text: David Perlmutter wrote in his 2018 book, The Encyclopedia of American Animated Television Shows, that all three segments of Dexter's Laboratory (the main scenario, along with Dial M for Monkey and The Justice Friends) elevate stereotypical ideas through an approach that contains "verve and originality". Perlmutter called the series more "complex" than it first seems. He praised the staging of action sequences throughout the series and wrote that Dexter's Laboratory is "much more effective (and funny) than it would have been under a director less committed to the project [than Tartakovsky]."
  Legacy
  As affirmed by Giannalberto Bendazzi in Animation: A World History Volume III, Dexter's Laboratory, along with Craig McCracken's The Powerpuff Girls, helped define the style of Cartoon Network, both for being works "in which lines and colour are predominant", and for underlining their graphic aspect through limited animation. Television critic Robert Lloyd claimed that both artists were "at the forefront of a second wave of innovative, creator-driven television animation, whose first wave began in the 1990s with the likes of Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and John Kricfalusi's The Ren & Stimpy Show."
  Dexter's Laboratory has been subject to scholarly works that include a study on post-9/11 America by Media International Australia and a publication about how children of Mexicans react to references in the series by Comunicar.