Post #8 – Ren and Stimpy

Ren and Stimpy was a cartoon aired back in the early to mid 90s.  This cartoon – marketed to the kids on Nickelodeon, constantly pushed the envelope.  Watching these episodes back then, I always knew they were a little grosser than most of the other shows I watched, but with age and maturity I can really appreciate how controversial they were.  Much of the humor in Ren and Stimpy revolved around either extremely disgusting visuals or extreme psychotic violence, and sometimes some sexual innuendo.  I can’t believe this show didn’t incite some kind of major campaign against it.

For one example, let’s look at this clip from “Stimpy’s Fan Club”.  In this clip, Ren is jealous that Stimpy has more fan mail than he, and watches Stimpy in his sleep.  Ren goes on a fanatical rant about his jealousy, touching on homicidal themes.  The rant is a giant roller-coaster of emotions for Ren, who goes from jealous to philosophical to just downright crazy.  He discusses the fact that Stimpy is as mortal as anyone else, and contemplates commiting homicide, to increasingly dramatic orchestral music.  At one point, he stares at his hands, and states that his hands have the power to kill Stimpy and “alter the lives of millions”.  He considers decapitation.  As he is about to carry out the murder, he suddenly experiences some horrible pulsating headache, and collapses while screaming wildly.  At this point, the background and music could not be any more intense.

Scenes like these worried some parents.  Many of them were troubled by Ren’s rambling, psychotic, homicidal urges towards Stimpy, especially since they were targeted to children.  Ren and Stimpy was always infamous for pushing the envelope.  However, this show wasn’t just extremely violent; it could also be extremely disgusting, and also slightly sexual.

Let’s analyze one random Ren and Stimpy episode, “Insomniac Ren”, to see what kinds of objectionable things we might find.  In this episode, Ren is trying to fall asleep to wake up at the crack of dawn to play golf, but he instead finds himself constantly disturbed by Stimpy.  At first, Ren hears water running (after Stimpy uses the restroom), and tells Stimpy that he “forgot to jiggle the handle”, leading us to believe that Stimpy forgot to do something other than disabling the faucet, if you know what I mean.  Still unable to sleep, Ren wanders into Stimpy’s dream.  Stimpy is being suckled for milk by a bunch of babies that look like him.  Generally, males don’t allow children to breastfeed them, so this might seem a little ‘weird’ to some people.

Anyway, a little later Stimpy tries to soothe Ren by feeding him “warm milk”, which we find out is actually camel spit.  The camera zooms in for a disgusting close up.  The milk appears to have a hallucinogenic effect on Ren, we see Ren acting like he’s on drugs.  Stimpy reads Ren some Edgar Allen Poe, and conjurs up all kinds of sinister and disturbing imagery.  Finally, in the morning, Ren is so tired he asks to be knocked out by his golf friends, who whack him brutally him with golf clubs. ”Shhh,” Stimpy says, “Ren’s taking a coma.”

It’s not very surprising to see that this material might be considered inappropriate to some parents.  I think it’s amazing that I used to watch this when I was a kid all the time, and it didn’t spark more controversy than it did.  Ren and Stimpy is a fascinating example of a show marketed to kids that clearly pushed the envelope much more than you’d expect a kids cartoon to go.

This week I commented on Brenda and Chris‘s blogs.

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