Trivia / The Ripping Friends

• Creator Backlash: John Kricfalusi does not like talking about this show, as it did away with many of his most coveted practices, such as Off-Model custom poses and strict avoidance of model sheets, often saying it "felt like someone else's cartoon altogether."
• Creative Differences: Many between John K. and his crew at Spümcø and both the animation studios and network. The short version is that Spümcø wanted this to be the Spiritual Successor to The Ren & Stimpy Show, with deranged, Off-Model animation, while both Funbag Animation and Fox Kids deliberately ignored him in favor of something more conventional.
• Descended Creator: John K. provides some voices on the show, such as Citrocet.
• Executive Meddling: John K. claims the show was so watered down and far removed from what he originally planned it to be that he can hardly watch it. Indeed, his famous Off-Model style of animation was deliberately ignored by the directors at Funbag Animation (who already despised Kricfalusi in the first place) and discouraged by the executives at Fox Kids.
• Hostility on the Set: John Shaw had explicitly told his staff at Funbag Animation to disregard John K.'s style guide and left it sitting on the front desk for weeks. When John K. came to the studio and found out, the two came dangerously close to stepping outside for "fistcuffs." Kricfalusi apologized, but was banned from the studio the next day.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: With the show last having aired on television in the early 2000’s, and without a modern streaming rerelease in sight (thanks in part to John K.'s allegations against him within the cartoon industry), the only way to see this series nowadays would be through either the Lionsgate USA VHS/DVD releases (both only containing the first 4 episodes) or through a region-locked Madman Australian DVD (which contains the complete series).
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The show was originally conceived as a feature film.
• Missing Episode: The episodes "The Infernal Wedding" and "Jimmy Gets Kidnapped" were left out of the Fox Kids broadcast of the series because it was just after 9/11 and the depiction of Citrocet as an evil foreign dictator who liked to blow up buildings was considered too controversial. (Oddly, they left in "Stinky Butt," which begins with Citrocet having already blown the Earth into multiple floating space chunks.) The episodes were added again during the [adult swim] airing.
• The Other Darrin: Crag was originally voiced by Harvey Atkin, but was replaced by Mark Dailey.
• Release Date Change: The show was going to premiere in September 2000, then to May 2001. It would finally premiere in September 2001.
• Troubled Production: It wouldn't be a John K. production if it weren't one of these. Most egregiously was a lack of communication between Spümcø and Red Rover Studios. The animators were given simultaneously complex and poorly-explained directions like "draw close to Jim [Smith]'s boards, while emulating Jack Kirby." Because John K. was in Los Angeles, he couldn't supervise directly, and could only comment on drawings by having them faxed to him for corrections. When production moved to Funbag Animation, he sent them a style guide which sat unopened on the front desk for the entire production by order of production manager John Shaw, whose relationship with Kricfalusi had already turned sour. Kricfalusi threatened to beat up Shaw when he came to the studio and was immediately banned from the premises, forcing him to do most as much revision as possible from a nearby hotel room. And in the case of Funbag and its blatant refusal to follow Kricfalusi's style, Fox Kids was pretty happy to approve of Shaw's decision to keep the characters as on model.
• What Could Have Been:
  • This show and a solo show about Jimmy, the idiot boy (then called Jimmy, The Retarded Boy) were both pitched to Nickelodeon in the same meeting as The Ren & Stimpy Show. The characters of Ren and Stimpy were background characters on Jimmy's show. John K. shifted the focus to two background characters because he didn't want to sign over the rights to Jimmy.
  • Playmates Toys planned to do an action figure line, but it never got past the prototype stage.

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