issues -- like use of the "N" word -- are addressed directly. Contestants swear almost constantly, both in general discussion and in…

Positive Messages

The show purports to teach lessons to white people about black culture, specifically as it relates to hip hop. Some of these lessons come through (and are beneficial), but the focus on drama, conflict, and competition drowns many of them out.

Violence & Scariness

Lots of verbal attacks, with intense cursing and physically threatening behavior. Possibility of some physical violence. Lots of rhymes about violence, including some about guns.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

There's a good deal of sexual language in the rhymes ("boner") and some sexual discussion about show contestants. Slow-cam close-up of bikini-wearing contestant. Blurred-out sex toy is used as a threatening weapon.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Steady stream of expletives -- the harshest ones are bleeped, but they're still very obvious. Words like "bitch," "dildo," and the "N" word aren't bleeped. One contestant is punished for using the "N" word.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands associated with New York (like Sabrett's hot dogs) are displayed as art in the loft. Some discussion of materialism, both pro and con.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Occasional heavy drinking to the point of intoxication. Beer and hard liquor bottles visible. Some smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this reality show focuses on a group of white rappers competing for $100,000 and a shot at fame. The subject of race is at the forefront, and some issues -- like use of the "N" word -- are addressed directly. Contestants swear almost constantly, both in general discussion and in their rhymes. Some rhymes include graphic (if lyrical) descriptions of sexual acts and mature concepts. Intense arguments beteen contestants include verbal threats and physical intimidation. There are occasional discussions of tough life circumstances, like being homeless and some sexual imagery, including slow-cam close-ups of one female contestant's body.

Where to Watch

Community reviews.

• Parents say

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

In a twist on American Idol 's talent-search format, EGO TRIP'S THE (WHITE) RAPPER SHOW puts 10 Caucasian wannabe emcees to the test in a competition aimed at finding the next Eminem . Hosted by early white rapper MC Serch (aka Michael Berrin) of 3rd Bass and legendary hip-hop producer Prince Paul, the show gathers the contestants together under one roof and pits them against one another for a shot at $100,000 and a fame boost. While the format is familiar, the show's tweaks to the mansion-and-hot-tub setup seen on reality shows like America's Next Top Model are intended to reflect the essence of hip hop, so this crew lives in the South Bronx instead of Los Angeles, their digs aren't as plush as some might expect, and instead of a limo ride to a fancy restaurant, challenge winners get a van trip to the mini-golf range. The contestants are a motley group: Persia has the most street cred, though her attitude threatens to overpower her talent; shifty-eyed John Brown is out to commodify himself as "King of the 'Burbs"; and Misfit is a sexy, blonde Brit whose looks may outweigh her confidence. Along with the others, these rappers face challenges like walking through a tough urban neighborhood and spitting rhymes to (mostly African-American) folks sitting on the stoop -- an intimidating idea to some of the white kids.

Is It Any Good?

The neighborhood challenge demonstrates the show's attempt to engage the racial issues involved in hip hop -- which are made explicit by the show's exclusive focus on white rappers. The crew behind the show (creators of the respected, now-defunct hip-hop magazine ego trip ) has a history of deftly and cleverly interrogating racial topics with books like ego trip's Big Book of Racism . But while The (White) Rapper Show courageously takes on the incredibly loaded subjects of race and hip hop, the series' focus often (and predictably) shifts to conflict in the house. In one episode, for example, the group is drinking after a long day, and an intoxicated Persia starts harassing John Brown and challenges him to a rap duel; when he refuses, she sticks a dildo (blurred onscreen) in his face and starts calling him the "N" word. The ensuing drama takes up more of the episode's allotted 60 minutes than do the more interesting rhyming exhibitions.

While teens, especially hip-hop fans, may find some nuggets of wisdom in this show, parents should know that, as in most reality shows, drama rules supreme. Yelling, threats, crude sexual language, drinking, and general stupidity steal the show.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about race and hip-hop. Parents, did you listen to rap growing up? What were your first experiences with hip-hop like? Teens, how about you? Where do race and hip-hop intersect? Do you think being black or white affects a person's ability to rap? How do stereotypes come into play on the show? What's the history of hip-hop? Where could you learn more about the roots of hip-hop?

• Premiere date : January 8, 2007
• Cast : Grandmaster Flash , MC Serch , Prince Paul
• Network : VH1
• Genre : Reality TV
• TV rating : TV-14
• Last updated : February 28, 2022

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Ice-T's Rap School

Making the Band

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.