The Ren & Stimpy Show
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
John Kricfalusi took the buddy cartoon, deleted the plot, and filled the space with faces: the gross up close of Stimpy’s tongue on a honeycomb, the sweat, the snot, the veins. The Ren and Stimpy Show is the reason nineties animation stopped pretending kids were germ free, and Nickelodeon broadcast it without ever fully seeming to know what it was airing.
The grossness hides real craft. Expression timing borrowed from the great Warner Bros shorts of the forties, Billy West’s Stimpy a golden retriever trapped in a cat, Ren a chihuahua having a permanent breakdown. The best episodes, Robin Hoek, Space Madness, Stimpy’s Big Day, are small masterpieces of codependency disguised as nonsense, and the art direction gave a thousand kids a permanent idea of what texture means in animation.
Watch the first two seasons, the ones Kricfalusi oversaw. The later Nickelodeon years without him are the same furniture with no fire.
Our score: 8/10.
