"Stimpy's Cartoon Show" is the 7th episode of the third season of The Ren & Stimpy Show that originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on January 8, 1994.
Plot
Ren yelling at Stimpy for wasting his time
Stimpy decides to work as a cartoonist inspired by his hero Wilbur Cobb, a prominent Walt Disney-like cartoonist during the "golden age" of American animation that ran from the 1920s to the 1960s. Ren tells Stimpy he is wasting his time, and then tearfully admits that he is jealous of Stimpy because he cannot draw. Stimpy tells Ren he can work as his producer to console him. As the producer of Höek Productions, Ren behaves abusively towards Stimpy while spending all of his free time next to a pool surrounded by adoring young women in bikinis. Finally, Ren and Stimpy meet Cobb in an attempt to have him fund their project. The elderly Cobb is senile and in bad health and has much difficulty in paying attention. Cobb loves Stimpy's cartoon I Like Pink when he is finally persuaded to view it. Cobb tells Ren and Stimpy that if they continue on their current path, they will end up where he is – which is revealed to be a prison.
The episode had its origins in 1992, when the showrunner, John Kricfalusi, developed an idea for an story where Ren works as a producer who cannot draw cartoons as a parody of the Nickelodeon network executive whom he constantly fought with.[1] The executives were displeasured with this idea, and Kricfalusi received a memo vetoing the episode that read: "You thought we had a sense of humor about ourselves – we don't."[1] However, the network still decided to buy the rights to the story despite vetoing it after Kricfalusi insisted that it was not about the network executives.[1] On 21 September 1992, Kricfalusi was fired from his own television show and the Spümcø studio lost the contract for The Ren & Stimpy Show, to be replaced with the newly founded Games Animation studio. The split caused much ill will as a number of cartoonists with the Spümcø studio left for Games Animation, leading Kricfalusi to label the defecting cartoonists "traitors".[2] The most prominent of the defectors was Bob Camp, who had co-founded Spümcø with Kricfalusi in 1989 and now became the founder of Games Animation. Camp's decision to join Games Animation has led to a lasting rift between him and Kricfalusi and the two men have not spoken to each other since September 1992.[3] Camp denies that he had any intention to "betray" Kricfalusi, and states that he accepted the offer to head the new Games Animation studio out of a desire to keep The Ren & Stimpy Show on the air, adding that his wife was pregnant and he would soon have a family to support.[4] About the allegations he betrayed Kricfalusi by leaving Spümcø, Camp stated: "It's not disloyalty when somebody lets everyone down, when someone you work for is really cruel and mean to everyone all the time".[4]
Public opinion was overwhelming on Kricfalusi's side when the news of his sacking was announced on 21 September 1992 with Kricfalusi being portrayed in the American media as a great artist being punished by greedy, soulless corporate executives.[5] The artists who left Spümcø for Games Animation were the object of harassment by the show's fans.[6] Kricfalusi was very vocal in expressing his criticism of Games Animation for "screwing up" his vision of the show and he sold T-shirts with the faces of the artists who left Spümcø for Games Animation along with disparaging quotes about them.[7] In a 1993 interview, Kricfalusi predicted that Camp, as the new showrunner, was not capable of doing "even less than what he did on the show while at Spümcø".[8] In response to Kricfalusi's statement that letting Games Animation do The Ren & Stimpy Show was like giving "an unedited cartoon to the milkman and have him finish it for ya", Games Animation adopted as their logo Stimpy dressed as a milkman while holding a bloody knife (the latter a reference to Kricfalusi's statement that he had been "stabbed in the back" by the defectors).[9]
Nickelodeon still owned the rights to Kricfalusi's vetoed story, and in 1993 it was turned into "Stimpy's Cartoon Show".[10]Bob Camp, the head of the Games Animation who once had been a leading animator with the Spümcø studio, stated in 1993 that, unlike Kricfalusi – whose ideas were often censored –, 95% of the material in the Games Animation scripts was not being censored.[11] As a part of an effort to improve ratings in light of the immense controversy that Kricfalusi's sacking had caused, Camp recruited as a recurring guest star the comedian Jack Carter to provide the voice of Wilbur Cobb, a character first introduced in "Stimpy's Cartoon Show".[11]
Camp described "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" as the story of a producer who does nothing but take all the credit for the work of others.[11] Many of the characteristics that Ren has a producer were those often ascribed to Kricfalusi.[10] The script for "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" was written by Elinor Blake, who had once been Kricfalusi's girlfriend, and she in turn had based her script on Kricfalusi's vetoed story of 1992.[12] In a gesture that reflected much of the rancor caused by the split, Kricfalusi was credited as the writer of "Stimpy's Cartoon Show", albeit with his name badly misspelled as "John Krisfaloosy".[10] On 18 May 1993, just before the premiere of "The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen", Kricfalusi sued over the inclusion of Chris Reccardi as co-director in the credits.[13] In the same lawsuit, Kricfalusi asked the credit "Created by John K." be removed from future episodes of The Ren & Stimpy Show.[14] The story for "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" was drawn in the United States, but inked in South Korea by the Rough Draft Korea studio as a cost-saving measure.[11] Camp stated in a 1993 interview that The Ren & Stimpy Show was "definitely alien" to the South Korean cartoonists of the Rough Draft Korea studio, requiring him to make a visit to Seoul to make it clear what it was he wanted.[15] Camp stated about Rough Draft Korea's work: "The better the layouts you send, the better the animation you get".[15]
Reception
The American critic Thad Komorowski praised "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" as a parody of Hollywood as Ren as a producer makes all the money while Stimpy as a cartoonist does all the work.[16] "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" is an exaggerated version of reality as cartoonists do the painstaking work of drawing in a cartoon frame by frame in obscurity while the producers are paid more. Komorowski noted that Cobb's tendency to ramble nonsense at length was a satire of aging Hollywood stars giving lengthy, incoherent interviews about their past glories.[16] In the first half of "Stimpy's Cartoon Show", Cobb is presented as a legendary figure, an animation genius whom everyone holds in high regard, but when Ren and Stimpy meet him in his prison cell, he is a demented old man.[16] The let-down experienced by Ren and Stimpy when they finally meet Cobb reflects the common experience when ordinary people meet their favorite Hollywood stars and come away disappointed that the reality of their favorite actors does not meet expectations.[16] Likewise, Komorowski praised the cartoon-within-the-cartoon, I Like Pink starring Explodey the Pup, as "exactly the kind of cartoon we would expect Stimpy to make – completely incoherent and incompetent".[16] Komorowski described "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" as the best of the stories directed by Camp.[16]
Books
Dobbs, G. Michael (2015). Escape – How Animation Broke into the Mainstream in the 1990s. Orlando: BearManor Media. ISBN978-1593931100.
Komorowski, Thad (2017). Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media. ISBN978-1629331836.
