#i feel like im missing smth but i gotta get off my computer lmfao its l a t e

[groundramon]

Hm, you know, the more I think about it, the more I hate everything about Ren and Stimpy and its existence and its effect on popular culture.  I honestly can’t believe how contrary Ren and Stimpy is to pretty much everything I value in a story.  Yes it’s had some good impacts but honestly? I blame it for the reason I can hardly find western animation that interests me.

First off I’m gonna say I’m gonna be harsh here because I have no respect for the creator.  He’s a piece of shit.  However I have nothing against fans and especially not against people who enjoyed it while growing up.  I didn’t watch it as a kid, but I did watch the cartoons (looney toons, tom and jerry, ect) that inspired it and its existence.  So I guess call me a hypocrite for liking those, idk?  But there’s a reason those weren’t originally made for television.

You see, Tom and Jerry and the Looney Toons were designed as pre-movie shorts in theaters.  I don’t know exactly how these shorts worked in regards to making profits, but my point is that their original intended purpose and profit was more akin to a pixar movie than Spongebob.  Television animation is much different than movie animation for a reason.  Movies directly make their profit based on how many people watch the movie.  That’s how profits work.

I don’t know if that’s how television works.  I know advertisers pay more money to have their advertisements during prime time hours or during big events, but I don’t believe that the amount of money they pay changes after the advertisement is aired.  I really don’t know, but based on what I’ve heard, that’s how it works.

That’s why, for years, animated kids shows were primarily long commercials.  Pretty much all 80s and early 90s cartoons were just toy commercials meant to market toys to kids.

Educational TV was one response to this, to create a safe space where kids were not bombarded by constant manipulative advertisements.

However, and I don’t know if this was due to laws like the educational TV movement or if it was just a natural response, there was another countermovement in the form of kids TV shows that didn’t care about marketing toys.  This is where shows like Ren and Stimpy came in and also why they were so influential - things weren’t simply as cut and dry as EVERYTHING being 100% a commercial and nothing else, but it was still pretty uncommon and revolutionary at the time to have a show with so little merchandise surrounding it.  Especially given how the show pushed boundaries in other ways.  Grossout cartoons weren’t a thing back in those days, and heck I don’t even know if censors let the old Tom and Jerry cartoons air reruns due to their violent nature.  Ren and Stimpy had both, and completely abolished previous standards of cartoons.  Not to mention, the fluid art style was radically different from the rigid styles of the past.

Unfortunately for me, personally, I don’t like grossout shows, and I’m not a huge fan of mean-spirited shows.  Now granted, if both parties are pieces of shit, or only the piece of shit party is getting their comeuppance, then I don’t quite mind.  But I wasn’t very fond of episodes where Squidward or Tom were unfairly punished by the normally “innocent” party, who would normally win since they were the “good” guys.  There’s a reason I dropped SpongeBob in season 8 and wasn’t the biggest fan in the few seasons before (and I’ve heard it’s gotten better since then, but the Squidward diaper fetish ep was enough to make me forsake the show forever, sorry.  Still consider myself a fan of the old seasons though, and not even just 1 - 3 bc I grew up liking seasons 4 and 5 too.)  And my opinion on exaggerated art styles depends very much on how well its done and how appealing it is to look at.

I don’t find Ren and Stimpy very appealing to look at, but it’s not bad on a technical level.  The off-model stills make a fluidity of motion, a proper illustration of exaggeration in animation unlike something like SU.  It’s basically the opposite of modern-seasons SU - they’re both off-model, but Ren and Stimpy is ugly to look at while doing it right and SU is tolerable while doing it 100% wrong.  If that makes any sense.

But I’m not a huge fan of the exaggerated, off-model art styles in TV shows.  I wasn’t a fan of Adventure Time’s art style and I’m still not.  I didn’t like early season 1 SU (although to be fair, SU critics give it WAY more credit than it deserves, because it was off model a LOT and not always in a properly exaggerating way).  I just don’t like these “weird” art styles.  SpongeBob starred anthropomorphic sea creatures (well, and a kitchen sponge) so it was easy to come to terms with how they looked.  They were reasonably designed for the world they lived in, and were appealing enough to look at.  Adventure Time’s style is relatively inoffensive but there are other art styles that honestly kinda hurt my eyes.  Like I don’t care if you have a reason for it, idc if it’s okay on a technical level, it’s fuckin Ugly.  That’s another reason I dropped SpongeBob in season 8 btw - all the new characters’ designs hurt my eyes, and I wasn’t even a fan of the revamps of old characters.

In addition to that, again, I said I don’t like grossout shows.  Guess what started popping up absolutely everywhere once Ren and Stimpy showed up?  Not even SpongeBob was safe from it.  (TO BE FAIR, yes there was grossout in the original few seasons, but I feel like I just...wasn’t phased by most of it, or something?  It’s like.  Yeah that’s a picture of a butterfly’s face.  Yeah that’s a hyperrealistic drawing of Squidward.  Nothing made me cringe due to my high levels of empathy because - other than the butterfly, which was quickly patrick and spongebob being silly - it was never grossout towards the characters.  I don’t know, does that make any sense?  It’s like.  Not grossout because grossout is supposed to hurt the characters, and bad grossout often hurts the audience more than the characters but also I just wasn’t grossed out by it so it wasn’t grossout.  If someone WAS grossed out by it then I guess it was bad grossout.  I’m not a hypocrite it just. didn’t faze me as a kid.)

And, apologies if I sound like a capitalist right now, but am I the only one who thinks its actually a good thing when TV shows sell toys?  Like, obviously it shouldn’t come in the way of a good story.  But that’s the thing - it doesn’t inherently come in the way of it.  You market a toy around a story and a good story makes the toy all the more profitable.  Like, look at Digimon.  100% a toy commercial (not good at marketing the toy it was trying to sell, but I digress - that’s another problem entirely) but it’s still beloved by people for its good story and good characters.  There’s NOTHING wrong with that, and in fact I wish it was a more common business model nowadays because that’s the only way I can hope to get 1. a serialized story and 2. enough of a budget for decent animation if I ever apply to a studio with my show ideas.

Ren and Stimpy normalized the idea of both non-serialized stories and non-toy-based cartoons.  Both of which are things contrary to my interests as a consumer, a producer, and as someone who looks at business from a logical perspective.  Non-serialized stories don’t matter, I mean look at SpongeBob, it’s just a personal thing there.  But like...not making shows for toy franchises is kinda?? a bad business strategy??  Why do you think CN plays TTG so much?  It’s because TTG has all the merch and sells all the merch and SU merch and other shows’ merch is superbly hard to come by.  Adventure Time was incredibly popular and well-pushed by the network when it first came out (one of the few things in this I’m saying with absolute certainty, because I was there) and there was quite a bit of merch for it right off the bat.  And as far as I know, it was pretty successful for the first few years.  But now as the show is ending, it’s fallen into obscurity.  AT was CN’s old TTG, just without the quite as ridiculous airing schedule (it was more akin to Nickelodeon and SpongeBob than TTG, if not slightly less than SpongeBob - it was on quite a lot, though).

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for shows like Ren and Stimpy in the world, but like, I can’t BELIEVE how much of the supposedly good things it did aren’t good in my eyes at all.  It’s a personal opinion, but still.  I can’t really think of a single thing Ren and Stimpy did that I liked.  The only good thing I can think of is loosening up censors enough for stuff like SU and other lgbt+ programs to fly by, but even then, all it did was loosen the censors in general - and loosening those censors has made a lot of problems alongside the good.