Sven Höek is the sixth episode of the second season of The Ren & Stimpy Show. It originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on November 7, 1992.
The episode originally aired on its own, as it clocks at 15 minutes, longer than most episodes in the series. It received critical acclaim upon release, and is considered to be one of the most well-known episodes in the series.
Plot
Ren and Stimpy sit at home through the night, waiting for Ren's European cousin Sven to arrive. Ren is growing increasingly annoyed of Stimpy's stupidity and expresses his excitement to see Sven, with whom he had spent his childhood and believed to be intelligent. In the morning, Stimpy attends to a nonsensical "appointment", during which he pays a quarter to visit Mr. Horse hidden in a hidden compartment of the house, who immediately kicks him away. This angers Ren enough to prepare beating Stimpy up with a baseball bat, only for Sven to arrive. Much to Ren's horror, he discovers that Sven had become an idiotic and bumbling fool akin to Stimpy. Ren's ire continues to grow while Sven and Stimpy bond over their shared love of disgusting antics, becoming the best of friends.
After Ren leaves to work, Stimpy and Sven engage in a round of "seek-and-hide", only for Stimpy to be found at his litter box, with the duo conversing in it and Stimpy pleading with the audience for privacy. The duo also play a board game called Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence, which requires players to try their best not to urinate over its eponymous electric fence. When Ren arrives home, he is infuriated by the destruction and vandalism of increasingly absurd items in his collection. Having reached his breaking point, he storms towards the duo and threatens to harm and torture them, traumatizing both Stimpy and Sven and making them cry. However, he decides to urinate before torturing the duo, only to notice the board game and urinates on it as a gesture of contempt. The game explodes, resulting in the house being destroyed and sending the trio to Hell, where Satan mocks Ren for his foolish act.
A fictional advertisement for Gritty Kitty Litter airs midway through the episode, returning from "The Big Shot!". The farewell segment from season 1 appears for the final time with Billy West voicing Ren.
The episode had a troubled production, moving forward at a sluggish pace.[1] The episode was approved of in November 1991 with network executive Will McRobb writing in a memo: "It's great to see an episode that explores the essential stupidity of Stimpy and Ren's equally essential exasperation".[2] To avoid complaints of ethnic stereotypes, Sven was described as only as a generic "European" in the episode.[2] However, Sven's mannerisms suggest he is German and more specifically Bavarian as he speaks with a German accent, uses words such as ja (German for yes), wears a Tyrolean hat and is dressed in a Lederhosen. The episode spent 11 weeks in the layout stage at Carbunkle Cartoons. When the layouts were completed, John Kricfalusi promptly announced that three-quarters of the work would have to be redone.[3] American journalist Thad Komorowski blamed much of the slow pace of production due to "micromanagement" by Kricfalusi, who altered the timing work that had already done by Bob Jaques on the episode, which further delayed the episode.[3] Kricfalusi was notably unhappy with the background painting done on the episode, causing him to rip the paintings done by the background painters off the wall as he accused the painters of using "candy cane" colors.[4]
Jaques complained about the poor lay-out work that his studio received as he expressed surprise that Kricfalusi "never took any sort of directional effort" to correct the mistakes.[5] In the lay-out drawings of the scene done by Michael Fontanelli of Spümcø of the scene where Ren urinates on the game, Ren walked onto the game.[5] Animator Chris Sauvé said of the scene as presented to him when it was sent north to Vancouver: "That was a difficult scene to figure out because it had a pan, a pan walk, and it had to stop at an exact certain point to allow him to turn around and point at the game. There's a lot to figure out there. I remember saying to Bob, 'well when I plan this whole thing out, he's supposed to walk by this game, he steps on the game! The game is standing right in his way of walking, what am I supposed to do?' And Bob did this drawing of Ren's leg stretching and we thought 'fuck, that's hilarious'".[5]
Kricfalusi who regarded Sven Höek as his masterpiece spent a disproportionate amount of the summer of 1992 working on the episode with the intention of having extended to half an hour, much to the vexation of the Nickelodeon network who had expected the episode to be finished for a premiere in the early fall of 1992.[6] Fitting the German theme of the episode, the episode was intended to premiere at about the same time as the annual Oktoberfest beer festival which occurs in Munich every September. At the time that Spümcø was fired from the show on September 21, 1992, Sven Höek was in post-production.[7] The episode was finished by Games Animation.[8]
The episode was heavily censored by Nickelodeon which banned the "sword swallowing" scene where it is strongly implied that Stimpy and Sven are lovers who are engaged in fellatio, which they refer to by the euphemism "sword shallowing".[9] Much of Ren's soliloquy was censored, especially the line where he declares his intention to gorge out the eyes of Stimpy and Sven.[9] Kricfalusi has expressed much displeasure over the censorship along with the post-production work done by Games Animation.[10]
Reception
Komorowski rated the episode as one of the best in the series, giving it four stars out of four.[11] American critic Martin Goodman praised the episode for Ren's "stunning descent into menacing lunacy".[12] Goodman expressed his approval for the episode for its shattering of taboos as it is implied that Stimpy and Sven are engaged in a homosexual relationship and the way that Sven shares his bloody bandages with Stimpy at a time when the AIDS epidemic was raging and controversial.[12] Right from the pilot episode Big House Blues in 1990, there were strong hints in the show that Ren and Stimpy were a gay couple.[11] Significantly in the scene when Ren comes home, a piece of graffiti written on the walls of the house reading "Sven+Stimpy" in a drawing of a heart is visible. Despite the frequent hints about the sexuality of the eponymous duo, Jim Ballatine, a producer on the show, complained that many artists at Spümcø were "angry cynical young men who probably hate fags".[11] Ballantine noted that the homosexuality of Ren and Stimpy was portrayed as sick, depraved, perverse, degenerate and unnatural. Further reinforcing the heteronormative message was that time to time, Ren was shown as attracted to human women-which notwithstanding the connotations of bestiality-is presented as more normal and natural than his relationship with Stimpy.[11] Goodman was more positive, noting that the relationship was still a breakthrough in representation, given that it was a bold move in the context of 1992 where gay subjects were almost completely non-existent in American animation.[12]
Books
Klickstein, Matthew; Summers, Marc (2013). Slimed! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age. London: Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN9781101614099.
Komorowski, Thad (2017). Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media. ISBN978-1629331836.
