In the late 1980s and early 1990s, children’s television and animation were becoming increasingly subversive.

Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies, while cute and cuddly, included a number of references to films and television shows intended for a more mature audience. Paul Reubens’ Pee-wee’s Playhouse took a formula well-established by The Howdy Doody Show and Captain Kangaroo and turned it on its head, encouraging kids to “scream real loud” as parents hoped their young ones wouldn’t catch the suggestive humor. Two years after Nicktoons debuted in 1991, Animaniacs brought sophisticated jokes and witticism into the homes of millions of children during after school hours.

The Ren & Stimpy Show, the manic brainchild of John Kricfalusi, didn’t break any well-established mold – it created its own, then smashed the mold to pieces. In a given episode, the viewing audience could see protruding neck veins, hairy facial moles, men wearing oversized rubber nipples on their knee caps, and, of course, plenty of farts and boogers. While some in the viewing audience at home may have tried to ban their kids from watching, Kricfalusi never received a single complaint.

The show’s enduring legacy is due to the shared genius of its creators, who together followed a strict set of creative principles that enabled them to make up their own rules along the way. Ren & Stimpy should have been too weird or edgy for kids, but always walked the line of appropriateness carefully, with one toe dangling off the high wire.

We conclude our four-part Nicktoons retrospective with the team that brought one of the most unforgettable animated series to the small screen – a very unique league of “sick little monkeys,” indeed!

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN (Story Editor, Nicktoons): John Kricfalusi understands cartoon language more than anybody else on Earth. Ren & Stimpy reinvigorated cartooning.

GEOFFREY DARBY (President of Production, Nickelodeon): We learned a lot from John. Or at least I did. I didn’t know, for example, that great cell animation was always done with a brush. I thought it was done with pen and ink.

BOB CAMP (Director/Development/Artist/Writer): Ren & Stimpy developed organically. Like a really funny tumor.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): I would go over to John’s parties, and he’d always have that development art that he’d sometimes whip out. He had been pitching that stuff since the mid-Eighties. His drawings were super cool, but there was no indication it was going to be anything special.

BILL WRAY (Development/Artist): After we met, John and I were pretty inseparable. There was a little group of us – friends of his from Canada like Jim Gomez – and we used to sit around talking about cartoons, drawing cartoons, watching cartoons, watching 16mm prints of Bob Clampett. This evolved into what was called Cartoon Party or something like that, and originally we were talking about [layout artist] Eddie Fitzgerald hosting the thing. We were going to have a couple of dumb, animated cartoons – and that’s where Ren & Stimpy came in.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): I made up the name Stimpy. It sounded like someone from another land who wasn’t too bright. Stimpy was influenced by Bob Clampett’s Gruesome Twosome. His middle name is “J.,” because all cartoon characters have “J.” as their middle initial. It’s tradition.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): John’s long-time girlfriend at the time, Lynne Naylor, had a big part in that. She had this ratty old cat in the apartment with us and the cat box was right next to the sofa where I was sleeping. She developed this idea that Stimpy was in love with his cat box and wouldn’t let it go.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): When I first saw the characters, they were a real retro, but really futuristic asthmatic Chihuahua and a brain-dead cat that I couldn’t tell apart from microbes or mosquitoes.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): John showed me this character he’d created and designed. At that time, “Ren Höek” would call up people and threaten to kidnap their babies. He got the name from a guy who was living in the apartment he was staying in Van Nuys.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren) [He] is just my caricature of a Chihuahua. Ren Höek was the name of my apartment manager when I first moved to LA.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): Halfway through our second school year at Sheridan College in Toronto, John went down to LA to get work and called me up: “Everybody’s calling! Get down here!”

THOMAS MINTON (Co-Writer, Christmas In Tattertown; Longtime Friend of John K.’s): I was at Warners when the Ren & Stimpy pilot “Big House Blues” was made by John and his starving Spumco crew, killing themselves, pulling round-the-clock work sessions. My guess as to why Nick picked it up is that it was the best pilot done by anyone.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): I saw this little blurb and I ran over to John’s place: “Hey! There’s this network, Nickelodeon, and they’re looking for animation.” John was never much of a TV guy. He was into older movies and music and stuff. He didn’t know what Nick was. He didn’t know what cable was. Cable wasn’t much of anything at the time. [Supervising Producer of Animation, Nickelodeon] Mary Harrington and Vanessa Coffey had worked at Marvel where I had worked before, so I knew them, and John pitched over there.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): I pitched the original idea with scarier character designs to all the major Saturday Morning cartoon networks, and they all rejected it. Then I added some fake characters – some more typically normal Saturday Morning cartoon types: the girl that’s smarter and stronger than all the boys, the black kid who is more white than the white kids, the wacky inventor. I called that show Cartoon Cavalcade starring Your Gang.

VANESSA COFFEY (Vice President of Animation, Nickelodeon): John brought in four projects but none of them worked. Your Gang had Ren and Stimpy in it, and I told him I loved those characters and that we should make a show based around them. He was in heaven. He said that was all he ever really wanted.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): I was trying to sell out by compromising the show. I softened it somewhat, as a compromise to Vanessa Coffey, but the basic personalities, format, and storylines were already set before we ever started production.

RICHARD PURSEL (Writer): My first impression of John was, “He sure is Canadian.” I grew up in Michigan, near Detroit, and could smell a Canuck. [Writer/Director] Vincent Waller tells me when we first started, John poked his head into office and said, “We’re gonna get rich.”

BILL WRAY (Development/Artist): John was one of the guys who came along and really made me believe that we could do something.

JIM BALLANTINE (Associate Producer): John had a real vision. He was not faking it. He was intense and I was on guard with him. He had no problems criticizing people to their face. The artists held him in high regard, but were quite afraid of him.

WILL McROBB (Story Editor, Nicktoons): There was so much talent there, and John was maestro of it all. He could be scary, though. He had a big temper. At the same time, he was so passionate. He could suck you into his world. John had that cult of genius, and deservedly so.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): If I wanted an “everyman,” I could just go door to door and watch my neighbors wash their dishes and mow their lawns. I like artists, actors, and musicians who have a ton of impossible skills and style.

CHERYL CHASE (Various Voices/Secretary of John K./Angelica, Rugrats): It was very stressful at John’s Spumco [original Ren & Stimpy studio], but very fun at the same time. I love being around an animation studio. It’s very vibrant and casual and creative and juicy.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): It got to be a little torturous, yes, and John may have lorded over people at times. There was the cult thing. Some people were calling him Koresh-falusi. Cartoonists are sensitive and nerdy, and they’re affected so easily. I always looked up to him.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): John would always say, “If you don’t have conviction about something, no one else will.” John suffered from a form of dementia that — when it was good — was amazing. But at its worst… was frightening.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): I was an abused child, so John had no idea that he was dealing with a guy who could take any form of punishment.

BILL WRAY (Development/Artist): John had always had a fascination with broken people, and mentally disturbed people and cast-offs of society. I was driving him around and he saw this big doofus walking down the street who looked like one of his Jiminy Lummox drawings, and he was like, “TURN THE CAR AROUND! OH MY GOD! WE’VE GOT TO GO TALK TO HIM! PULL OVER!” It was like he saw Marilyn Monroe. I tried to turn around to go find the guy, but we couldn’t. John was inconsolable for the rest of the day. He’s always been attracted to these dumb cartoon characters.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): I was 22 when I got my first job with him. I was extremely insecure. I had issues dealing with my parents and the baggage with that. I had people-pleasing and parental issues, so I think he probably was a bit harder on me than some of the other artists. If I could go back in time, I would say, “Hey, asshole. That’s inappropriate.” He was very critical and demeaning to people who were slower or had flaws. These are traits common with guys like him, who are extraordinarily talented.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): When I’d find somebody who was good, I would immediately introduce them to John. John’s stuff was constructed so well. There was something about it, some facility to it. He was fluid with drawing.

EDDIE FITZGERALD (Layout Artist): In somebody else’s hand, a pencil’s just a pencil, but in his, it’s like it’s Rembrandt’s brush or something. One day we were working on “Sven Höek” for the second season, and John couldn’t get what he wanted. He said, “Maybe I can do it.” He sits down, thinks for a couple minutes, and then starts drawing. It was just me and one other person watching this. Before you know it, all of a sudden there’s a million heads watching John do this. And the drawings are – they’re fine art. It’s like Willem de Kooning came by and painted something. He creates this scene in a new style that we’ve never seen. He deviated from his regular style to show how mad Ren was. This was a style that didn’t exist anywhere. He’s not copying any old cartoonists, he’s not doing traditional ’40s animation; it’s just him innovating right on the spot – and we were there to see it. By the time it was over, all of us were sweating as though we’d been through an ordeal. When he left, we all dragged ourselves to our desks, unable to work for the rest of the day. Our minds were blown. I’ll never forget that.

MARY HARRINGTON (Supervising Producer of Animation, Nickelodeon): John was considered a hot, innovative talent in 1980s animation. He brought creativity back from work he was doing on [the Rolling Stones music video] “Harlem Shuffle” and Mighty Mouse. Kids liked it. Adults liked it. He had a strong creative voice. There was something going on.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): I had no idea what kind of voice I wanted for Stimpy. I just knew I didn’t want the same old stock cartoon “dumb character” voice – the Lon Chaney Jr. character from Of Mice and Men. Nothing was clicking. I remembered that while auditioning for Beany and Cecil, Billy did an impression of Larry Fine that had me laughing and I always wanted to find an excuse to use it.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): I was best friends with this producer and musician named Andy Paley who did the first Brian Wilson [of the Beach Boys] solo record. Andy was also friends with John K., who was about to remake Beany and Cecil at the same time as the Brian Wilson record in 1988. Andy suggested me as a voice actor, and John took me aboard.

KEN SCARBOROUGH (Head Writer, Doug): I actually knew Billy a bit better from Higgins Boys and Gruber. He was a sweet guy. He used to hang around there a lot, playing his guitar and singing songs in different voices. He’d come on the show and do – which Three Stooges did he do? – I think Larry.

FRED NEWMAN (Various Voices, Doug): Someone doing an impression of Larry of the Three Stooges – not Curly, not Moe, but Larry? That was just so Billy. That’s the sort of bland, middle guy that he wanted to play Stimpy.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): I didn’t think it would work for Stimpy. I said, “It’s weird, and I have to reroute my brain to let it sink in, but yeah, let’s do it.” It was a lucky accident, because hearing Billy do that voice for Stimpy helped redefine his character to make him more than a mere retarded cat.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): I sped it up to make it childlike – Stimpy couldn’t sound like a depressed old Jewish guy – and the Nick people loved it.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): We always had a good time when Billy West came in to record. He is the most talented and versatile voice actor I have ever worked with.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): I made an audition tape for Nickelodeon of me voicing both Stimpy and Ren. I had to go into a closet to record – there was a mop and a bucket in there, and [MTV icon] Kurt Loder’s office right up the hall since Nickelodeon was under MTV Networks’ umbrella. John came out and said, “Congratulations, you just sold the show.”

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): I knew I wanted a Peter Lorre voice for Ren, because I had been doing it myself for years while pitching and acting out stories. I auditioned every voice actor I knew and I couldn’t get the intensity or insanity I wanted out of anybody. Someone was watching me direct all the actors and suggested I do it myself and put it on tape. I never wanted to be a voice actor. I hate the sound of my voice every time I hear it on my answering machine. But I did the recording, sent the tape in to Nickelodeon, and ended up getting the job.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): John worked you real hard. I was thinking, “I’m going into cartoons and this is what it’s like? Getting the shit beaten out of you?” It was just take after take of doing the same stuff over and over. You’d feel you had to regroup and pull it together just to get back on the mic after break. I thought my throat was going to blow out. And it did. It just made me stronger, as the proverbs go. Michael Pataki was an actor who did George Liquor. I saw what John did to this guy, who was practically lying on the floor in the recording booth, sweating and feeling like he was going to die, saying take after take, “How was that?” Then you’d hear from John in the booth: “You’re ninety-five percent there.”

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): Too much was never enough. I like my characters to be alive and pulsating. None of us could talk for days after our voice sessions. Mike Pataki would gradually remove his clothes until he was practically naked and pouring sweat all over the studio. He was a sight. He looked a lot like George Liquor, actually.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): The guy who played George Liquor came to do “Dog Show,” and I’m fairly confident he had a drinking problem. We were warming up the mic and he would do a test run. The guy had been out drinking whiskey until eight in the morning. John took his finger off the monitor button and looked at me: “This is gonna be rough.”

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): I would be physically drained after these sessions. Your body is tricked into thinking that you’re in battle, you know? It feels like you’re in a huge conflict: fighting and screaming matches. The body doesn’t know the difference.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): When Billy came in and did his first show that I directed later on – “Hermit Ren” – I ended up doing the same thing. I felt really bad, but it had to be done. When Ren freaks out, you got to do it. I didn’t start off on a good foot with him.

CHERYL CHASE (Various Voices/Secretary of John K.; Angelica, Rugrats): When you’re going through a scene with John, he acts it out. It’s really fun seeing him bring the characters to life. I was blessed to be there.

WILL McROBB (Story Editor, Nicktoons): John would pitch ideas to [Network President] Gerry [Laybourne] in her office like a Tasmanian devil. He’d emerge covered in sweat and out of breath. Everybody in the room looked like they had just been through a hurricane.

BILLY WEST (Stimpy/Ren [later episodes]): I knew how good Ren & Stimpy was, and I knew how good John was. He worked everybody to get the best of them. It was his style. Nothing else was ever that hard again in my career.

VANESSA COFFEY (Vice President of Animation, Nickelodeon): The first pitch meeting I set up for him, John was throwing himself all over the place and his Certs fell out of his pocket. All these executives said, “He’s crazy, but I can see why you want to work with him.”

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator/Ren): Cartoonists “wrote” the shows at Spumco. No scripts. We’d write a three- or four-page rough outline describing the main gags and plot, and then we’d write it with pictures on storyboards.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): On Ren & Stimpy, we were handed these outlines – literally short paragraphs describing each sequence. The typical outline I’d have was a page-and-a-half.

VANESSA COFFEY (Vice President of Animation, Nickelodeon): We didn’t do Ren & Stimpy from scripts. We went from premise to outline to storyboard.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): Bob Camp [story]boarded the whole “Log” thing. It was an accident! We had this show that was nine minutes long or seventeen minutes long and we had to bridge the gap. So they had the idea of putting “Log” in there.

CHRISTINE DANZO (Producer): The original budget called for half-hours, but when reviewing the budget agreed upon, it fell short. John suggested the idea of repeating some of the animation to save cost-per-foot, thus creating the idea of commercials and bumpers.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): John would hand me a couple of lines – “They go to space,” “They go crazy.” He had convinced Nick to let the writer and cartoonists develop the stuff. And a lot of that has become standard practice. I did maybe a dozen outlines for these episodes.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): John was a whaling captain; he didn’t mother people. “Okay, here’s the outline. Go to it!” I started storyboarding “Space Madness” and thirty panels in, he saw what I was doing and completely threw it out. “This is how you approach it!”

BOB CAMP (Director/Development/Artist/Writer): “Space Madness” is just about John’s greatest cartoon.

JIM GOMEZ (Writer/Artist): [That episode] was free-form stuff. I probably wrote the outline for it in a day or two – which is probably too long.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): Not every cartoon could be up to that level. “Space Madness” was the first “A” Cartoon. Right from the opening we knew it was special. Then “Stimpy’s Invention” was the next step up from that.

CRAIG BARTLETT (Writer, Rugrats): Ren & Stimpy was happening down the street from Rugrats. I knew some of the guys on the crew and visited the production office a couple of times during the first season. When there were storyboards for “Stimpy’s Invention” up on the wall, I looked at them and just laughed. They were fucking hilarious – and it wasn’t even a cartoon yet! That kind of experience doesn’t happen on other shows.

RAYMOND ZIBACH (Animator): It was a gang of artists doing what the fuck they wanted, which was mainly to make you laugh. They did know what they were doing and were seeing what they could get away with.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): I did some layouts on “Stimpy’s Invention” and I was staying with my sister, who didn’t know anything about the show. To her, cartoons were silly things for kids. I said, “We gotta watch this thing! I worked on it, but I don’t know how it came out.” The whole middle part with the Happy Helmet and “Happy Happy, Joy Joy”… It was amazing, beautiful … and a little self-indulgent – which I love – and my sister was shaking. She was like, “That’s going to give me nightmares! I don’t even know what to call that! That’s what you work on?” Yeah.

CHRIS RECCARDI (Director/Storyboards): What I think was appealing to the college stoners and parents and even young children was that, in the first season, there was an innocence to Ren & Stimpy.

MARY HARRINGTON (Supervising Producer of Animation, Nickelodeon): The thing that was so powerful about Ren & Stimpy was that, along with its pushing the envelope, at its core was the relationship between the characters. They really cared about each other. There was a friendship there that was unconventional. One of the reasons the pilot tested so well was because they both ended up in the pound together. When Ren got rescued, he went back for Stimpy. For kids, that was significant.

JOHN KRICFALUSI (Creator; Ren): I never got any complaint letters, although I expected them. Parents thanked me for making a show that the whole family could watch together. I had a couple letters from priests who asked me to move the time slot because the show was on during church and they’d sometimes forget their recorders. We got lots of letters from gay couples who identified with Ren and Stimpy.

BILL WRAY (Development/Artist): We did a signing at Golden Apple Comics and were hoping that someone would show up. There was a line around the block. We did a million drawings. People would say, “You saved my life.” There were spontaneous outbursts of the “Log” song. We couldn’t believe it.

[Watch The Ren & Stimpy Show on Hulu or the Nick app]

SEE ALSO:

Caseen Gaines is the author of We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic. His grandmother unsuccessfully tried to stop him from watching The Ren & Stimpy Show when he was a child. Follow him on social media: @caseengaines.

Mathew Klickstein lost his mind interviewing more than 250 VIPs from the early days of the First Kids Network for SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age. Fortunately, he was able to salvage a few last neurons for the forthcoming Marc Summers documentary, On Your Marc, and the new podcast, NERTZ. Find out more about Klickstein’s shenanigans here.