As this is a Nightmare Fuel page, spoilers will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
This got rated TV-MA for a damn good reason.
If you thought "Man's Best Friend" was the most unsettling and depraved that Ren & Stimpy could get, think again. With its violence, Nausea Fuel and profoundly misanthropic undertones, Adult Party Cartoon makes that episode pleasant and tactful by comparison. And keep in mind, most of these examples come from one episode, "Ren Seeks Help".
- "Ren Seeks Help", which is the darkest episode in both Adult Party Cartoon and the Ren & Stimpy franchise. Comparisons have even been made to [adult swim] stuff, and numerous commentators have accurately described it as feeling like an especially disturbing Missing Episode Creepypasta that happens to really exist.
- The scene where Ren gets therapy from Mr. Horse and tries to find out why he's behaving the way he always does. When Mr. Horse angrily said that he (Ren) is insane because of his acts, Ren was horrified by the fact he turned on him. Mr. Horse then started to beat the mess out of him. Unfortunately for him, Ren hits him with the phone and scratches him viciously. When Mr. Horse reaches for the gun, Ren grabs it and pistol whips him mercilessly until he's dead. When the authorities come, they see Mr. Horse dead on the ground and Ren, who makes a face like that of a demonic dog and growls menacingly, and carry him away while he wriggles rabidly. The ending was rather dark, even by the show's standards.
- Before being hauled away, Ren actually bites off the hand of one of the officers and SWALLOWS IT. His tongue comes out like a snake's and licks his lips, too!
- The most horrifying thing about that episode, however, is the exploration of Ren's twisted childhood. The origin of Ren's anger comes from memories of his birth - being in the "dark... and stinky" womb, and receiving a slap from a nurse, which leaves a bright red mark and leaves the baby stunned. Sound funny? It wasn't played for laughs, surprisingly. It was played completely straight. "My first memory was of unspeakable pain... and from that moment on, I wanted to inflict the pain on others." We see Ren age from a baby to an adolescent, and we see that he grew up torturing little animals. The audience is treated to several long scenes such as baby Ren gleefully plucking the legs off of a screaming caterpillar, burning ants with firecrackers, and a young child Ren torturing a frog in multiple, horrific ways.
- Ren's voice is even creepier in the episode, too! John Kricfalusi had to lower Ren's voice, making him sound very emotional and unhinged, even while speaking calmly. For better or worse, it's John K.'s best acting. Not only can you hear the genuine pain in Ren's voice at the beginning while he's talking to Stimpy, but his calm narration of his entire life story is downright chilling.
- It's also terrifying that Ren actually kills somebody on-screen. Hitting Mr. Horse on the head with the gun somewhat sounds like gunshots, even though Ren holds it upside down and the gun was a "Bang!" Flag Gun, all which doesn't help matters at all. Did we mention that Ren has completely lost his mind at this point? The face Mr. Horse has after getting killed, although being shown briefly, also doesn't help, and neither does the fact that Ren's problems are never solved: he just devolves into a literal monster.
- The unmade episode "Life Sucks" probably would have been this for the bulk of its length for its dark message and scathing honesty, but the storybook sequence especially stands out; it's a scene where Ren tells Stimpy a bleak tale of a colony of Christian crusaders (made entirely of children, drawn in an art style that homages the work of artist Mary Blair) many of whom die horribly in a winter storm during their long journey, and when they reach the promised land, they end up attacked en masse by the land's inhabitants and are graphically killed via stabbing or decapitation on-screen—and the children that did survive ended up growing up and inducted into harems (a room in Muslim households that was reserved for woman servants) and slavery for the rest of their lives! Outside of Ren's infamous outbursts, this easily would have counted as one of the darkest (and chillingly nihilistic) moments, in what probably would have been the darkest episode in the entire series. And most frightening is that it wasn't made up for the episode—it was based on something that (in some form or another) actually happened.
Ren: That's life, Stimpy! Meaningless, stupid and cruel! I tell you, life SUCKS! It's a damn miracle there's any living lifeforms left on the planet!
