Thoughts on Ren and Stimpy

There's an awkward hour or so between the time I normally get off the phone with my fiancée and the time I go to bed--a segment between about 11pm and 12:30am when I'm too tired to read but that's too short for a movie. I used to fill this time with whatever shows were on TV, which is dangerous--both because I tend to watch them for longer than I mean to, and because they tend to feature, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, celebrities telling bad stories about their plumbing.

Then I discovered old television series on the Netflix streaming Wii disc, and my quality of life soared.

If that's not exactly true (I recently made the mistake of watching a horrible Zach Galifianakis special), Netflix's ever-increasing library of worthy TV shows has definitely helped. That's how I just ended up watching the first episode of Ren & Stimpy--a show I hadn't seen since I was 9 or 10.



Even now, The Ren & Stimpy Show looks different from other shows. For one thing, it had much longer intervals in which characters were shown expressing over-the-top emotions while music played in the background. But even more unusual is the way the show moves back and forth between cartoon flexibility, where characters can stretch or undergo violence in impossible ways, and a disgustingly detailed fleshiness. In one shot, Ren looks like a droopy little dog; in the next, his strangely human butt is being paraded in front of the camera. Likewise, Stimpy sits on a mound of glittering color in one shot that then materializes into Gritty Kitty Litter that the characters squeeze between their toes or crunch repulsively between their (now gigantic and gummy) teeth.

I can see how Ren & Stimpy eventually got old by failing to adapt, the same way that South Park would have gotten old if it hadn't moved from being a show about children saying "f*ck" into the realm of social satire. But there's still a lot to it. Ren & Stimpy's interest in interrupting the pure, imaginary realm of cartoon interactions with reminders of gross bodily function feels very familiar, not from other shows but from life itself--it does a great job of representing the embarrassing intrusion of dirt and grime and other crap into the mental and emotional world that we all like to imagine we occupy. That gives the show its own strange brand of realism in a famously unrealistic medium--an admirable achievement.