Ren and Stimpy have a documentary coming out on August 14th and if that brings you thought of happy happy, joy joy, then hold that thought a little longer. Getting into the documentary is going to be kind of rough, likely because while the Ren and Stimpy Show was a revolutionary idea, it was still something that didn’t pan out all that well behind the scenes apparently since from the creator to his team things weren’t always firing on all cylinders and the show suffered for it. The documentary will give you all you need to know about this since a lot of what will come will be an opinion and the reminiscing of a great number of people that can remember when this psychotic cartoon was first released and marketed to the public. Keep in mind that when I say ‘psychotic’ it’s said in the most loving way possible since the show was beyond crazy and it took its content to extremes that a lot of people felt shocked by and were certain would never catch on. But that must be why the merchandise came after and people were singing “Happy, happy, joy, joy” all over the place when the show was still a hit. It’s true, the content was a mess and things were so overly crazy that parents had to think long and hard about whether they would allow their kids to watch the show. One could say something along the lines of “Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry are violent too”, but the truth of it is that unlike Ren and Stimpy, many other cartoons were tame with their violence and their content.
Ren and Stimpy was a cartoon that broke the rules without looking back since it went forward in a manner that made it clear to anyone that if their jaw was on the floor it might get used as a welcome mat to the kind of toilet humor that the series implied and used quite often. There were no apologies from the show and no desire to throttle back and make it a little more agreeable to anyone since that wasn’t the point of Ren and Stimpy. The point of this show was to be as wild and crazy as possible and they obviously pulled it off in a very big way that upset some people and made others laugh in a very profound manner. Taking the show as an affront to good sense and manners was often laughed off since the honest to goodness truth was that if you couldn’t stomach this show then you belonged to a very big part of the population that doesn’t embrace the crazy nature that we’re born with and might need to relax every now and then. Yes, it was absolutely nuts, and yes it was downright offensive sometimes. But to be fair, cartoons are not perfect, since no matter what the content is there’s bound to be something that will offend at least one or more people down the line. Ren and Stimpy just cut out the ‘down the line’ part and got right to it.
They were also a huge influence on a lot of other cartoons that would come later since the nuttiness that they brought to the screen was emulated in a number of ways in the years following the show and lo and behold, many of those shows were hardly ever talked about. Sometimes it had to do with the fact that said shows weren’t all that popular and didn’t really take off, but it’s nice to think that at some point people finally found their sense of humor and just laughed off the crazy that continued to display on the TV screen, but that doesn’t feel like an accurate statement at all. Instead, it would feel that they learned how to ignore it and just went about their way as those that actually enjoyed said shows continued to support them as much as they could. The documentary will go into a lot more detail as it describes what went on behind the scenes of Ren and Stimpy and why it started to tank after a while despite the fact that people did love the show at one point and were hooked on it in the same way that some folks are hooked on caffeine, they just needed it for one reason or another. But in their heyday, Ren and Stimpy were two of the funniest but also over the top characters that ever danced across the TV screen and it was hard not to laugh at them since their antics were just about as funny as any other cartoon character, even if their content was a bit over the top at times. When all is said and done though, their humor wasn’t any worse than what we see on TV today.
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