Chapter V: Come As You Are
THE KINGFISH
Gone Fishin'
Eric Stefani In Control
Excerpt from the documentary Happy Happy Joy Joy, The Ren & Stimpy Story (2020)
ERIC STEFANI: So basically, I now had a huge amount of control over the show. But like - it wasn’t just the show. Nickelodeon basically held John at gunpoint to give me a huge leadership role at Spümcø. They were all like, “do you want to keep your job, or do you want your show to become a little baby show.” *chuckles*
ERIC STEFANI: After looking over any problems the studio needed fixing - I realized that the way John ran the studio was….. well it was an utter clusterfuck. Of course I didn’t tell him, knowing how he couldn’t stand criticism back then. The staff was just totally overwhelmed with work, and it was a big reason for the late episode deliveries. So the simplest solution would obviously be to hire more people. After Nick forced Spümcø to promote me, they also forced the company’s decision making process where I, John and others would vote on decisions regarding projects and the workplace. Kricfalusi barely agreed to this, and I thought that there was no way that anything could be done with him and his lackeys blocking progress. Luckily, there were cooler heads at Spümcø and on the board - some of whom I’ve worked with on Yaks.
ERIC STEFANI: Bob Camp, uh, was a fellow director and was considered another big creative force on the show.[1] He shared John’s dream of the animation world with total creative freedom, but by this point the two had developed bad blood between each other. Apparently, John had started taking credit for writing Yodelin’ Yaks - even though it was I that wrote it and Bob that directed it. John - only John was invited by all the big-wig talk show hosts - ya know, Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman, Larry King, you name it!
*cuts to John Kricfalusi on David Letterman*
JOHN KRICFALUSI: *in the voice of Ren* Stimpy, you eediot! We are on live TV - and you can’t even behave like a civilized person!!
*audience cackles in laughter*
JOHN KRICFALUSI: *still in the voice of Ren* Ohhh…. What I’m gonna do to you…. First, I’m gonna tear your lips out… and then I’m gonna… gouge your eyes out…
*laughter continues only louder*
JOHN KRICFALUSI: *still in the voice of Ren* Next I’m gonna…. TEAR YOUR TEETH….. OUTTA YOUR DIRTY MOUTH……….[2]
*cuts back to Eric Stefani*
ERIC STEFANI: Then there was also Jim Smith and Lynne Naylor - the latter of whom was John’s girlfriend until they suffered a nasty breakup. She then started dating Chris Reccardi.[3] Kricfalusi had been fuming about the breakup and at the time had started to mope around. Perhaps it played a role in his later breakdown.
ERIC STEFANI: But I digress - basically we all met and held a vote on whether or not we should expand the staff of the show. John angrily voted “no” - protesting the chaos that “little tykes” would bring onto the studio. Or something like that….
*cuts to Director Bob Camp*
BOB CAMP: Long story short, John was outnumbered 4 to 1. Spümcø now had to hire more people whether John liked their skills or not. And with Yodelin’ Yaks being such a huge breakthrough for the show, we knew that we needed a larger team to meet the demands of Ren & Stimpy. So, Eric Stefani took charge and spearheaded the hiring process. Luckily for Eric, he had also been working another job on the hit animated sitcom The Simpsons - in the design department. So he had plenty of experience with helping out writers with backgrounds in other art forms.
BOB CAMP: Among the writers that Eric was able to pull away from The Simpsons included the talented duo of George Meyer and John Swartzwelder. Those guys wrote a lot of the best episodes of early Simpsons, and they would go on to help maintain Ren & Stimpy’s adult appeal.[4] Next, we would also try to recruit new artists fresh out of college. And among the standout artists we found was a guy by the name of… Richard Deutschendorf. And I was like, “we searchin’ through German exchange students Eric?” *chuckles* He preferred to be called Dick Dutch.[5]
BOB CAMP: Looking through his resume was like looking through a phone book. There were…. probably hundreds of drawings in the 3 stacks of folders. And all of them had these handwritten sticky notes put on them. You got these drawings that keep referring to this weird thing called “Amerime”. Dick explains it’s a stylistic mixture of American comics and anime - or Japanese animation. And I was like - *makes a baffled face* - “Anime? Isn’t that one of those weird bug-eyed Japanese cartoons I saw when I was a kid?”
BOB CAMP: As someone working in the animation industry, I became familiar with the medium back when I was working at Rankin-Bass on shows like Thundercats and Silverhawks. Some of my Japanese colleagues gave me a sneak look at some of the animations that the Japanese industry was putting out around that time. And having been shown the likes of movies like Golgo 13: The Professional and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, I was like, “why can’t we have that in America?!”[6] But that’s the thing, I was an industry insider who knew about these things. But then I see some rando that hands in his resume to Spümcø and I’m like - “How does this nobody know about anime of all things?!”
*cuts back to Eric Stefani*
ERIC STEFANI: And so we kept looking through his resume, and there’s this crumbled up, kinda torn piece of notebook paper in it that details a trip to Japan with his dad around 1982. He claimed that in the paper, he had discovered the art of Japanese animation - anime - through watching shows such as Lupin the 3rd and Space Battleship Yamato. He went on claiming to have begun to beg his parents to learn Japanese and become fluent in the language, and this allowed him to read more manga - which is like, the comic form of anime as far as I know. *chuckles* And speaking of comics, Dick also claimed in another paper in the folder that he was a huge fan of Batman and DC Comics - and also Marvel Comics characters such as Iron Man. And would you believe this kid has been drawing since the age of three? I’m serious - there are these drawings that Dick drew as a kid - they’re all just… amazing!
ERIC STEFANI: So I decided to give Dick a shot. And as I thought to myself, I just prayed to god that this kid was as interesting as he claimed to be. Interesting - would be an understatement.
Dick Dutch’s Big Break
Excerpt from Win, Lose, or Drawing: Secrets of Animation Past (2022)
“Too dark, dreary, and depressing.”
That was the note that was attached to my response letter - signed by Peter Schneider of Walt Disney Feature Animation - telling me that my job application as an animator was rejected. I had pitched an idea for a movie called Hank and the Hustlemen, basically a coming-of-age movie about a gang of kids who make the most of their last summer together with a whole bunch of wacky hijinks and schemes. And the most unique part about it is that it wouldn’t shy away from the raunchier aspects of childhood - including realistic violence between the rival gangs and the child actors that voice the kids in the movies actually swearing. But they simply didn’t care. They thought it was “too dark, dreary, and depressing, and not in touch with the family-friendly Disney brand.” I tried telling them that maybe it could fit for that Touchstone label they use for edgier movies - even edgier animated movies - and they responded with some corporate shlock about “being unable to secure a market potential for a potentially unprofitable venture.” As in it won’t line Michael Eisner’s pockets with money, or get him that new Porche for Christmas. They call my film concept Hank and the Hustleman dark - when they can’t say shit about being “too dark” since they’ve made shit like The Black Cauldron! Or Bambi or Who Framed Roger Rabbit!
But, I had to pull myself together and look elsewhere. So I applied for Warner Bros. Animation, since I heard they were making a new Batman cartoon - and being a huge Batman fan, I decided to apply. I was turned down. And so then I went to apply Klasky-Csupo. I was turned down. DiC Entertainment. Turned down. Marvel Productions. Turned down. Film Roman. Turned down. Hanna-Barbera. Turned down. Universal Cartoon Studios. Turned down. Don Bluth Entertainment. Turned down.
Every time, I kept hearing the same damn thing - “cartoons are for children in the morning, not for adults late at night.” And every damn time I tried telling them about the medium of anime as an argument against, but they wouldn’t listen. “Too cheap.” “Too loud.” “Too bright.” They simply didn’t get the idea of anime - let alone American anime, or “Amerime” as I like to call it. And so I took my chances and went to pretty much the last animation studio in Hollywood I haven’t tried yet - Spümcø.
I had heard a lot about Ren & Stimpy back in 1992. Mostly because everybody was talking about it and the famous collaboration with Nirvana - The Yodel Song. On the other hand, I had also heard quote-on-quote “nightmare stories” about John Kricfalusi’s abrasive attitude and his inappropriate behavior on set. But I had no fear. I had grown up knowing all my family members swear like sailors around me - and had seen a lot of violence growing up watching horror movies. So you could say that as an animator, I was used to a sketchier guy like John Kricfalusi.
I was called down to Spümcø in late 1992 for the job interview. Fully expecting to face Kricfalusi’s so-called wrath - I was instead greeted by this guy named Eric Stefani. He was apparently responsible for writing the famous Yodelin’ Yaks episode - not Kricfalusi. He told me that he was actually blown away by my artistic skill, and considered me to be one of the best artists I’ve ever seen, which surprised me coming from the studio with supposedly strict standards.
I asked Eric about the rumors of Spümcø being a terrible working environment, and he explained to me that the studio was starting to overhaul problems that was plaguing the show’s production. This including hiring a much bigger and more talented staff to improve the writing and animation - which as far as I know suffered from a lot of animation errors in the first season due to bad outsourcing.[7]
So basically, for me to join Spümcø, I had to be approved by this “Creative Decision Board” - which later famously evolved into the “Think Tank” a few years later - where five people would vote on decisions within the company. These five people included John Kricfalusi, Bob Camp, Jim Smith, Lynne Naylor, and Eric Stefani. Camp. Smith, Naylor, and Stefani would all vote to bring me in - but not John Kricfalusi himself. I would try to ask people why exactly John would refuse an artist like me - considering we both have a similar pattern of raunchiness when it comes to content in children’s cartoons. But years later, he would tell me that he personally despised anime and Amerime at the time. Bill Wray would also tell me that John Kricfalusi told him that anime was just “gluing big Bambi cartoon eyes onto male characters to make them look gay.”[8] Not exactly the most unhinged thing I’ve heard from John Kricfalusi - but definitely not the last.
I would officially join Spümcø in December 1992. The show would never be the same again.
[1] In fact, Camp was the one running the show after Kricfalusi was fired IOTL. For the longest time, Camp was disliked - and in some cases, outright hated - by the Ren & Stimpy fandom for his tamer direction of the series. However, when John Prick-Fail-usi’s history of sexual assault came up in 2018, the fandom began to have a change of heart towards Camp - even going as far as to call Camp the “real creator” of Ren & Stimpy.
[2] This is of course paraphrasing Ren’s monologue from the episode Sven Hoek - which aired in November 1992.
[3] This is OTL, though it maybe slightly later or earlier depending on the butterfly effect. According to William Wray - a close colleague of John Kricfalusi during the production of the show - the breakup with Lynne Naylor played a key role in Kricfalusi’s descent into utter madness - along with getting fired from the show IOTL.
[4] George Meyer and John Swartzwelder’s writing credits include some of the best episodes of early Simpsons - including Bart Gets an F, Simpson and Delilah, Bart the Daredevil, Itchy & Scratchy & Marge, Lisa’s Substitute, Homer at the Bat - that’s all just Season 2 and 3. There’s a lot more in seasons 4, 5, and 6.
[5] Dick Dutch is actually not a real person but rather a fictional OC. Hat tip to @TheGuyWhoHeartsHistory for the idea.
[6] One of Bob Camp’s first jobs in the animation industry was an artist at Rankin/Bass. In the 1980s, Rankin/Bass outsourced its animation to Pacific Animation Corporation - which was founded after the collapse of Topcraft in 1985. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that Camp - who was a design lead - to have to communicate with Japanese animators who were actually doing the animating - and thus come across these movies.
[7] This is OTL. A lot of the animation for Season 1 of Ren & Stimpy was outsourced to Fil-Cartoons - your basic average sweatshop animation studio in a developing country - specifically The Philippines in this case. Scenes put out by them exhibited cheap zeroxing, washed out colors (similar to OTL’s SpongeBob Season 1), and missing animation cells and unfinished animation. One of the episodes - Nurse Stimpy - was so awful that John Kricfalusi withdrew his name from the credits of said episode and replaced it with the alias “Raymond Spum”.
[8] Kricfalusi IOTL made a similar complaint towards anime-inspired American cartoons like Ben 10 and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
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