An average day working for John K.
The Ren & Stimpy Show was, in its original run, one of the most talked-about shows on television, and one of the biggest hits for the then-fledgling Nickelodeon network. It's now counted alongside The Simpsons, Beavis And Butthead and South Park as a revolution in TV cartoons, and one of the key shows of The Renaissance Age of Animation. However, it was fraught with production troubles right from the start behind the scenes, which would ultimately destroy the show. Years later, co-creator and director Bob Camp summed up the whole experience as "the best of times, the worst of times" and that "the whole thing was fucked from the beginning."
- Nickelodeon greenlighting one of their first three original animated series from a studio that had never produced animation (up until this time, Spümcø had been an illustration company) turned out to be the blind leading the blind. According to Bob Camp, there was poor communication regarding creative control from then-network head Linda Simensky, who outright told the crew that they had carte blanche on content under the incorrect assumption that they shared a consensus of just how far "too far" was. The result was constant disagreement and confusion between both parties on an issue-to-issue basis. The executives also didn't understand the show's particular brand of absurdist humor, like jump cuts or gross up close ups, when shown the storyboards, forcing the crew to overexplain most of the more bizarre gags (this obviously didn't help the network's faith). Because of John Kricfalusi's insistence that the show not use scripts, only storyboards, he had to fly to New York every time the network needed to approve stories. Each storyboard took two months to complete and be approved. Bob Camp admitted that the crew had too much of a "shitty 'fuck you' attitude" that the network wasn't prepared to deal with.
- Many of the season 1 episodes were massacred by bad outsourcing, due in part to work from Fil-Cartoons, a literal sweatshop studio in the Philippines with poor working conditions and such dismal pay that employees were forced to sleep there. The studio handled ink-and-paint work for the entire first season, and more often than not, heavily ruined many scenes due to their all-around cheap Xeroxing, ugly colors, and habit of "reworking" drawings or whole scenes of animation without Spümcø's consent. There were even some unintentional (rather than purposeful) Off-Model moments, such as Stimpy's eyes inexplicably turning black in the "Stimpy's Breakfast Tips" note and Ren accidentally having two elephant trunks on him instead of one in "Black Hole". note Carbunkle director Bob Jacques had to fight tooth and nail to get the studio to turn in acceptable work for episodes like "Stimpy's Invention" (and even then, the sporadic error slipped in, such as Stimpy's eyes floating off his face when he's showing Ren his new socks), and described the experience of working with them as "all damage control" and called them "the cheapest shithole studio [he's] ever had the displeasure to work at". The second season switched to digital ink and paint, presumably to avoid further problems like this, which came with its own set of problems, being such a new and still very rudimentary form of technology.
- One of the biggest sources of friction was over censorship. Nickelodeon was always uneasy with the show's gross-out humor, and sent constant revisions for every single episode. "Nurse Stimpy" had a good chunk of footage axed before it got to air (specifically a gag involving a leech being used on Ren), and they even kept one finished episode, "Man's Best Friend", off the air due to its violent and scatological content. As a general rule, anything that had to do with religion, politics, alcohol, or tobacco was put under a microscope by Standards & Practices. In particular, the character George Liquor had his last name removed from one episode, and made only sporadic appearances due to opposition from the network, right down to axing a scene with him from "Rubber Nipple Salesman", forcing Spümcø to change a Liquor cameo in "Haunted House" into a parody of Doug Funnie (which was edited out in reruns anyway) and rejecting an episode idea starring him (which prompted the crew to improvise the story for "Fire Dogs" in an afternoon). Meanwhile, "Powdered Toast Man", featuring the Pope, removed a cross from his hat and credited the character simply as "the Man with the Pointy Hat", and the ending scene of Toast Man carelessly using the Constitution and Bill of Rights as kindling for a fire was edited out after its initial airing, which ironically ruined the episode's satirical message of how easily authority and power are abused.
- In addition to his general unprofessionalism, John K.'s perfectionism was out of control. Spümcø was largely understaffed due to his refusal to hire anyone who didn't meet the standards of the studio's founders (himself, Jim Smith, Camp and Naylor). Not only did this mean that the show had to be done by an incredibly small crew, but what few staff members were hired regularly had their drawings torn up if they didn't meet John K.'s exact expectations, despite his directions often being vague. One scene of Stimpy shaking his butt in "Stimpy's Invention" was re-animated sixteen times until it met John K.'s approval. Historian Jerry Beck distinctly remembers visiting the studio and finding out that John K. was so obsessed with finding the right color for the present that Stimpy hands Ren that the walls were lined with over 50 different cels of the same present in different colors, likening it to a scene out of The Shining (ironically, John K. ended up working with one of the initial color choices).
- Through a combination of the crew's perfectionism and the constant battles over what was acceptable to air, the show suffered from severe Schedule Slip almost from the start. Nickelodeon only ordered six episodes when the show was green-lit and they still had to rerun the pilot episode in order to have something to show in what should've been the second episode's time slot; this helped the show build an audience but killed any hope for syndication. The second season was planned to have twenty episodes before getting cut down to thirteen. Only eleven were completed, with two held over for season three.
- Feuding between John K. and Nickelodeon over how long and expensive the production of each episode was reached its apex in September 1992, in the middle of the second season, when John K. told them point blank that episodes would "cost what they cost and take as long as they needed." Having had enough, Nickelodeon fired him and his studio from the series and continued it through their new in-house production facility Games Animation. To this day, John K. continues to insist that content was the deciding factor, specifically that in "Man's Best Friend," but nearly all sources say otherwise.
- The remainder of the series was finished by half of its original staff (those who weren't loyal to John K.) plus some newcomers. Despite their efforts to conform to the more traditional structure of TV animation production, deadlines were still missed. Both fans and much of the staff agree that there were more bad episodes of this era than good ones. Nevertheless, the show ended up running for three more seasons until 1995, at which point Nickelodeon put it on "indefinite hiatus."
- In 2003, John K. relaunched the show as Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon", part of an adult animation block on Spike TV. The censorship fights at Nickelodeon were inverted at Spike TV - John K. maintains that Spike TV pressured him to turn up the adult content farther than he was willing to go, though other crew members have disputed this. At any rate, Spike TV made the mistake of giving John K. complete Auteur License and the result was a combination of the usual production delays and excessive spending that had gotten him fired from Nickelodeon back in the 90s and the newfound license to refuse criticism from anyone and everyone over anything to an even worse degree than before. By August 2004, when Spike TV cancelled all of its animated projects, only three episodes were fully completed, after which John K. had to beg people for money in order to finish the last three episodes.
- As for the 2020s reboot, several of the original staff members such as Bob Camp, Bill Wray, and Jim Gomez were brought on initially to help develop it and write and direct, only to find that the project would be script-driven and helmed by a largely young female staff who didn't understand the tone of the original show and undermined their guidance and contributions. Wray himself posted this (now removed) statement on his Facebook page as the episodes were leaked:
"We tried to educate them and they wouldn’t let us in the writers room. Management made promises for us to write and direct and they completely reneged on them. They were absolutely sure that we were old white men who had no idea how “young and fresh” humor had progressed…(and they would get really mad when you asked them what is young and fresh mean) and I know I’ll get canceled for saying this, but this was a young inexperienced woman’s writing room—(I’m pretty sure that most of their Merger credits came after working on this show because we started it two years ago) who forced us out because of our age and gender- this is not a bitter old man’s supposition. They said it to our faces in Zoom rooms and they said it privately to us again and again. I waited 30 years for this to happen and got my heartbroken all over again. The Ren & Stimpy curse continues. Paramount would be smart to write this thing off. I think they might.".
