Ren and Stimpy

Sunday May 11th, 2025

Tags: blog, books, review, tv

I reached the portion of my No More Whoppers relisten where they discuss the 2013 book Slimed: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age. I didn't read the book last time and I didn't read it this time---I don't find a simple transcription of interview material compelling as a book---but listening to them talk about it was entertaining enough. The book briefly touched on the schism that happened in season 2 of Ren & Stimpy in which the show's creator, John Kricfalusi, was fired from his own show. The show was fairly important to the warping of my young mind and shaping the person I'd eventually become, and I had always wondered what exactly happened. I was too young to understand anything about the situation at the time, I only had the vaguest notion that cartoons were actually made by people, but as I got older and perpetually watched the show in reruns, I got a picture of a narrative---John K. was too much of a creative genius and Nickelodeon was too much of a sterile corporate machine to properly nurture his artistic talent. And I knew even at the time that this narrative was bullshit. Seasons 1 and 2 had plenty of rotten episodes, and the seasons after his ousting had plenty of great ones. So what exactly was the deal? It made me wonder if some sort of tell-all book about the situation has been written, so I went looking and found Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story by Thad Komorowski. I found a copy at the library and proceeded to read it in a couple days.

In 2018, John K. was revealed to be a child sexual predator who groomed and abused two teenage fans who eventually also ended up working for him. The book was published in 2013 and doesn't go into any of this part of John K.'s life, even though it's been described as an "open secret" about John K. This is obviously worse than anything he's done in an artistic or professional context, and my interest in the Nickelodeon details is not meant to minimize the horror his victims experienced. I had close to zero respect for John K. even before I learned about his child sexual abuse, and only have a continuing interest in Ren & Stimpy because it was such a formative part of my childhood.

All that said, the book was pretty good. I gave it three stars on Storygraph. It was well written but in dire need of an editor. The number of grammatical and usage mistakes was quite distracting, but not enough to take me out of the book completely. What was more distracting was the author's opinionated approach. He's a historian of animation, and it felt like at least half of the book was an excuse for him to shit on every animated TV Show and movie that's not Ren & Stimpy or Looney Tunes shorts from the 1940s and 50s. Like, he's correct that animation in the 80s was a wasteland of cheap, zero-effort shows primarily made as extended toy commercials, and R&S represented a sea change away from this attitude; but in 2013, he writes as if there had not been an animated show of any redeeming value since R&S ended in 1995, disparaging even the then-recent Cartoon Network hits Regular Show and Adventure Time. I haven't seen enough of either show to be an expert---I really should, at some point---but I've seen enough and I know enough to say that they're groundbreaking works of animation.

John K. and the author of this book both share the frustrating opinion that the only animation of any value is an extremely specific style pioneered by Warner Bros. directors Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. This philosophy eschews the idea that cartoons should have writers or scripts---all the writing should be done by the artists themselves during the "layout" portion of production. Layout is the step between storyboard and actual animation, in which a large number of drawings are made with specific, meticulous instructions for the animators.¹

Ren, wearing his producer hat (a golden fasces with the letter P) berates Stimpy for his work during the layout phase of his project in Stimpy's Cartoon Show (Season 3).

Now, there is some wisdom to this no-script approach. Artists and animators know better than anyone else what's possible with animation. When they have a large amount of input over the story, they'll take the medium in a direction that's fun and interesting to look at. When cartoons are pre-scripted by people who aren't hands-on with the art and animation, there's a risk that the characters will be merely flat, lifeless vessels through which the writers' jokes are delivered, and we can see that most clearly in the shitty post-Simpsons wave of adult animation like South Park and Family Guy.² (The Simpsons itself would of course eventually head down this path as well.) There's no question that Ren and Stimpy breathed new life into animation as a medium, and that its techniques helped sparked a renaissance in the art form.

But this single-minded dedication to animation was also the show's downfall. The system was not set up to allow this level of artist/animator control, and Spümcø was perpetually missing deadlines and going over budget. The other shows that kicked off Nickelodeon's animation library were Doug and Rugrats, and they were able to consistently deliver new episodes every week, while R&S floundered and had to go into reruns almost immediately. Doug and Rugrats were also great shows, no matter what the animation snobs have to say on the subject. Were the characters as expressive? Were the highs as high? Are they as influential? No, but they were consistently imaginative and entertaining. They told good stories. I haven't watched either show in years, and they're not as memorable as R&S, but I'm confident that if I were to go back, there would be more solid episodes of both shows than R&S.

John K. was a huge part of Ren and Stimpy's failure, and I'd argue played only the smallest role in its success. His slavish dedication to animation above all did make the studio produce some legendary episodes, but his obsessive attention to detail and insistence on authoritarian control ruined the show not just at a financial level but also artistically. Even today, people blame Nickelodeon for putting budgetary concerns over the art, but if Spümcø had unlimited time and money in the early 90s, they would've made a worse product. John K. has never understood what makes a good TV show or been able to manage a project, and there's no better proof of that than the unwatchable revival from 2003, Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon".

Sick Little Monkeys is a well-researched book, with plenty of information from primary sources close to Ren & Stimpy, but Komorowski was still unable to determine the exact sequence of events that led to John K. getting control of a Ren & Stimpy reboot. The cable Network TNN had designs on rebranding to an edgier, male Gen-X demographic-oriented channel called Spike TV, and a cornerstone of their blueprint was going to be a block of adult animation. Someone involved in the process was apparently a big enough fan of R&S that they pulled the right strings at Viacom (the parent company of both Nickelodeon and Spike) to greenlight the project and give John K. full creative control. They told him to pull out all the stops and make the show that he wanted to make at Nickelodeon but was unable to. He had a team of all the Spümcø loyalists who refused to continue working on the show at Games Animation, Nickelodeon's in-house studio, after Kricfalusi's ousting during Season 2. Spike TV gave him a budget and a contract for 9 episodes with practically no oversight.

Spümcø only produced three episodes on time, at the cost of the entire 9-episode budget. Only the first 3 episodes ever aired, with 3 more eventually coming out on DVD. It's the worst TV show I've ever seen. John K. "pulled out all the stops", alright: the gross-out humor and juvenile shock jock horseshit was turned up to 11, with some homophobia thrown in for good measure. Ren & Stimpy's sexual relationship, once subtextual, was made explicit and not in an accepting, open-minded "coming out of the closet" kind of way. It was played purely for shock value and cheap laughs. There is no redeeming value to the plots or characters. It's John K.'s id on full display, and it fucking sucks.

The animation is very lively, since that's the only thing Kricfalusi thinks matters in a cartoon. It was lively to an extreme fault. From the book:

During the production of the episode Fire Dogs 2, Kricfalusi came up with a “really stupid rule,” Cory said, that “you were never allowed to hold a frame of drawing. You always had to have it changing.” Hence, Ren and Stimpy have an instant reaction to every single frame of an animated Ralph Bakshi on the toilet, gesticulating incessantly, further undermining the difficulty his animators had in getting his drawings to work. [...]

This painstaking attention to every frame of film was the ultimate undoing of the show, financially and critically. Kricfalusi’s insistence on over-posing scenes in the layout stage goes against his maxim of returning to “cartoony” cartoons, as he became increasingly intent on instilling “human” acting into his characters. As he has noted, live-action actors do not act pose-to-pose, like in limited animation. Rather, you can “see the change in the thought process from one expression to the other and there’s a lot of things happening in between. The more subtle and rich that is, the more the audience believes it and the more real it seems.” Therefore, Kricfalusi’s rule of never using the same expression twice is a means to this end and why Ren gesticulates in a half-dozen ways during a single bit of dialog.

End quote.

A naked Ralph Bakshi from Fire Dogs 2 holds Ren and Stimpy captive in his meaty arms. They all have distorted expressions of non-specific misery.

The author's attitude towards John K. in the book is odd. He correctly takes him to task for all the ways his ego got in the way of making a good show, but at the same time I feel like Komorowski gives him far too much credit. His animation-above-all ideology makes him treat John K. as the savior of all cartoons for bringing back the Looney Tunes style, and I don't think that factor is nearly as important as he makes it out to be. It was a factor, sure, but there are so many other elements I think were equally or more important. None of my childhood memories of the show are about how good the animation is. As a child I never once thought "wow, this is good because it's like the old Looney Tunes cartoons!". Sure, I watched Looney Tunes as a kid, but I didn't hold it up as the be-all end-all of entertainment. That's apparently the lens through which Komorowski viewed the show, and that's fine if it's his special interest, but he constantly shits on every other form of animation without really justifying his criticism. Doug and Rugrats weren't as animation-first as Ren & Stimpy, but they certainly had more artistic merit than the toy commercial cartoons of the 1980s.³ As an anxious nerdy kid whose daydreams bounced between fantasy and catastrophe, and who eschewed "masculine" pursuits like sports in favor of "feminine" ones like journaling, Doug was more relatable to me than anything I'd ever seen on TV or in film. It helped me feel less alone, like I'm not the only one who had these sort of thoughts, and it helped me feel like it might be possible for me to have friends in spite of my weird brain. It was the closest thing I had at the time to "representation." But the author paints every cartoon that's not Looney Tunes or Ren and Stimpy with the same brush, disregarding any potential value because of the "bad animation", and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

My favorite parts of the book were the ones where he describes the production process. He made it very clear that everyone who worked on Ren & Stimpy did so with an incredible amount of passion and dedication. I can still go back and enjoy Ren & Stimpy the way I can't with, say, Woody Allen films, and it's because I know how little Kricfalusi ultimately had to do with it. His main role in the production was 1. coming up with the funny cat and dog characters,⁴ and 2. getting out of his team's way. That's an oversimplification, but fuck it, that's what he deserves. Bob Camp, Jim Smith, Lynne Naylor and the rest of the team were able to make a good show in spite of John K.'s narcissistic self-sabotage, and the show would've been better without him from the beginning. Adult Party Cartoon should be the only proof anyone needs.

Yeah, the Games Studio era had some stinkers, but so did the John K. era. Here the author's opinions about what makes a good cartoon diverge radically from my own; he doesn't discredit the entire Games run, but in his appendiceal episode guide, none of the Games episodes are given the highest 4-star rating; in the John K. era, he correctly identifies Space Madness and Stimpy's Invention as two of the best episodes, while simultaneously giving four-star ratings to Man's Best Friend, the loathsome George Liquor vehicle Nickelodeon rightly refused to air, and Svën Höek, a tedious slog of an episode devoid of any wit or charm, which leans on one joke for the entire episode. I hated it even as a kid. They both feel like they wouldn't be out of place in the Adult Party Cartoon era, but they're both exemplified I guess because the animation is good or whatever.

Meanwhile Bob Camp's In The Army, one of the episodes that consistently cracks me up even today, is given a paltry **½, I reckon because it's mostly sight gags, timing and Camp's brilliantly unhinged performance as the drill sergeant that elevates it, and not Looney Tunes-caliber animation.

A miserable Ren and a blissfully ignorant Stimpy are given KP Duty peeling h-bombs for their unit's mess hall as punishment for disobeying the Sarge.

Anyway, judgmental opinions aside, it's a good book and provided a lot of insight into how cartoons are made. It's a subject that fascinates me and I know very little about, so getting a peek into the technical process was a treat. Kricfalusi's sacking wasn't as dramatic or interesting as I thought it would be. The animation world was unready for a cartoon as technically intricate as Ren & Stimpy (the studio at Games continued to struggle with deadlines, a fact that John K. defenders were all too quick to point out) and John's obsession with control and refusal to work with others made the problem worse. After Adult Party Cartoon failed and Spümcø closed its doors, John resigned himself to his blog, where he came up with terrible ideas for cartoons, basked in the adoration of his misguided fans, hurled abuse at anyone who critiqued his crackpot ideas, and sold NFTs charmingly named "inbred kitties".

"If you want to be a genius, it's easy. All you gotta say is, 'everything stinks'! Then you're never wrong." The elderly and desiccated Wilbur Cobb, legendary cartoon director, lectures Ren and Stimpy from behind his mahogany desk in a creepy, poorly-lit office.

The book doesn't really get into John's Post-R&S disgrace, and I guess there aren't a lot of reasons to. It's the story of Ren and Stimpy, and that story ended in 2006.

The book got a second edition in 2017; I don't know how much is changed compared to the version I read, but it's hard to imagine 4 years of hindsight would make it worse, so that's probably the one to check out if you can. The Buzzfeed article where John's victims spoke out references a line in the book about "a girl he had been dating since she was fifteen years old", and that's not in my version, so hopefully it paints a more complete picture of the person John was and is.

Thad Komorowski has his own blog, where he expresses animation opinions that are slightly more level-headed; in recent years he's become more involved with animation restoration and preservation, and his company is currently fulfilling a kickstarter for a collection of Paul Terry's "Aesop's Fables" cartoons from the 1920s, which I think is an excellent use of his passion and expertise. I wish him the best.

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