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

Stimpy decides to work as a cartoonist inspired by his hero Wilbur Cobb, a prominent 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. Despite the fact that the elderly Cobb is senile and in bad health, he loves Stimpy's cartoon I Like Pink. Cobb tells Ren and Stimpy that if they continued on their current path, they will end up where he is-which is revealed to be a prison.

Cast

• Billy West-voice of Ren and Stimpy.
• Jack Carter-voice of Wilbur Cobb.

Production

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 executives with 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] 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. Kricfalusi and Camp last spoke to each other in September 1992 and since then the two men have never spoken to each other.^[3] Camp denies that he had any intention to "betray" Kricfalusi, and 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]

Nickelodeon still owned the rights to Kricfalusi's vetoed story, and in 1993 it was turned into Stimpy's Cartoon Show.^[5] Bob Camp, the head of the Games Animation who once been a leading animator with the Spümcø studio stated in 1993 that unlike Kricfalusi-whose ideas were often censored-that 95% of the material in the Games Animation scripts was not being censored.^[6] 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.^[6]

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.^[6] Many of the characteristics that Ren has a producer such as narcissism, an abusive attitude to his employees, a perfectionist streak, and a tendency to take credit for the work of others were those often ascribed to Kricfalusi.^[5] 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.^[7] 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.^[5] After his firing, Kricfalusi tried hard to keep his name from appearing in the credits of the stories that he had started at Spümcø , but had been finished by others at Games Animation.^[8] In 1993, Kricfalusi had threatened to sue Nickelodeon for including his name in the credits for Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen, a story he had started in 1992, but lost control of after his sacking.^[8] 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.^[6] 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.^[9] Camp stated about Rough Draft Korea's work: "The better the layouts you send, the better the animation you get".^[9]

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.^[10] 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. Komorowksi 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.^[10] Likewise, Komorowski praised the cartoon-within-the-cartoon, I Like Pink staring Explodey the Pup, as "exactly the kind of cartoon we would expect Stimpy to make-completely incoherent and incompetent".^[10] Komorowski described Stimpy's Cartoon Show as the best of the stories directed by Camp.^[10]

Books

• Dobbs, G. Michae (2015). Escape - How Animation Broke into the Mainstream in the 1990s. Orlando: BearManor Media. ISBN 1593931107.
• Komorowski, Thad (2017). Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media. ISBN 978-1629331836.

External Link

• Review of Stimpy's Cartoon Show

References