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Do you have to keep tapping like that? You bloated sack of protoplasm!
-[Stimpy] I will make him happy again. -[alarm rings]
- [TV static noise] - [screams]
[Ren] You idiot!
[TV static noise]
[suspenseful music playing]
[man 1] Everything in his life is seen through the lens of a cartoon.
That's all he lives and breathes is his cartooning, you know, and it's all he knows.
[man 2] John's personality is so permeated in that project,
I can't imagine it being done any other way than what it was.
[woman 1] He was very driven, very ambitious.
[Robyn] He had this sort of Rockstar status.
[man 3] He's the best drill sergeant you'll ever meet.
And drill sergeants do need to be cruel.
[man 4] But underneath it all was just this very ugly undercurrent.
[man 5] You know, the whole thing is tragic.
It is like a Shakespearean play.
[jarring indication]
[grunting]
[screams]
Ren & Stimpy was innovative on every level.
[man 6] It was an artist-driven show.
The drawings, the paintings, the characters, the voices.
Why won't they leave me alone?
Ren & Stimpy was gorgeous, was hand painted cells, hand inked. This was not done.
[screams]
[man 7] The influence of classic animation was extraordinary
and it was being digested and spit out in a way that none of us had ever seen before.
[screams]
[thuds]
[Bobby] I thought it was like Tom and Jerry.
If Tom and Jerry opened up a portal to, you know, hell.
[screams]
It was unapologetic and disgusting
and you never got to see that stuff on other cartoons.
It's not just [inaudible], it's also like getting deep into the experience of the characters.
Ren & Stimpy kind of opened the doors saying to everyone out there,
yeah, no more rules.
This show built up a cult following amongst both adults and children
and became America's most popular made-for-cable series in television history.
We were the kings, we were the bad boys of animation.
We were making the funniest cartoon than anybody ever made.
In order to do what we did, it took intense pressure and it all emanated from John.
But behind the scenes there were a lot of things going on that were really damaging.
[man 8] He called them beatings. Some of it was torture, I tell you.
He said that I could go fuck myself.
[Robyn] You know, I still have nightmares about him.
[Chris Reccardi] Despite what he says, you know,
nobody else worked harder to fuck it up than this guy.
It makes me sad because we were changing animation forever
and it all fell apart before it really got going.
[screams]
[body thuds]
[screaming]
Every single Ren & Stimpy cartoon that was made
was made with a certain amount of pain involved,
but that pain ended up in this creative result that is the work of art.
[TV static noise]
[scraping]
[classical music playing]
[Matt] A single sentence explanation of Ren & Stimpy,
whoo, let's see, where do you start?
Um...
Uh...
That's a really hard one. How would you describe it?
I don't know. Nothing else like it.
It seems to be about a dog in a cap, but it's a lot more than that.
It's an animated show about two friends who happened to be a dog and a cat,
but they live on the precipice of insanity and...
And death.
He's dead!
Dead, you idiot!
You know what dead is?
Just like we'll be if we don't get out of here!
[classical music playing]
[Iliza] Even though now looking back, of course, there was stuff that adults would get,
it felt like something that was just ours and it was weird but like you were part of it,
like you just got it.
[Matt] It was ostensibly a children's show.
You know, it wasn't a prime-time television series, it was a children's cartoon.
What a good boy!
[Chris Gore] Who pees in a children's cartoon?
I mean, like a children's cartoon where you have a character named George Licker,
a children's cartoon where you have a ghost that comes back alive
as a fully naked black man.
Man, what a blast!
What... What?
♪ Masked crusaders Working overtime ♪
♪ Look around... ♪
My' I've got to pack.
You don't realize what the state of the world of animation was in the '80s and early '90s.
It was a travesty. It was an embarrassment.
Poorly animated shows mainly created with the intention to sell a toy line,
but not with the intention to actually entertain either the kids
or the adults who had to suffer through watching their kids watch those shows.
The culture was so conservative then.
One of our most important freedoms' the freedom of speech'
was under attack by both conservatives and liberals.
Demons and Wizards, we will be burning that tonight.
We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family
to make American families a lot more like The Waltons
and a lot less like The Simpsons.
[applause]
[man 9] All the censorship that was going on in the world,
I think that is what John was pushing against.
[light music playing]
[Bob Camp] John's a great designer and he designed a lot of the characters.
He was doing the stuff we'd all have thought about doing but nobody had the nerves to do.
You know, he was sort of the Andy Warhol of animation back then.
The guy that people were getting around and people were thinking,
"Wow, this guy is the new talent in town."
[Chris Reccardi] John's just obsessed with cartoons.
I mean, the guy really couldn't do anything else.
I knew him personally and socially, aside from working under him.
He, he couldn't, you know, fix a flat, he couldn't drive. He didn't do anything else.
It was like this thing, this thing, and it showed, of course.
He's drawing all the time in his brains, it's like he's got a pencil on his brain.
So, he meets you, he seems very intensive, he's drawing you.
[overlapping chatter]
[Bob Camp] John K was really talented and really funny
and drew funnier than anybody around
and, uh, you know, to him, the funniest thing in the world was Fred and Barney having sex.
[quirky music playing]
[Richard] Bob said, you know, he's the next Disney.
We all kind of thought that... That John was gonna be the next Walt Disney.
[thuds]
I gotta move this thing out.
I'll just try to sit up straight.
[clears throat]
So, remind me if I start slouching, which is my normal position.
[interviewer] Sure, sure.
Did all the other, uh, interviewees get to make up too?
This lighting looks awful bright.
[interviewer] It... it won't be.
I look like a ghost.
First time I ever saw an animated cartoon, I was floored. I just... I couldn't believe.
I was looking it because it was drawings that moved.
And I was just shocked, like, "How is this possible? This is magic!"
And that's when I was hooked.
And I think I was probably about four or five.
I've had theories ever since I was a little kid,
I'm always trying to analyze and figure out how things work and why they do this or that.
So, when I saw the cartoon, I was convinced that magic was possible.
I had friends that I would give my theories to
and I told them the theory about cartoons must be proof of magic.
One day I was out with my dad and he stopped in a corner store somewhere
and I went straight to the, uh, toy rack.
This long package with Huckleberry Hound on it and I loved Huckleberry Hound,
I tug at my dad's jacket, "Dad, you gotta buy me Huckleberry Hound.
Buy me Huckleberry Hound!"
He's like, "All right, here is your goddamn 15 cents."
So, bought it and I took it home and I opened it up
and there were these long strips,
like film strips, of different scenes with Huckleberry Hound.
So, I read the instructions and it said "Cut these individual images out,
pile them on top of each other, flip through them."
You know, this just seems crazy, all right.
So, I'm flipping through it and I see the animation.
I was like, "Whoa!" They all went flying. I was like, "Eureka!
It isn't magic, it's science!"
So, then I had to call my... All my friends over to show them the flip book, right.
Hey, I was wrong, this is actually physically possible.
Oh, they all thought it was crazy.
They just like the funny drawings.
If I did a funny drawing, they'd laugh.
So, then I thought, "Well, make it even funnier."
So, I would exaggerate it more and do crazier stuff with it
and I realized that's really the key to cartoons is to make things so exaggerated,
so caricatured that people laugh.
If you can make it funny, you win, you get... You're popular.
[suspenseful music playing]
I saw a postcard with a picture of a Chihuahua in a sweater
standing next to, uh, this woman's leg.
You could tell that the dog hated the sweater.
It was humiliating to have to wear this sweater.
So, instantly, Ren Höek came to life.
From this, I kept drawing him
and he, eventually, morphed into something like this.
It was kind of egg-shaped, long ears.
Stimpy, I started drawing him and it didn't really look at all like Stimpy.
Originally, it was just me doodling from memory,
the cats from the Clampett cartoon called Gruesome Twosome,
that had these cats in it that had big bulbous noses.
I didn't really discover Bob Clampett fully till I was an adult.
When I saw his cartoons, I was just floored because they pulled you into them.
Come out!
[shouts]
[John] The early cartoons were animated, drawn, designed, painted by professionals,
people who had learned step by step through the 30s and 40s.
[lively music playing]
I watched the decay of animation which shocked me
because I didn't think anything can make cartoons bad.
I was an idiot. I was naive.
I thought, "Ah, we'll change it."
And somehow, I convinced a handful of my friends that it might happen.
But I don't think they ever really totally believed it.
I think Lynne did because she had a lot of faith.
[Lynne] I was a huge fan of his drawings.
He'd sit down and do these incredible drawings
and, uh, they'd just sort of toss them aside
and I used to just [inaudible] them,
like I used to steal them and put them in files at one point, it was ridiculous.
And so, I geek out over his creativity
and his ability to just get something down right away like immediate...
Immediate results.
[John] At some point, Lynne and I made these presentation art and story Bibles.
Somehow, I don't even know how I did it,
I got meetings at each of the Saturday morning cartoon networks,
which were NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox was still fairly new,
but they all had Saturday morning cartoons.
So, I went in there and pitched the cartoons.
I had never seen anyone take me through a storyboard like John did.
This... He was possessed.
[Chris Gore] He performed every part. He did every voice.
He would show you the board but you didn't need it.
No one had cared for so long about cartoons that he was saying,
"Wake up, I'm telling you a story that isn't like that other crap that you're seeing.
Here's this new thing. So, wake up."
Nobody pitched like that. It was explosive.
Screaming and like acting out all the lines.
He would roll around on the floor, he would get up, he would smash things.
I always like horrified, I have never seen anything like it ever.
His glasses hit somebody in the head once.
Okay, beep, watch out, the glasses are coming.
That was John, and you walk out of there like wow.
Like if I was an executive, how could you not?
You'd have to... You'd have to.
How do you not hire that guy to do that?
You lousy [inaudible].
[thuds]
Shut up!
[John] The executives in those days were mostly like moms.
The... the cartoons were full of morals and dumb stuff and they were completely bland.
So, all of a sudden, I come in with all these specific ideas
and making fun of morals and things.
Well, that didn't go over well.
In fact, one of the networks had a security guard come and escort me outside.
We read the Nickelodeon was looking for new Saturday morning cartoon ideas
but they didn't want to go to the big studios.
Didn't want to go to Hanna-Barbera, Disney, or Warner Brothers
because they thought they would just get the same stuff
that you see on Saturday morning cartoons
and they wanted something original and fresh.
[light music playing]
The first initial pitch with Vanessa went very differently
than the same pitches I gave to all these Saturday morning cartoon networks.
They... She didn't throw me out.
[Vanessa] He pitched me a project called Your Gang.
One of the kids in the project had a dog and a cat called Ren & Stimpy.
I didn't like any of the projects he pitched me but I did like those characters.
She just focused in on who are these two characters here, these Ren & Stimpy.
[Vanessa] There was an emotional element to Ren & Stimpy that was unlike any other, not...
I'd never seen anything like it.
[somber music playing]
[lively music playing]
It was edgy.
It was probably a little bit above our demographics.
And Nickelodeon was afraid of it.
[screams]
They weren't gonna do it.
So, I called Gerry Laybourne and I begged her.
I begged.
She was hesitant but I talked her into six episodes.
My relationship with Vanessa right from the beginning was like this,
we were two peas in a pod.
[Vanessa] I was attracted to that passion and craziness
because I have a lot of passion and I am probably crazy, too.
[John] If Vanessa wasn't in charge of the new animation unit,
it never would have happened.
I don't think she analyzed anything, she just knew what she liked,
which is extremely rare.
It was just natural for her to do what she felt was right.
But, you know, which made her a perfect executive.
[jarring indication]
[TV static noise]
[groovy music playing]
[TV static noise]
[glass shatters]
Ren' you... You're angry?
[teeth chattering]
You're darn-tootin' I'm angry!
I have never been this angry in my entire life!
[squelching]
Hey!
I feel great.
I love being angry.
Thank you' Stimpy.
Happy to be of service.
[cackles]
[Carey] Ren is as dysfunctional a character as you can get.
I'll challenge you to identify with this character because he's a complete ass.
What do you mean you don't agree with me?
Do you know who you're dealing with?
[alarm rings]
[explodes]
But somehow, you're... you love him.
And if you get that out like from the very beginning,
you just set the tone, this is who this guy is, he's a piece of shit.
And I kind of want him to win, too.
Oh, yeah' it's great.
Great for you.
[teeth chattering]
People always love the stupid one.
[whimpers]
But nobody ever loves the jerk.
Everybody hates me.
Casting for Ren, I tried all kinds of actors and I had all these people come in,
some really good actors and stuff
and, uh, nobody quite could get the intensity of the insanity that I wanted to get into Ren.
I tried everyone.
So, I finally just went in and I recorded it myself
and said I wanted to be like this and I acted it out and stuff.
Then I listened to it and I hated it.
But Nickelodeon said, "Well, you should just do it."
[thumps]
Do you have to keep tapping like that?
You bloated sack of protoplasm!
John's voicing on Ren is to me, astounding.
Wax paper.
There's episodes I can't believe how good and how emotional
and, he... he's just, you know,
he wouldn't... Why... Why... Why should he be good at voice acting, he's a cartoonist?
I have had this ice-cream bar since I was a child!
People always trying to take it from me!
Why won't they leave me alone?
[water splashes]
In the beginning, Ren was basically just...
He was Peter Lorre, he's a psychotic.
You... you imbecile, you bloated idiot!
[thuds]
You fat bloated idiot!
[thuds]
You worm!
[John] He... he was frail and tiny but couldn't control his rage.
[thuds]
You broke it. You broke it.
[sniffles]
My voice material possession.
Stimpy was an abject retard but with a good heart.
Happy, happy' happy, joy' joy, joy.
[lively music playing]
I did Stimpy, which was based on Larry Fine from the Three Stooges.
What's the matter with him? I'm still in one piece.
[Billy] His voice was so sublime.
Everybody could do Moe and everybody could do Curly but nobody could do Larry.
No one even cared about him.
But I went nuts the little that he said.
We gotta help him.
[Billy] He'd say like, you know, "Hey Mo, you put too much tinsel on the tree."
And... and John said to me,
"I don't want him to sound like a depressed old Jewish guy."
So, we pitched him up and he became very high-pitched and he...
And he could hear better to the parameters of a cartoon universe, you know,
where he'd be like, you know, "Will you button me, Ren?"
Will you button me, Ren?
Sure thing' pal.
[squelches]
- [Ren] Good night Stimpy. - [Stimpy] Good night, Ren.
You know, Stimpy was like really innocent and pure,
totally naive and he seemed to believe in everything.
Well, guess what the mailman brought you today...
Nothing!
This letter is for me!
[John] Vanessa never liked Ren. Ren was abusive to Stimpy.
Stop hitting Stimpy.
You know, I called John, "Stop hitting Stimpy."
How about that?
To me, that was integral.
That was the core of the show is that Ren slapped him around.
Love.
It says love.
[jarring indication]
Stimpy.
[somber music playing]
I would always have scenes where you'd feel sorry for Ren, even though, he's the asshole.
There's no... You shouldn't feel sorry for him.
Oh, Stimpy.
I'm so ashamed.
I didn't know that that would translate into heart.
I didn't set out to do "heart", in fact I was...
I was physiologically opposed to it.
And Vanessa loved that part.
[bawling]
[Vanessa] I think any great story brings out some emotional component.
Ren & Stimpy's particularly, was funny and emotional.
It was emotionally compelling usually because of Stimpy.
There, there Ren.
[sniffles]
There, there.
[Chris Gore] Stimpy loved Ren.
No matter how much he was abused or treated badly, Stimpy loved Ren.
[Bob Camp] They're just as real and... and as fucked up and as messed up as normal people
and they have real problems and insecurities
and... and they drive each other crazy all the time
but they're absolutely inseparable because they need each other.
Pal.
Buddy.
It's their relationship, you have this person who's really angry at the world, upset,
should be like this or like that, he thinks he's a genius, maybe he's not,
and then you have this really sweet other person who's sometimes an enabler.
You stupid.
- [thumps] - [Ren groans]
[Ren] Idiot!
[somber music playing]
It's kind of stylized toxicity, you know,
and there's a... there's a yin-yang to it.
[John] People always ask me if I identify with either of them.
Well, I'm not gonna say that I identify with... with an idiot,
um, but I... I... I guess I do identify with an asshole.
So, Ren is the one I identify with more.
[sad music playing]
John is clearly Ren. And Stimpy was Lynne.
Never angry, just always heart first, feeling first.
For me, in the beginning of Ren & Stimpy was a mom-and-pop shop.
It was John and Lynne and, you know,
everyone else was support for that, you know,
'cause they were... They've been together for 13 years or so.
And she could draw just as well as he could.
[light music playing]
[John] While I was at Sheridan College,
one of the assignments we had was to take a famous cartoon character and draw it.
So, I chose Merlin the magician from The Sword in the Stone,
which was one of my favorite Disney movies when I was a kid.
There was this really cute girl and I saw her put her drawings down
and Merlin the magician was one of them,
but I saw it had this really unique style
that didn't look like what other people were doing.
And I think I kind of fell in love with her right there.
In 1979, I moved to California, to L.A. I was missing Lynne.
I said, "Why don't you come down, man?"
Sneak across the border like I did. I told her how.
I hope I don't go to jail for this. Luckily, I'm a citizen now.
[romantic music playing]
[Lynne] I pictured it to be completely different like Beach Boys, the beach
and, you know, Hollywood and fine and I thought that was all golden
and... And crystal and sparkly and it wasn't.
And getting a job was really tough at that time.
[John] I had trouble trying to get my style into the business.
You know, when they looked at my stuff, they liked it but they said,
"Hey, but it's like too Looney Tunes. It's... been done before."
Then after a while I called, uh, Jim Gomez.
We both went to Sheridan College and I met John there and the union had gone on strike,
the animation union had gone on strike the day we had showed up.
It was the first strike in four years.
So, I ended up working at 7-Eleven.
We didn't have any money, so we had to rent one place.
[Jim Gomez] It was a bachelor apartment, there was no bedroom, it was one room.
There was four of us in there.
It's 112 degrees out in Los Angeles, you know how it is here,
sometimes it gets unbearable,
there's no air-conditioning, there's roaches all over the place.
You know, sometimes we'd stay up all night just killing roaches.
John had bought all these roach traps
which we called Muhammad Ali roach traps, had a picture of the champ on it.
It was one of his more dubious business deals.
And they couldn't get rid of the damn bugs, they're everywhere.
I was like, "Oh, my God, it's crazy."
I remember there's big jar of pickles in the fridge.
It was like big pickles.
I think John liked big pickles, too,
so, there wasn't anything to eat, like, there wasn't... We're really hungry, so.
[romantic music playing]
[overlapping conversation]
[Jim Gomez] Whenever I met somebody in the business who I thought was really good,
I would take them over to John.
[John] There's not a lot of these, you know, super specific people
that have the ability to translate their personality or what they believe
and what they feel through the pencil onto the paper.
But whenever I found somebody like that, I would totally latch on to the person.
Lynne was one. Jim Smith was one.
Bob Camp.
Bob and I had a good chemistry.
We'd go everywhere together. We'd laugh together.
It was a perfect partnership.
We'd listen to music on John's record player and watch cartoons
and we would, uh, share theories about animation.
[John] I've had people say to me I can draw in any style,
which basically means they can't draw very well
because nobody can draw in every style except for Bob Camp.
We had the audacity to call ourselves big shots
because John's always using that term, you know,
"Someday we're gonna be big shots."
[Jim Gomez] We had this naive expectation that we were gonna make great cartoons
because after all nobody was, so they would buy them from us
because clearly, nobody knew how to do it
and so, if we offered them great cartoons, naturally, they would get made.
Those guys did have like a real punk... punk mentality.
They were like if we... if we sort of set the tone how we want it to be,
it'll turn that way.
That's a trip. That's a lot of... that's a lot of hubris, a lot of, um... a lot of balls.
[John] And, you know, at some point I realized we need our own studio
just so we can do what we were put on Earth to do.
[man 10] And I think Bob came up with the term Spumco.
[TV static noise]
[Bob Camp] Where are we going, Bill?
We're going to see the creators of Ren & Stimpy at Spumco.
[rock music playing]
The Spumco offices were kind of gross, these weird little dank rooms.
The best way I can describe that studio was it was a shithole.
[man 11] Like it or not.
Spumco was this horrible old building that had been supposedly a brothel for...
For Paramount and it was like covered in ugly white tile,
looked like a giant urinal, basically.
[Bob Camp] It was so much fun.
We all were like, you know, having a good time waiting for somebody to kick the door
and drag us out in the street and tell us to get the hell out, you know.
[man 12] It's... it's weird that they let us do it.
[Bob Camp] We all were being the bad boys, you know,
being the Rolling Stones of the animation industry
and, uh, we pissed people off and we were kind of bunch of rude jerks.
It was John, Bob, Vincent. Vincent is just like Mr. Cool Calm.
And then Bob's intensity, so Bob has the intensity between John and Vincent
but they're all demented.
[Chris Reccardi] If an alien spaceship landed
and took everybody that was hanging out there,
it would be a really bad sampling of the human race.
[man 13] Lynne.
Okay, okay.
[giggles]
I think the excitement was like, "Oh, we really get to do this. How do we do it?", you know,
just wanting to get everything in there.
[man 14] Lynne was the heart, you know, and John was the brains
and we were all just, you know, playing different instruments.
Spumco was probably the greatest collection
of talented artists,
not just animators, not just character designers, not just background artists... artists.
It just stunned me like how good everyone was.
[dramatic music playing]
I mean, Jim Smith was the best draftsman that I have ever met probably in my life,
if not for Chris Reccardi, too.
And Bill Wray.
He's an extraordinary artist.
I walk in and there's Bill Wray painting these paintings
that I think should have been in museums.
This was a cartoon and these were the backgrounds
that were gonna be in the cartoon that we're making here. Oh, my God.
We would use sponges to do dot pattern effects. These are makeup sponges.
And when you're trying to get, uh, a transition of dark to light, you press it on there.
[Tom] I've said for many years and I believe this,
there should be a coffee table book of all Bill Wray's backgrounds from Ren & Stimpy.
I mean what a book that would be.
He started doing abstract splashes of color to heighten the emotion
and that's everybody's stealing that today.
[Teale] John knows what he wants, you know, and he knows what works
and he knows what doesn't work and he knows what he likes. And I think he made all of us...
He certainly made me a better artist, better color stylist for sure.
John's got a ton of charisma and his magic
was able to bring really multi-talented people together in a unified force, you know,
that... that had conviction and belief and stuff.
If anything could be called genius, that's, you know,
being able to mobilize people to come together to produce something great.
[John] It's not rare to find people who have unique personalities.
It's rare to find people who can tap them and put them on paper.
[dramatic music playing]
[Vince] A lot of the stuff was just based on our emotional experiences
which we definitely tried to relive
and make sure you felt whatever it was we were feeling at that time.
When I was growing up, my mother was a Jehovah's Witness,
I was forced to go out and go door-to-door.
And you never know what's gonna open that door.
[clanking]
[squeaks open]
[man 15] The Nipple Salesman episode,
there's a moment where Mr. Horse clearly is being portrayed as a sexual predator.
[Mr. Horse] But I'll tell you what though...
[creaks]
Do you have any rubber walrus protectors?
Call the police.
And, I mean, God knows how that got through.
Quick, man! Cling tenaciously to my buttocks!
Both of them?
[groovy music playing]
[Elinor] You know, John, there would always be something
in the cartoon that he wanted to slip by.
Their process was to bombard me with the most intense stuff
and, I mean, they did sneak some things through.
There is a very powerful supercharged vacuum cleaner and... and he says it can...
This vacuum cleaner can suck a monkey through 40 feet of garden hose.
[chuckling]
It can suck a monkey through 30 feet of garden hose.
You hear that line, I was like, "Oh, my God, how did that get in?"
[Bob Jaques] John used to hide little bits of drawing under the storyboard
and he would send a copy to Nickelodeon.
He'd show it to me and he'd go, "Dan, look what we got away with,"
and pull a Post-it back in.
[Elinor] They just didn't catch it, you know,
and then they were furious when they saw it.
And we were like, "Look, it's in the storyboard."
Man' that's pretty.
We were constantly adding stuff, a little innuendo there,
a little something in the background there.
And Nickelodeon would we say, you know, "Don't... Don't, we can't do that."
And we'd go, "Okay."
[man 16] What can I do for you' Officer?
Like the glass coffee table collection.
And see, and I say that to some people and people don't get the joke,
- so, I'll just leave it there. - I got it.
[Jim Ballantine] There's also a great shot where people are throwing hats in the air.
If you DVD slow frame through it,
there's an intestine that flies up and a big turd shoots out the side and flies off screen.
There... There are things I look at now going, you know, "Where was I?"
You can string the dingleberry garland.
[Vanessa] I never knew what a dingleberry was.
Everybody was laughing at dingleberry garland
and I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, why are you laughing? It's so sweet."
And everyone's like, "Okay."
That one they got... They got on me.
John was never more vulnerable than when he was pleading for me to...
to get them to pass some jokes that he thought were necessary for kids to see,
when I would say, "Look, uh, did what I could,
but they're not gonna let Ren eat his own vomit."
There would be this long silence on the phone
like he just couldn't fathom it, you know,
he'd just be like, "I mean... I mean, it's not like they're fucking."
[howling]
If you were outside the studio, it seemed like a cult.
And if you were inside the studio, it was like cult.
It's not a cult. Oh, John, John, John.
[lively music playing]
Yeah, I could see where people would think it's a cult.
[Chris Reccardi] At that time, there really wasn't anybody older
who was really doing anything good like what he wanted to do.
So, it was like recruiting young people that were fresh and training them.
So, I was one of a handful of those people.
[Ed] Coming into the industry I felt like,
"Oh, there's only certain things you are gonna be able to do,
so, here's where you should set your heights," you know.
But then with John, it was like, "No, no, set them way over here."
And for RAs for 18, 19, 20, that was what we were looking for.
When I first started working there, I, uh... I had this...
I have a really distinct memory of going,
"I can't believe I'm here like this is exactly where I need to be."
[Mr. Lawrence] We were in the place we needed to be
and we were working out primally how to make the best cartoons.
[Joe] It's like all of a sudden, I'm like 18, 19
and I'm working on a show that is, obviously, revolutionizing TV animation.
And I was so enamored of this personality.
But in working at Spumco, I realized that it wasn't just John.
John was really good at being a driving force.
But behind that driving force came all of these people that made you care.
[mellow music playing]
You know, the... the drawback with cartoons is they take so long to make
'cause you have to... You have to animate it
and, you know, you can't get the cartoon up and running.
Unless you're South Park, you know,
you're gonna have to spend a year to get a season figured out.
[man 17] Oh, man.
Yeah, we will.
As much as I talk about how much we, uh, screwed around,
you still had to spend a lot of times indoor sitting down
drawing hundreds and hundreds of drawings.
It's the nature of... of animation, all those drawings have to be done.
It's madness. It's cra... It is a mad medium in that 24 frames a second
even if you break it down.
[David] So, we were doing first episode, Stimpy's Big Day.
You could see the pressure from the very beginning.
Everyone was there trying really following John K's notes,
trying to redraw, very intense.
And all I could think of is, "This is not gonna last.
It's either gonna drive... I'm thinking of Lynne now...
"You're either gonna go nuts from this
or you're gonna go further and further down this rabbit hole."
But then, see, I was with John for a while, um, as his girlfriend.
So, uh, we broke up, so I left.
[somber music playing]
It was kind of like mom's going and, uh... And we're left with psycho dad.
But we have two psycho dads.
We've got John and Bob, two alpha males who are highly overly opinionated.
And this is like before we even finished the first episode of the series.
We were all trying to live up to John's idea of quality.
[quirky music playing]
John was, you know, willful and he was, uh, eccentric,
creatively volatile,
hard to deal with, nasty, but he was the artist.
[Carey] If he wanted to sort of jump to the next tier of quality
and he sort of expected his artists to follow through on that
and when we didn't, he would call us out.
I've been called a dictator. I disagree with that.
He was the hardest director I ever worked for.
You know, he had a sadistic edge.
I was screamed at... screamed at, at least three times in public.
The artists that worked for me had more leeway
than they ever had in cartoons they worked previously
and the cartoons they worked on afterwards.
There were two factions. Some people thought he was a crazy person,
um, but actually John, um, had a razor-sharp vision of what he wanted.
And he really does see things nobody else can see. That's true.
John could be really tough. I would sit in there and I'm just like,
"Okay, you're gonna say one more thing
and I'm gonna take this fist and double it up and knock you off that stool."
And I swear to God, it's like he had a psychic meter in his head
for when that place was with me and he would instantly go,
"But you did a really good thing right here
and that's really nice and blah blah." It's like, "Ah, okay."
[laughs]
[slow music playing]
[Elinor] You know, it was a hard job because his standards were so, so high.
It was an enormous amount of pressure but we'd all signed up for that
and we'd all signed up for like no sleep
and really long hours and coming in on the weekend.
[Chris Reccardi] I know in my case and a lot of people's case, we just had that side of us.
They wanted to be attached to something really cool.
There was a lot of talk about like how could you work for this guy and da da da,
he is such a jerk.
And you work for jerks in your life.
But if you work with somebody who actually cares about what they're doing
and maybe take some pride in it, that is rare actually.
So, I'd much rather work for the jerk who has pride in what he's doing.
[slow music playing]
He's like a cartoon character himself. I mean, you... You go eat dinner with him
and he orders a salad and he goes,
"Queer times, what the hell is that?"
And he'd pick them up and throw them across the room.
You know, he's badly behaved, you know, but... But funny.
[Eddie] John's secret is, if he doesn't get it the first time,
he'll try ten more times and if that doesn't work, he'll try a hundred times.
He will do something until he gets it.
He obsesses over getting it right.
And if you're doing the thing right, uh, it's never easy.
It's all about, if you can't stand the heat,
get out of the kitchen and everything is fair game
and you pick on everybody and everybody picks on you
and, you know, you don't hold back any punches.
It was like that at Ren & Stimpy.
And, uh, I think if John K were normal, the show would be more normal.
[boings]
[shivering]
My hands... dirty.
The dirt won't come off!
[jarring indication]
Ahh!
A lot of people think that Ren & Stimpy is sho... shock.
To me, it's not... It wasn't shock at all.
I... I really believe that it was characters expressing just emotions
that are kind of horrifying to look at
or people are scared to look at of depression and mental problems, delusions.
It's psychological and John was a master at transferring
what was here directly into your mind.
[mellow music playing]
The one thing I noticed early on is the characters were assuming the shape of their emotion.
If they were depressed, they were kind of flattened down.
If they were real happy, they were stretched and... And lively
and, you know, it was... It was almost you were looking at symbols of emotions.
And then when you had the expressions on top,
it just made it that much stronger.
[Mike] The characters emote, they change, they squash and stretch.
They express themselves in visually grotesque way.
We got to know who Ren & Stimpy were in their heads.
We got to see psychologically what was going on in there.
- Hey. - [crackles]
[screams]
It's happening again' my brain!
I think John really tried to... to get expressions that are kind of based on life
and trying to do a cartoon take on something that's very specific,
something complex and not just like something out of the Preston Blair book.
[light music playing]
There were a lot of studios and cartoons that had a very formulaic use of this is what,
you know, their lip-sync chart looks like this
and, you know, that people would just kind of plug it in and John was like, "No."
[laughs]
While you were drawing, you had to make the expression.
So, if Stimpy was smiling, you were smiling while you were drawing.
Or, you know, if he was angry, you had to really put it into the cartoon.
So, we had to study acting.
[John] Takes a long time to become a good animator
just like it takes a long time to become a good actor.
[Elinor] You know, back then, laserdiscs was a big thing,
so, John and I would get all these laser discs so we could freeze frame them.
We studied a lot of the sort of classic Hollywood actors that actually overacted.
Kirk Douglas was a favorite.
Dirty pictures you put there today.
Dirty pictures?
Yes.
[Elinor] Kirk Douglas, the amount of crazy expressions that goes into his face
for one expression is like staggering.
If you were to look at all the drawings
and see what went into, you know, one of Ren or Stimpy's expressions,
it would be like, "Wow."
[John] One of the things I love about Kirk Douglas is he reminded me of my dad
and he reminds me of men, in general, maybe not the man of today.
But, traditionally, men try to keep their emotions inside
but they can't ultimately because it builds up.
The more you keep it inside, you don't cry and you don't yell,
it's just churning like lava inside you and...
I used to watch my dad, whenever my dad was chewing me out or lecturing me,
I'd see him like... he's doing this, "Listen Johnny..."
[groans]
...and I could tell what his feeling is,
"I don't want to kill the guy but I have to somehow get through... through him
'cause he's such a damn moron."
So, he's holding back all those violence and I'd see his face twisting and boiling.
I was like, "Oh, shit." But it was entertaining.
You know what it's like when you're a kid and you're having dinner
and you're supposed to be in good behavior
and the more you're trying to be on good behavior,
the more you hear your friend snickering.
And then you can't look at them, right, and you start to snicker.
[snickers]
And then you watch your dad getting madder and madder, you know,
until he breaks the fork in half.
I was scared shitless.
But I... You know, whenever I saw anybody doing some kind of extreme emotion,
going through an extreme trauma, it's like a movie camera went off in my head
and I'll just absorb it.
I wouldn't even be paying attention to what was being said
or what the meaning of it was, it's just a turmoil that I was watching.
It's a man trying to be like a normal conservative, you know,
Leave It to Beaver-type dad to make me become a normal conservative,
a clean-cut boy, you know, they can be proud of with his friends and brag about.
That was never gonna happen.
I spent most of my time in the basement just drawing.
Drawing and copying characters out of comic books
and... and that my dad thought was... that was nuts
and that reading comic books was destroying my mind. I think he was right.
But I had to hide them under my bed and stuff, but he'd always find them.
Man, he'd would blow up, start kicking the comic books all over the room.
But, yeah, and there was... there was never any question in my mind
that I was going to be a cartoonist, come hell or high water.
My dad will get mad at me and then,
"Only one in a million will make it in Hollywood, buddy.
You think you're gonna be that one?"
I'm like, "Yeah, I think I'll be one of them."
[dramatic music playing]
[siren blares]
[screams]
At last I have control of your TV set.
Are you receiving me?
Welcome to our secret headquarters.
Thousands of miles below the Earth's crust.
Shut up, you fool!
How do we know we can trust them?
[ominous music playing]
[John] I realized that Ren & Stimpy was a success on a Monday
after the first episode aired.
I mean everybody knew. Oh, it's working.
Every week, the audience would get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Think about this, you're working for another studio,
the shows are airing and all the artists are running into a room to watch the shows.
We had a bet and, uh, I bet that we would get to a 4.0.
I was told it's impossible.
And I don't know, I believe it was the fourth airing of the first episode of Ren & Stimpy,
we got a 4.0.
It was first time in cable history.
Ren & Stimpy was just this weird show
that people were talking about in the animation industry.
And then, all of a sudden, bam, it was like a hit.
[rock music playing]
- [man 18] So, you guys have been Ren & Stimpy, you're going in? - [man 19] Yeah.
[man 18] All right, I'll see you.
[John] Golden Apple, a comic book store down the street,
was having signing with the Spumco artists.
We expected a few hundred people. We got a couple of thousand people showed up.
[rock music playing]
We're driving down Melrose like, "Oh, wow!"
And the line went literally around the block to get in to see us
and talk to us about Ren & Stimpy.
[Chris Reccardi] Cartoons weren't fucking cool then.
These were like sexy young people, you know.
[man 18] These guys are the best animators walking on this planet, no lie.
It's like, you know, suddenly, we had like girls following us back to Spumco to...
To look at the studio.
[rock music playing]
[somber music playing]
[John] I drove down to Golden Apple and they were running Ren & Stimpy cartons on a monitor.
I walked in right as it was playing Space Madness,
playing the part about the ice-cream bar.
Everybody in the audience was chanting along with it,
they've memorized the damn speech.
I don't know the exact date but it was shortly after the show aired.
My dad, he called me and said, "Oh, you did it.
I was wrong. You pulled it off. I don't know how.
It's pretty weird stuff but seems like everybody likes it.
But don't do the space ones. The space ones are stupid."
[interviewer] Did you do any space ones after that?
No.
I'd gotten so used to obeying my dad, following his rules.
[somber music playing]
Vanessa faxed me a bunch of fan letters.
So, people not only did they like it and laughed,
they were kind of obsessed with it.
I was way into Ren & Stimpy when I was a kid.
So, I started drawing Ren & Stimpy, I took animation classes at a kid's museum.
And then when I was 13, I started writing to John K.
I had built him up in my mind since I was 11 or 12 years old.
You know, he had this sort of Rockstar status in the '90s.
I had always wanted to work for him.
And just thought that the... the drawings were just like really cool
compared to anything I'd seen on TV and I wanted to draw like that.
I just... I liked intensity and things.
Ren's going insane and Stimpy's tone looks really gross
and so, you know, it's perfect for that age of kid.
I remember one night, I was just sitting there in my living room and feeling really bad...
sorry for myself and I was flipping channels and Ren & Stimpy was on.
And I thought I was having an acid flashback.
[light music playing]
I didn't even know what the fuck it was.
I literally just turned on a TV and I saw it and I was like,
"Oh, this is mine."
Loved Ren & Stimpy.
Yeah, I mean, it kicked so much ass,
it was so influential and it was like disgusting, hilarious, and sexual.
I mean, it's all clean, there's no bad language, there's no pornography,
it's just that you can feel the throbbing energy behind the art.
That's it, you're in our secret club!
It felt like something that was just ours and it was weird
but like you were part of it, like you just got it.
[mellow music playing]
My name is Scotty and I'm just a regular schmuck like anybody else
but I just have a massive affinity for this cartoon and its merchandise.
These are all new things like toilet paper and calendars.
These are all the, uh, comics.
These are all the factory direct ones. Little plushies here.
The Ren & Stimpy slippers that they sold at Spencer's and they sold them just like this.
You had... had about like one clubfoot and one skinny foot.
So, I bought two pairs just so I had a pair of each I could wear, you know,
a pair of Ren or a pair of Stimpy.
I've always been into cartoons
and I've never had a cartoon just grab me by the sack and said,
"You're coming with us." This one did.
I was, you know, young, just under 20
and, you know, I'd started smoking weed at that same time,
so, they were quite a fucking combo, I'd tell you that.
They were playing them all back to back on a Saturday or Sunday
and a buddy of mine recorded on it... on his VHS recorder
and I watched that thing until it was...
I mean, it almost obliterated, the tape was just so worn out.
You would play... play it on slow and you would just hit a button
and it would just take you frame by frame by frame by frame
and there was a different picture in every frame.
It was... I mean, it was un... Unreal.
Whenever... Whenever you see perfection, recognize it.
And they had their perfect moment.
[mellow music playing]
[Richard] You know, in 1994, I think the merchandising for Ren & Stimpy
was like four billion dollars or something insane like that.
No one had ever seen anything like that, you know.
This was creator-driven cartoons.
That whole created by that being new.
That turned it into an auteur form.
Before, it was, uh, by committee toys steered the show.
It had to be a pre-existing something.
But who... who created that, you know.
Who created the Transformers cartoon?
Who created He-Man?
You have to go way back to get Hanna-Barbera or Chuck Jones.
Ren & Stimpy with, created by John K, brought that back.
[John] I wanted the world to know who did it.
So, I elevated the top artists like Vincent and Bob and Jim, Chris Reccardi,
but I had to fight to be allowed to do it because they didn't like the idea at Nickelodeon.
Well, Stimpy' what's on TV tonight?
Oh' joy!
Hey, Ren, it's Commander Hoek...
People tend to think that like if you have a good character, you come up with Bugs Bunny.
Wow, it's gold.
But look at how many times they've tried to revive Bugs Bunny
with different people doing it.
None of them ever come close to the success of the original Bugs Bunny.
It's not Bugs Bunny that is the, uh... That is the... the golden property.
It's the artists.
[calm music playing]
I think a lot of great art hides in kids' cartoons.
What Ren & Stimpy had that other shows didn't have were these close-ups.
So, you'd have like Ren & Stimpy doing something and then something disgusting
and they would have this like weird jarring music like...
[grumbles]
...and it would be a close-up of just very detailed topographical look at someone's skin
or a booger.
And you never got to see that stuff on other cartoons.
It was unapologetic and disgusting.
If we're gonna show a still, it better be great. It better be amazing painting.
It better be this great painting we can hold on, you know,
and be disgusting, you know, as dis... as... as gross
and we're gonna make you sit on it 'cause it's so beautiful but, yet, it's so, so gross.
[creaks]
[squelching]
[screams]
[John] I didn't think of myself, "Oh, I'm gonna push boundaries."
I was more about like, "How do you get quality?"
[man 20] Ren & Stimpy was an anomaly in its time. He did not want scripts.
Script-driven shows were like anathema to us and to John.
He didn't want to have to follow someone's script.
He wanted... He felt like cartoonists were funnier than writers.
And to a degree, he was right. I mean, for this show he was right.
He felt like it was important for him to convey to me my uselessness.
You know what I mean? It's like...
And I was... I said, "What... We... Didn't we just have waffles and chicken?
Now you're telling me I'm just... I'm nothing?"
People who aren't cartoon writers are not very good at writing cartoons.
It's just like you try to write a music score without knowing how to read music, without...
Or never playing an instrument and try to describe it in words.
John's legacy is that he reset the clock on animation,
that he reestablished the storyboard artists
and the artists, in general, as the king of animation.
[Carey] You had to be constantly moving forward.
There's a lot of, "Oh, this part of the drawing is working.
I'm keeping these eyes but they're too big,
so, I'm gonna size them down on the Xerox machine
and then I'm just gonna work on the body a little bit."
And then you cut and paste into it.
So now you've got like three or four or five different elements
and then you're using liquid paper and so you've got this like just mess,
and your pencil would go... [grumbles]
...over all these, you know, levels of paste and liquid paper.
Any other cartoon production, they would look at...
at our storyboard and say, "That's a mess."
It didn't matter. The goal was to be funny.
Ha!
[bees buzzing]
[gasps]
[screams]
[grunting]
The one episode that I really still think about today is Toothache.
[sloshing]
[glass shatters]
John was always like grabbing somebody to go to lunch.
He... he hated being alone.
So, there is this Roscoe's Chicken N Waffles, world famous.
He came up with the whole idea of Ren's toothache with the... the nerve endings
and the stink and he's like, "Yeah, so anyway, you know,
teeth fall out and the stink's coming out and then,
and there's flies eating the shit in the fucking cat pan and it stinks so bad.
And there's this giant black guy behind them, turns around and goes, "Hey, hey, hey.
I'm trying to eat here.
I don't know what you guys are talking about. It's just disgusting."
[bee] Hey' hey' hey' hey, hey, hey, hey, we are trying to eat here
and you stand here, airing out your stinky old gum holes.
[boing]
[thumping]
Whoo!
[suspenseful music playing]
[rumbling]
[farts]
[hissing]
The genius of Ren & Stimpy was how far it went in being outrageous.
It was the fact that, uh, an outrageous show could also have so much heart.
[somber music playing]
And with that heart, you know, you suddenly had shows that had a balance to it.
[tears sloshing]
Yeah, that was a great episode. Um, the name got changed to "Son of Stimpy,"
but it was originally called "Stimpy's First Fart."
[classical music playing]
[tinkling]
That drew a lot of criticism,
like, people were like, "Alright, you're really hitting bottom."
And I remember John saying, "Oh, no, no. This is... this is high art."
[Bob Camp] And you're very sympathetic for Stimpy and his situation, you know.
And he's heartbroken because he lost his fart, you know,
but still, it kind of makes you want to cry.
[cries]
I hate pathos. It drives me crazy because it's... it's contrived.
It's just like shoving it down your throat.
Vanessa encouraged me, "Can you do more scenes in your cartoons with heart."
[Ren] Stinky!
[John] You know, as I say, I was totally opposed naturally to it,
so, instead, I came up with a way of making fun of it.
[somber music playing]
If I'm gonna make people cry, I'm gonna make them cry over the most ridiculous reasons.
[creaks]
[sighs]
I thought I'd never smell you again.
And I actually enjoy doing it. Once I got to the point where I could make fun of pathos,
I thought, "Wow, this is a great ingredient."
[shouts]
Most of it came from Vanessa,
but she didn't urge me to make fun of it, she urged me to make her cry.
It's so good to have you home.
Come in and sit by the fire.
If your mentality, like John's I think sometimes was,
is let's see how much I can get away with.
After a while, that kind of becomes self-defeating how much I can get away with.
It just becomes an end unto itself.
[Vanessa] You know the idea was let them bring as many ideas,
but then pull it back because it's still television and it's still storytelling.
It's not just gags.
It's not just being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous.
If it was left up to just letting it go,
there's no way it would have been this good.
[man 21] Hey, let's just hang somebody.
[woman 2] Oh, my God!
[man 21] Then he goes, "Yeah, we hang nobody in a long dang time! But who we gonna hang?"
Really with John, you know, probably the... the person who dealt with him the best was Bob.
[John] He didn't draw on my style before Ren & Stimpy,
but once we started hanging out, he just picked it up overnight.
I didn't have to give him all the theories about maintaining guts and all that stuff.
He just did it.
[Bob Camp] We were missing more and more deadlines
and I, uh, approached Donna and said, you know, "Let me direct."
[Scott] Bob was the perfect extra director. He wasn't as obsessive as John.
Bob just wanted to be really funny and that's it.
Just funny, funny drawings, funny gags and John could do his craziness
and... and pushing the envelope.
When John and I worked together, we made magic.
[dramatic music playing]
[thunder roars]
Stimpy's invention which some would argue
was the ruination of the entire Ren & Stimpy franchise
just because it took so long to make,
maybe it was all worth it just to have that one episode
just in terms of something that gets you on every single level
and deserves in my mind to be in the pantheon of great cartoons.
[boings]
Hey, what is this thing?
Get it off of me.
It's the happy helmet' Ren.
Now you'll always be happy and this is the remote control.
[alarm rings]
[teeth chattering]
Free!
Hey, it works.
[alarm rings]
Hey' what's happening to me?
[Will] I think John succeeded in conveying what a cartoon nervous breakdown would be like.
Ren's having his mind controlled and it's tearing him apart.
It's part horror story, you know, part comedy, part cartoon.
- [cackles] - [alarm rings]
Can't lose control.
Will strong, body weak.
[Carey] For Stimpy's Invention, we've got these storyboards that were really broad and hilarious
and it was a Bob Camp storyboard and it was one of the funniest storyboards I'd ever read.
A lot could be learned from comparing that storyboard to the layouts that were done,
particularly, the ones that were done by John.
It was like doing graphic things that were really unusual.
Ren is wearing the happy helmet and he does this bit of dialogue
and he says the word "go" I believe the letters "go" are in his mouth.
Hey' must go do nice things.
And I just, I remember that kind of blew my mind
like that the level of interpretation was getting really right-brained.
[Jim Gomez] One of the things about John was that the bar was so high,
every time it passed on the next guy, it had to be plus,
starting from the story moving forward all the way to the final.
[ominous music playing]
[David] On Stimpy's Invention, John would fix drawings after they had been shot.
The scene was done, it was finished.
And John would grab the scene and start to redo drawings.
[Christine] John decided to take the show, all the elements that we had into his office,
he locked the door and wouldn't let it go out of the studio
until he reviewed the whole show and did his thing on them.
It was incredibly horrible emotional time for about 6 months there
when we were just skidding without delivering a show.
Nickelodeon came to me and said, " Ren & Stimpy is so successful we want to do 20 episodes now."
[Chris Reccardi] Yeah, that's normally an exciting thing in the TV world,
but the reality for John was like who's... who's gonna create all this stuff?
I can barely deliver with the crew we have now.
[John] I said, "Well, we'd have to multiply the crew by 3 and some."
And they said, "Go do it."
And here's what we get back to what executives, network executives,
think makes a good cartoon.
They think it's the idea.
Once you have the idea, then you can just fill a studio with bodies to do all the drawings.
It's... it's a crazy idea.
He kept going, "Well, I have to train all these guys."
I said, "No, you don't.
Hire people that know how to do it."
[John] So, I knew that was going to be a problem and frustrate everybody
because I'd have to split my time now into three.
[Jim Ballantine] My big job was schedules and budgets
and getting us on track and we were way off track.
Shows were delivering months late,
so that's why I originally had been brought on.
I think in my first interaction, you know, with John he said,
"Oh, so you're the studio hat that's been brought on to, you know, watch us."
[Bob Camp] We weren't even very far into season two,
we were already hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget
and months behind schedule.
I mean, we missed the air date for the very second week of Ren & Stimpy
and we had to rerun the first week cartoon
that pissed off the advertisers big time, you know,
because John couldn't let the cartoons go.
[ominous music playing]
[Todd] He told me one time, he was quite sad about it and he said,
"You know, I wish you would just come in here, punch me in the face,
and take the work and give it to him, just physically take it from me."
[pen scraping]
The whole secret in animation is to get the director to sign off on that stage
whatever it is that storyboard, that layout.
If John wouldn't approve one drawing, then that footage is sitting there.
What are you doing?
John, he was obsessing up on way too much and being the bottleneck in production.
And it ended up creating some great cartoons,
but then, again, I know the cost of those cartoons and it was not just money.
[Jim Ballantine] You know, he was really struggling under all the pressure of it.
[Vanessa] He became aggressive. I noticed how he started abusing his artists.
[Joe] We would leave at like midnight after doing all of our scenes and stuff,
but John would stay up. The man didn't sleep.
And he would stay up going through everyone's work.
You just have to know that people were so punished.
I mean, they were punished trying to get John's approval for a drawing.
[Elinor] You would like slave away
and like you might be really happy with your scenes that you'd done
and then they go to John and he was like, "This isn't a drawing. You got to redo this, you know."
There wasn't a single layout I did that didn't have,
at least one drawing that he would throw away,
you know what I mean, at least one drawing.
[John] The artist would finish the scenes, bring them back to get them checked
so they preserved storyboard expressions, did they push it further,
or did they tone it down.
Well, if they toned it down, they'd get what people called a beating.
[classical music playing]
[scraping]
Literally, like throwing the layouts out on the floor like, "Look at these.
This is not acceptable!"
[Chris Reccardi] He had all the qualities of somebody who's like
borderline like a Hitler type, you know,
like just total intolerance for anything weak or unsatisfactory.
So, you know, like, you draw like a fag.
I mean at one point, I did kind of lose it and I quit and I said, you know,
this kind of criticism doesn't do anything to make me better, it just, you know,
makes me hate you and I went home and... and, of course, he was really apologetic
and said, "No, no, no. Come back. You're really important."
So, there was, you know, there was a lot of psychology at play with it...
With the whole thing, you know.
[David] It was Bob Camp who I remember the most.
It was like John was really treating Bob poorly.
He was rejecting all of his drawings.
He was complaining to him that this is no good, that's no good, and it was really affecting him.
[teeth chattering]
Please God, please.
[gasps]
Mm...
[bee buzzing]
[sighs]
Mm?
[teeth chattering]
[thuds]
[suspenseful music playing]
John did that to a lot of people.
[John] Trying to make a good quality show
with all these handicaps we had in the second season,
you know, I was on the verge of insanity, I think.
And they would add these obstacles of throwing whole storyboards out after the...
The story had been approved.
And we got... Our notes got way longer.
That was the most frustrating thing about the second season.
[Vanessa] That was hard for me because I got a lot of pushback.
Initially, John and I would work together and it was just a give-and-take and it was fun
and he would listen and then it was over.
[lively music playing]
Hello, I'm George Liquor, American.
We had been working on the boards for, uh... It's called Man's Best Friend,
I think, the first show of the second season that never got aired.
John pitches this idea, we do the boards, they get approved
and I go, "Wait, what?"
I get him alone in a room, he's never lying to me.
I go, "John, are you sure they've approved this board?"
He goes, "Yep, yep. They did it."
Now, come on boys' attack!
But you are my kind and beloved master.
I can't.
But I can.
[thumping]
Man's Best Friend, I didn't like it. It was extremely violent.
[grunts]
[thumps]
No!
[groans]
[swooshes]
[squelching]
[thumps]
[shivers]
[plops]
[squelches]
- It's discipline that begets love. - Ouch!
Nickelodeon is making an investment in kids' programming.
[grunting]
You must learn your place.
[groans]
And that's to say, when we saw it, I was just like...
I mean, it is up there with Samuel Beckett,
it's one of the best things ever made but it's not for kids.
[ominous music playing]
[John] The executives at Nickelodeon thought George is me.
This is absolutely not.
He thinks he's doing you good.
[clears throat] Today's lesson is discipline.
Now in order to learn discipline, you must learn to misbehave.
Now you see this over here?
This is a couch.
Now a couch...
[John] After he tells them don't get on the couch, he says,
"Well, what are you waiting for get up on the couch?"
Come on, make me mad. Make me mad or I'm going to be really mad.
[whimpers]
[jarring indication]
[squeaks]
What did I tell you about sitting on my couch?
[gasps]
- Are you afraid? - [John] It's twisted logic.
It's... it's logic of authority figures.
It's my dad.
[somber music playing]
George Liquor is the first character that ever just popped into my head instantly
and I knew almost everything about him.
He's a moral god-fearing man who believes in being tough.
Tough love that's what it is, it's tough love.
That's a good boy.
It's discipline that begets love.
[John] In the cartoon, you take real-life emotions and you exaggerate them.
I identify with almost all the characters
and I try to put something into them that I feel myself.
George Liquor, I don't identify with personally,
but I identify with having to, uh, yield to authority.
[sad music playing]
He called me to give me feedback on my notes that I was giving him
and he said, um, that I could go fuck myself.
That he wasn't gonna take notes anymore.
That he made the network and he is the star.
[Bob Camp] He sent a note to the network saying, "I can no longer be held responsible
for budgets or deadlines, sorry."
When I read that I was like, "Oh, my God!"
And I got the biggest marker I had and I drew a giant pair of balls on his door
because like, clearly, he had the biggest ones in Hollywood.
[Vanessa] We failed at working together after that. It just failed.
You know, "I'm going to do whatever I want to do
and it's going to cost you whatever it costs."
And as an executive for a company that, you know, I was beholden to,
it didn't work that... It doesn't work that way.
[somber music playing]
And I just walked down the hall and tell Gerry Laybourne
that I had an out-of-control train
and that I had an episode I couldn't air.
And I have, you know, outlaw artists on Ren & Stimpy
which I loved but it was hard.
They approached me and they said, "Look, we want you to finish the show."
People within my studio, they were plotting behind Spumco
to, uh, take... Start a new studio and take it over.
The network was talking to me about it and saying, you know,
we don't know if we're gonna have to fire John or not.
We're gonna have to close the studio and I'm trying to talk him out of it and everything.
[Richard] Bob was smelling blood and, uh, he's like,
"Yeah, fuck John, you know, he's abandoned his duties.
Dereliction of duty, you know."
When, you know, we do it without him.
You know, he started talking in that... that way.
[John] Nickelodeon, behind my back, would tell them,
"You're the backbone of the show, you're the brains.
We don't need John. And we'll triple your salary."
[man 23] Everybody was angry and I... I told them that I had talked to John.
I was shocked. I said, "If you do this, you're gonna be right back
to where you were before Spumco
where you have no creative say and you're screwing all the people who built this up."
But they went because they thought of the glory.
Well, boy, now I'll be the big cheese, even though, I'd made everybody.
All the top people big cheeses, but not big enough.
[somber music playing]
[Vanessa] I remember the final conversation with him.
I mean, he was just like, "Please, you know, don't do this."
And I said, I have... I... I can't not do this.
We have to... We have to do this.
You're the one who created it.
You created this mess, we didn't.
And he denied it, but there was no choice.
[scrapes]
[sad music playing]
[scrapes]
Yeah, actually he called me. Yeah, and he said, "Guess what? I've been fired."
And... and he actually said this. "I'm actually kind of relieved."
[sad music playing]
It was really sad. I was crying.
John was almost crying.
We gathered everybody into one big room
and said we... we have to give you guys two weeks' notice.
We don't have any more money, they're not paying us anymore,
so, it was... it was horrible.
[somber music playing]
The hardest thing really was just the fact that we were having so much fun
and doing such great work that it was a real shame that it had to stop.
The artists had to make a decision about stay with John
or come with me and Nickelodeon and produce at Games Production.
We created a new studio, in about three weeks, we put... Put it together.
[Richard] And it was just Bob saying, "You know, you have a job if you want it."
You know, he would say to a lot of people.
I said, "You know, Bob, I'm not... I'm not going to Games."
And he says, "What? Traitor. Fucking traitor."
You know, just all in my face, spitting mad, you know.
And I'm like... And then Vincent, you know, was like, "Whoa..."
And he goes... "I am not going either." He goes, "What?"
[Bob Camp] It was devastating. It was horrible.
And I knew that it would make me look bad in some ways,
but I knew I had to do it, you know, because otherwise, the show would die,
or worse, they would give it to someone who would candy coat it
and make it into something that wasn't what it should have been.
John and I were the best of friends and... and I haven't seen him since that day in 1992
and I don't know if I ever will again.
[John] You know, I was burnt. Who wouldn't be burnt?
You build something over years and years
and it's taken away overnight for somebody else to build something.
These are characters that you developed for years that you loved.
You're losing your kids, basically.
[sad music playing]
[Vanessa] It broke my heart. I loved the characters. They were my babies.
It just was a car accident for me and it... it... I struggled.
I really, really struggled.
[Jim Ballantine] We really did try to make the most we could out of a very unhappy situation,
but, you know, we did get death threats.
I mean we had to put surveillance up.
They sent this card with this bag over this German Shepherd's head
with a hole in the bag
and its snout coming out and a gun down the German Shepherd's mouth
and it said, "You're gonna die bitch!"
And that was one of many.
[interviewer] Is there anything you would have done differently?
We're back to that one.
[sniffles]
That's an impossible question to answer.
- [interviewer] No, it's not. - Yeah, it is.
[gulps]
There's nothing I could have done about how it turned out.
It was fate or something.
It's like, I would, you know, if I was gonna change something I'd say,
"Let's not do 20 episodes."
[TV static noise]
That's not my Ren.
Not my Ren. No...
[Vanessa] Yeah, it's funny when people say,
"Oh, you stole Ren & Stimpy from John Kricfalusi or the network stole.
Well, the network owned the copyright.
He didn't bring Ren & Stimpy to us.
I picked Ren & Stimpy out of one of his properties.
This idea that he brought us a show
and, you know, we took advantage of him and took it away, it's just not that... It's not true.
He didn't pitch us a show called Ren & Stimpy until we developed it with him.
And the one thing that he wanted back, like, his fight at the end, you know,
give me the character George Liquor back."
I'm like, "Take it."
The last thing we want is that character. It's a horrible character.
It's abusive, bully, horrible, insane character.
[ominous music playing]
You know, later I left, so it was just unbridled, left unchecked John.
[eerie music playing]
I mean, there's a reason why there's a difference
from the original Ren & Stimpy to Ren & Stimpy Adult Party.
It's because he lost a lot of the people
that gave those characters heart and feeling and appeal.
After losing the show and losing that expression and I wasn't there,
and I lost all contact with them, but I think, in real life, you know,
that's when his behavior got really bad.
[eerie music playing]
I had always imagined what it would be like to meet him
because I wanted to work for him so badly.
[John] To the girls that were in charge of the library and the fan club,
they brought me this big thick binder from one particular fan named Robyn Byrd.
I was amazed that somebody 16 years old could write so well
and could express her emotions so clearly.
Some of the things she conveyed was that she was lonely and depressed
that nobody understood her.
She used to call me Mr. Faluci, which was very cute.
She also sent a videotape of her sitting on the floor in her room talking to me directly.
That did it.
He responded to me.
I was... Had just turned 14 when I first heard back from him.
I was falling in love with her letters and I knew that probably is not right,
but I was just so smitten by her personality in her letters
and then when I watched the videotape, it's like, "Holy cow!
This girl is amazing."
[thrilling music playing]
[Robyn] It had developed into this weird sort of romantic thing
over the time that I had been talking to him.
[John] In some of her letters, she would, uh, put double entendres about sex and things.
[Robyn] This is the guy who's been like saying, like, dirty stuff to me for two years
and like talking to me on the phone and only at late at night.
The first year of that, really as a little kid,
when I was 14, I was still a little kid.
And then her mom sent her out for a summer after I visited them
and, you know, she, uh, was an intern at Spumco for a while.
And then, um, when I was 16, I moved in with him.
[slow music playing]
I thought I'm getting offered a job.
I'm getting offered an internship.
I... There's someone who can take care of me.
So, I... I just... I went with it because it's...
It's what I had always wanted and what I thought I still wanted.
Well, she was too young and I freely admit that.
It was a bad decision...
but she was so convincing.
[slow music playing]
[Robyn] My entire adolescence, so, 14 to 21 was owned by him.
His work was so wrapped up in his life.
That was his life, so it was my life, too.
So, it was just like you lived in the kingdom of John
and, you know, I still have nightmares about him.
[slow music playing]
I was isolated from everyone I knew.
It was almost like there was this mandate not to talk to me.
I was sad all the time.
He blamed me for that.
"I'm making you happy. Why aren't you happy?"
[Inaudible] talk about women's bodies all the time.
I would cry at work and he would tell me how inappropriate that was.
Indoctrination-type stuff, Bertrand Russell's essays about non-monogamy.
What are you trying to tell me?
You know he just really had no response to actual feelings.
[slow music playing]
He's gross, he's weird, he's eccentric, he's sick.
And there was a brief break in there where I went and worked at a couple other studios
because I just needed to have my space
but I came back to him and when I came back, Katie Rice was there.
Hey' this is Katie Rice.
She is one of the young artists I was telling you about who sought me out
- because she grew up watching Ren & Stimpy, right? - Mm-Hm.
He had, literally, flown her out like two days after I moved out of his house.
He just started hiring kids, you know,
because they're gonna have that devotion to him.
Katie is the princess of sexy girl artists.
[Robyn] I had matured a bit.
I could tell that, you know, this stuff that has been going on for the past five years
is not normal and so I left.
I ran and I thought I can't go back to L.A.; no one will hire me.
That... that 16-year-old me that could do anything was just... just squashed.
[ominous music playing]
[interviewer] You read the article, I assume.
I read parts of it and then I had to put it down.
[interviewer] The parts that you...
See, I don't want to like complain about...
I don't want to get into details because then you have to drag other people into it
and, you know, it's just more people getting mad at each other.
You know, I don't know what he's been up to, lately,
except I have names of lots of girls he's tried to get with 'cause they've talked to me.
[overlapping chatter]
Well, I've officially retired, not exactly by choice,
I still have tons of ideas, characters and things I would love to explore.
So, all that's gone.
It's my own fault for not being smarter or more responsible.
John didn't just turn into this... John has, I think been this person for a long time.
He would have us over to his house for parties and he got drunk enough, you know,
he would talk about young girls being, you know, the hottest.
I talked to his most recent assistant and she was... she was crying and sad about it
and she's like, "That's not the John I know.
Uh, he never... Yeah, I mean, he would say inappropriate things
because he's kind of a man-child."
That whole male locker-room thing, I didn't take it seriously enough.
I'm making no excuses,
it's just like it never occurred to me that a guy would actually pursue that.
[Vanessa] I think that his abusive nature and his God kind of thing,
I just wasn't surprised.
I was also really, extremely angry.
It hurt... It hurt that he used, um, Ren & Stimpy that way
to, um...
lure girls into his fold.
It was upsetting.
Um...
So, that made me sad.
I got a message this morning that made me almost cry because of the way she put it.
She was like, "You are, um, protecting all of the little girls
who never put their crayons away."
[interviewer] She came out. She said she's hurt.
It was very... She felt like she was taken advantage of.
Knowing that is how she felt, what would you say to her?
I would... I would definitely apologize to her
and... and explain that I didn't see things the same way that she did and I should have.
I would admit to what I shouldn't have done that I did do.
Explain how guilty I feel about it, especially when she says now
how... how hurt she is by it.
I really feel awful about that.
And I'd ask her to forgive me and try to explain that, you know,
I always had ultimately her best interests.
What I... From my point of view were her best interests at heart
and I never wanted to lose friendship with her.
[interviewer] I think with that two words, "I'm sorry" would that be of...
Well, didn't I say that?
I would definitely tell Robyn I'm sorry.
Really, really sorry, because I didn't realize how affected she was
until that article came out.
And it just made me feel complete shame and guilt
and felt like the lowest creature on Earth.
So, I really would love tell... I'd love to tell Robyn in person.
If she watches this, give me a call, please.
[somber music playing]
[Richard] That created by moniker, you know, is John's legacy,
but, in the end, it's what stains the show.
Oh, Vincent said, "Now the characters are covered in shit paint," you know,
and that's heartbreaking.
[Chris Reccardi] Basically, this show's a bastard child and it's fucking always gonna be.
And it's still, you know, right up to now, it's easy to blame John for that.
It's like, well, clearly, you know, nobody else worked harder to fuck it up
and than... than this guy despite what he says, you know.
[somber music playing]
[Robyn] People have sent me pictures of their comics in the garbage can and stuff like that
and I'm not gonna tell them not to do that.
But if someone is really conflicted about it,
then I would say, "Look, just don't think about him.
Think about how you were happy when you were a kid
and you would watch Ren & Stimpy, draw Ren & Stimpy."
I don't really find anything good in it for me anymore,
but I don't see why someone would have to pull out a part of their childhood
just because of what's in him.
[sad music playing]
The show is the show
and there were a lot of creative people that, uh, contributed to it,
so, whether you like me or hate me,
I would hope that that wouldn't color your enjoyment of the show
because, you know, there's Bob Camp and Jim Smith
and Lynne Naylor and Chris Reccardi
and on and on, all these talented people that contributed to the show.
[Richard] You know, people don't know all the different people that came together
to create created by and that's how you get a SpongeBob.
That's how you get a South Park.
That's how you get everything that followed, you know,
none of that would have happened without Ren & Stimpy and that created by cart.
The current day examples of shows that I think were influenced by Ren & Stimpy
are all of the shows.
[David Silverman] It's ongoing impact is the way it affected
and changed the way people who worked on cartoons, looked at cartoons,
and you know did cartoons afterwards.
It's all there, you know, from character design, to expressions, to timing,
you know, it influenced a great deal.
[David] It has much validity as a Eugene O'Neill play as it does a Daffy Duck cartoon.
It's all about addressing the human condition.
[somber music playing]
[Chris Reccardi] And I think a lot of us somehow do feel
a sense of gratitude towards John, you know.
This group of people, this thing, you know,
I would never take that credit away from him.
Some of my favorite artists and musicians and actors, comedians,
some of the most talented ones just tend to be the ones that suffer the most
in terms of interfacing with reality.
[sad music playing]
[Robyn] It's not necessary for someone to be like that to create great art.
You can have that going on in your head and you can use it to make art.
In fact, you can work through it with art.
That's what a lot of artists do with their pain.
[somber music playing]
Pain does create great art. I do believe that but, um,
you don't have to keep inflicting pain to create great art.
[John] You know, when you make something that people really like,
they sort of expect you to... to be perfect.
And once people know you for real, a little of the magic is worn off.
"Oh, he's a human like everybody else."
[sniffles]
[somber music playing]
[TV static noise]
[classical music playing]