Ren & Stimpy | August 03, 2025

Original Show Run: August 11, 1991 - December 20, 1995

Start Date: June 29, 2025
End Date: July 18, 2025

Rating:

Favourite Episode: "Big House Blues"

  Moving back away from the 2000s and into the 90s again, I recently watched The Ren & Stimpy Show. This is one of the other original Nicktoons, alongside Rugrats and Doug - which I remember both much more fondly than Ren & Stimpy. Infact, I did not watch Ren & Stimpy much as a kid. Having watched through the entire show for the first time, I am quite surprised this was one of the shows accepted by Nickelodeon at the time, even if they were desperate for something unique or groundbreaking - which the show was.
  I was aware that many of the artists from Ren & Stimpy eventually moved on to projects, nmost notably SpongeBob SquarePants, where they carried over things such as "Gross-Ups" (a highly detailed close-up of something obscene, such as a character with rotting teeth). However, what surprised me the most when watching Ren & Stimpy was how much of the music was also eventually used in SpongeBob. Almost every episode had me going - "Hey I've heard this in SpongeBob!". Since both shows take a lot of inspiration from even older cartoons, I'd be interested to see if any of the same music was used and if they use it to convey the same emotion as the modern shows.
  Before starting Ren & Stimpy, I was aware of some of the inappropriate, to say the least, behavior of its Creator, John Kricfalusi, but not to its full extent. I had decided to watch the documentary, Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren and Stimpy Story after completing my watch-through of the show itself, to prevent it from causing any bias while watching. It is very unfortunate that the creator had used show was used to coerce many young girls to get close to him, and it can make it difficult to enjoy a show or other art when we discover things like this. As mentioned in the documentary by several people - this does not necessarily need to be a reason to avoid the show or dislike it; there were many talented people who worked on the show, from voice actors to artists to writers, and did not use it such ways, so their talents still deserve to be appreciated. For my favourite episode, I picked out "Big House Blues" as it introduces the "first material possession" gag, that always gave me a good laugh when Stimpy would say it.