Added: 337 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: Nerdcore | 9 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/17089/A-Lament-to-Ren-Stimpy/'>A Lament to Ren & Stimpy</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

I don't know about anybody else out there, but I miss this damn show. Created by the genius hand of Canadian animator John Kricfalusi, it was a unique and hilarious tangent to, well, to every other show on TV at the time. It started out on Nickelodeon in 1991 - whoever set that up deserves a medal for corruption of the young - and by some weird anomaly managed to stay there for the next 5 or so years (the golden years) before some fiendish, soulless executive must've come along and said something like, "Great Christ! This is the most depraved and unholy thing since Caligula ice-docked a horse with a frozen kangaroo turd!" At which point it disappeared before resurfacing as Ren & Stimpy 'Adult Party Cartoon' in 2003. Now, sadly, it is no more. Boo and hoo. I miss the deranged and exquisite joy of seeing Ren's face go supernova when Stimpy had done something so monumentally stupid he made Stan Laurel look like a Nobel Prize winning scientist. Or Stimpy would cough up some fur balls and kitty litter so repulsive they'd make you physically gag. I miss Mr. Horse and Yaksmas with Mr Stinky Wizzleteats, who'll teach your grandmother to suck eggs! (and featured in the awesome Happy Happy Joy Joy Song). I miss the blotchy, splattered backgrounds that popped up from nowhere and the always cheerful narrator. I miss poor Ren's blood shot eyes, and his frequent bouts of dementia.

It was fun to watch, not only fun, but like a freakishly twisted journey into the soul of a madman tripped out on datura (a nasty, troubling hallucinogen). The glaring colours, the debased scatological humour, the sexual perversions, the switch from animation to a sudden still image, the sense of manic displacement - watching a whole episode was like a bolt of lightning to the cerebral cortex, followed by a foot-long line of Pop Rocks candy, and 3 grams of sherbet injected into the base of your spine. In other words, it was joyous. Like a kid hyped up on sugar and the latest fad, who's just discovered the abundant humour in messy bodily functions.

For a kids' cartoon it was daring, and warped. I'm surprised a whole generation of kids didn't grow up into maddened, howling loons with blood pressure as high as the Empire State Building, and blood that wasn't just boiling, but had turned to lava. Kids ready to snap at any given opportunity, like a twisted coil of deadly, ferociously hungry, angry vipers. Maybe it was Stimpy's Zen like idiocy that kept us from tumbling over the edge into a schizophrenic cartoon breakdown.

Its disturbing aesthetic paved the way for many to follow including; The Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob, Drawn Together, The Grim Adventures of Bill & Mandy, Chowder, Flapjack and more, but its style and manner was a natural descendant of Looney Toons, Hanna-Barbara, the productions of Charles B. Mintz, Tom & Jerry, even Disney - aping the styles of Max Fleischer, Walter Lantz, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Also adding its own mix of lunacy, frenzied sense of foreboding, dark-as-abyss jokes, and a crude love of flatulence, vomiting and what Freud might call the infantile anal fixation. But at its centre was the sweet, although violent, friendship between the stressed-out Chihuahua and his amiable, but dumb, moggy friend. While it was twisted, darkly surreal, psychotic even, it was also warm and strangely comforting and in its own way a great reflection of the madness of the real world.

The list of characters were truly original: Powdered Toast Man who farted before he flew away, Mr. Horse, Muddy the Mudskipper with his gravelled voice, and attitude straight from a 1920s Hollywood producer, the Yaks - these characters would seemingly appear from nowhere and bring confusion and flights of fancy to bear down on the already bizarre plots. I remember "Space Madness", it was like a Star Trek episode filtered through a crack pipe. Truly mind bending.

Along with the Animaniacs, Batman: The Animated Series, Dexter's Laboratory, Rocko's Modern Life, Rugrats and others, the 90s rocked when it came to leftfield but appealing cartoon shows. None quite reached the apoplectic wonder and genius of The Ren & Stimpy Show however. It was as rabid as a sleep deprived speed freak who's just found out every paranoid conspiracy they thought was true, is.

This is just a general hurl of stomach lining to rejoice in its sublime, subversive, screwball, unhinged, inventive brilliance. It would perfectly suit the broken, screwball, unhinged world we currently live in, full of, as we all know, fat, bloated, eeeeeeediots.

Added: 337 days ago by Kevin Holmes | Posted in: Nerdcore | 9 Comments

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