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Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Ever had something you love dismissed because it’s “just” pop culture? What others might deem stupid shit, you know matters. You know it’s worth talking and thinking about. So do we. We're Tracie and Emily, two sisters who think a lot about a lot of things. From Twilight to Ghostbusters, Harry Potter to the Muppets, and wherever pop culture takes us, come overthink with us as we delve into our deep thoughts about stupid shit.
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Deep Thoughts about The Ren & Stimpy Show
Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!
This week on Deep Thoughts, Tracie brings nostalgia, laughter, and the unfortunate realization that you really can’t go home again with her analysis of The Ren & Stimpy Show. While creator and tortured animation genius John K brought back the artistry and commitment to craft when his angry Chihuahua and sweetly dim cat graced our screens in the early 1990s, he did so with a big old side of emotional and psychological abuse of his fellow animators and predation on teenage female fans. We revisit the hilarity that still makes Tracie and Emily snort their drinks, the humor and story beats that haven’t aged well, and the complicated legacy of a brilliant artist who thought the rules didn’t apply to him.
Throw on your headphones because It’s Pod, it’s Pod! It’s long and funny and good!
CW: discussions of statutory rape and grooming.
Mentioned on this episode:
Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
Our theme music is "Professor Umlaut" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Learn more about Tracie and Emily (including our other projects), join the Guy Girls' family, secure exclusive access to bonus episodes, video versions, and early access to Deep Thoughts by visiting us on Patreon.
I'm Tracy Guy-Decker and you're listening to Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, because pop culture is still culture, and shouldn't you know what's in your head? Today I'll be sharing my deep thoughts about the 1990s animated show, the Ren and Stimpy Show, with my sister, emily Guy-Burken, and with you. Let's dive in. Have you ever had something you love dismissed because it's just pop culture? Have you ever had something you love dismissed because it's just pop culture? What others might deem stupid shit? You know matters, you know it's worth talking and thinking about, and so do we. So come over, think with us as we delve into our deep thoughts about stupid shit. Okay, um, I know you remember Ren and Stimpy because we have talked about it fairly recently and you quoted some stuff to me. But remind me what you got. What's in your head about Ren and Stimpy, because we have talked about it fairly recently and you quoted some stuff to me. But remind me what you got. What's in your head about Ren and Stimpy?
Speaker 2:So, I remember it came out. I think I was in middle school. I remember I had a middle school teacher who really liked it and that made her instantly cool. I can recall you and I watching it together and there are like things that I remember as being funny and then things that just stuck in my head. So it's log, it's log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood. That's in there. That is part of the furniture of my brain. And then you know, don't pee on the electric fence, whiz, don't whiz, don't whiz. Don don't pee on the electric fence, whiz, don't whiz don't whiz.
Speaker 2:Don't whiz on the electric fence. Yak shaving day um ren's cousin, sven, who was just like stimpy um showing his brain to stimpy and stimpy uh showing his brain, which was tiny, and Sven being very impressed and I remember it being Willikers eat so big. But apparently it was Yemeni.
Speaker 1:Actually, you're right. I remember it being Yemeni, but it was Willikers. It was Willikers. Oh, okay, oh, I feel vindicated. I don't know where Yemeni came from, though.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, but okay yeah so if I see something that is um laughably small in my head, I go willikers eat so big and like it's just kind of in there. Every once in a while I'll be reminded of it because one of these catchphrases like runs through my head, but it is an aspect of 90s culture that has not kind of come back around again.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I might push back on you on that, but we'll get there. We'll get there.
Speaker 2:I just I can't remember having seen anyone talking about it the way that I have seen people talking about Daria. And there have been all kinds of stuff like Clueless you know, there was a Super Bowl commercial that had Alicia Silverstone reprising her role as Cher Horowitz. So there were other like big pop culture moments from the 90s that I feel like I've seen people like getting on the nostalgia train for, and maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, or maybe this was counterculture enough that it wasn't like really widespread which I can't imagine is true it was very widespread. It was very widespread, but like like there was a Beavis and Butthead thing on Saturday Night Live recently. It's one where I feel like it's been a little bit memory hold. I don't know, Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but I haven't really seen a whole lot of people talking about it. So tell me, why are we talking about it today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I put it on the list because it was. You know, I wanted to be an animator from the time I was a small child and at that moment in the 90s, ren and Stimpy hit Nickelodeon in 1991. And at that moment in the 90s it was kind of a low point. I mean, it was in the midst of that low point that I named when we talked about the Last Unicorn, where most of the new animation that was being done, especially on TV, was schlock. It was either existing characters, like from comic books, or it was stories created solely to sell merchandise, right. So there was the Strawberry Shortcake and my Little Pony, and even He-Man and She-Ra. They just they weren't, they didn't take the craft seriously, and that is something that Ren and Stimpy deeply did. They took the craft really, really seriously and so it was revolutionary in many ways, like, and it did think I even realized that kind of as a you know historiography because I was living it, but I knew it was different, I thought it was hilarious, I mean, I thought it was so, so funny at the time and just so different than anything else that we were seeing and so, like you, it's kind of like plugged into the furniture of my mind in ways that are, like, even more deeply affectionate because of my affection for animation in general, and so I wanted to kind of look back at it and, honestly, when I put it on the like so listeners, emily and I sit down like once a month or so and we plan out the next you know five or so episodes, and when I put it on our sort of you know short list for soon, I thought of it as like a palate cleanse after my dead poet society, and that's where I will end up have been wrong.
Speaker 1:All of those things I just said are absolutely true. They took the craft very seriously in the best ways. True, they took the craft very seriously in the best ways, but but John Chris Falusi I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his last name he often just went by John Kay, who was the so-called creator. I mean that the self-named creator of Ren and Stimpy also took himself seriously, too seriously, and he's not a good guy Like. He's just not a good guy, which I had no idea until I started doing this research for our thing. So in 2020, a documentary was released called happy, happy, joy, joy. The Ren and the. Let me get the actual song.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I told, yes, like I sing that song. I forgot that was from Ren and Stimpy. It's like it's not that I forgot the song, I forgot that's where it came from. Oh man, oh man.
Speaker 1:So there was a documentary that came out in 2020 called happy, happy, joy, joy the Ren and Stimpy story, and that's where I learned about, uh, John Kay's very problematic behavior yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'll get into some of that, but I, I, I do. I also do want to talk about the actual show and the influence that it had, because in many ways the Ren and Stimpy show and the success of the Ren and Stimpy show made like paved the way for modern animation. Like, you named Beavis and Butthead. Beavis and Butthead, I don't think could have happened without Ren and Stimpy having happened. You named beavis and butthead. Beavis and butthead.
Speaker 1:I don't think could have happened without ren and stimpy having happened, yeah, you know um and even like south park and like family family, all the ways that we think about even where the simpsons went those simpsons is contemporaneous. I still think, like what it was in SpongeBob SquarePants, like a lot of, even for kids, stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm thinking like Rugrats and hey Arnold and like all of that Arthur which we just recently found out. Neil Gaiman was in someone's falafel in Arthur.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it was. It was deeply influential. So I do want to talk a little bit about that. But let me just quickly remind you and our listeners kind of the conceit of the show. So it it reads as a sort of variety show and so we have a couple of a kind of recurring sketches that like the way that a variety show from the 40s or 50s might have even saturday night live.
Speaker 2:They'll have, like the recurring characters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, back to yeah yeah, with these two, with ren and stimpy being sort of the central cast. So Ren is a chihuahua. He's very sarcastic and high-strung, high-strung, pessimistic, quick-temper, like has anger issues and like takes it out on his best friend, stimpy Stimpson J Cat, who is a big like. So Ren is this skinny little chihuahua, stimpy is a large red cat. They both have these. Well, no, stimpy has a big bulbous nose and he's the guy who voiced him was using Larry from the Three Stooges as his kind of model, mm-hmm. So he's just this sort of like sweet and cheerful and like optimistic and not very bright, and the two of them have this codependent, unhealthy relationship and we put them into all of these weird situations. So some of one of the most famous is they are Captain Hook that's Ren's last name and Cadet Stimpy and it's the year like 4 million or something and they're in space. And so there are at least two stories where they're off in space. There are others where it's sort of like versions of themselves. Like, actually, in the first skit of the first episode not the pilot but the first aired episode Stimpy's watching cartoons and Ren says cartoons will rot your brain. You know, which was kind of meta for this very first skit in the very first episode, which was kind of cool.
Speaker 1:But he's watching his favorite show is Muddy Mudskipper, which is a fish who kind of skips around, and anyway there's a recurring gag about Gritty Kitty Litter, which is Stimpy's preferred brand. There's a recurring gag with Mr Horse, whose catchphrase is no sir, I didn't like it, which is one of the ones that I come back to. There's a lot of gross out humor which again'll you'll see something and it'll be like a gag, and then they'll zoom in and it'll be very detailed art or occasionally like a photograph of an actual sponge. And there's something like really funny in that juxtaposition that with these like detailed, highly technical layouts of like a booger or somebody's, like gross tongue or like yeah you know like cracked toenails or like just grossness, but in these like really detailed I I don't want to say beautiful, because the actual content wasn't but the technical skill- was beautifully rendered and the whole thing.
Speaker 1:It was just these series of stories that are just absolutely absurd. Push the envelope. I mean the whole point was to push the envelope. I mean the whole point was to push the envelope. So there, they were very funny when I was whatever, 13, you know, watching this in the 13, 14, watching this in the early nineties, looking, watching them now. There's a lot less that I find hilarious, not nothing. There's still some things that are where the absurdity is still amusing, and even at least one episode I laughed out loud rewatching it. A lot of it, though I'm just like oh, that's uh, uh, uh, uh, which you know, I guess was kind of the point, right, like that's what they were trying to do to middle-aged moms like me. So that's kind of. That's kind of it Like, like I don't need to give you a plot because I could. Maybe we will get into plots for a couple of specific episodes, but that's the deal.
Speaker 1:It's these two that the animators envisioned them as kind of yin and yang, but it was not a healthy balance, right? Stimpy was constantly being abused by by ren and, and actually it's kind of hard to get all of the episodes now, so several of them have been banned, so they are streaming on, it seems. Um, paramount plus has the nickelodeon oov catalog, the nickelodeon catalog, but Nickelodeon had banned a number of them. So I had to go find actually the pilot Big House Blues on YouTube, because it's not available on Paramount Plus and the episode with Sven the cousin is not streaming anywhere. I found a version of it that was just the vocals, so none of the soundtrack, so it's the animation and then just the vocals. So none of the soundtrack, so it's the animation and then just the vocals, which is how I know it was. It was, in fact, uh, willikers, okay, but it's not streaming. And then there there are others that have been pulled. So what well, I'm, I think, for violence, predominantly okay, like that's why a lot of them got like there was well, let me, let me actually sort of tell some of the story of how this thing got produced and then and then maybe we'll get there.
Speaker 1:So john k was this talented and brilliant and charismatic animator, based on what I learned from this documentary that I watched Happy, happy, joy, joy. This is my personal speculation. I think he's neuro-spicy in some way because of the way they talk about his hyperfixation. So I'm not a mental health practitioner, but there's something in the way that they described his working style that makes me think there's there's some neuro spiciness going on with John K and he, like the way that some of his former colleagues described him, was like he would meet you and he would have this intense attention on you initially and then you realize later he was trying to figure out how to draw you as a cartoon. Everything he did he looked at through the lens of cartoons and he had this. He was a visionary and he had this vision of how this should work and this level of quality, these standards that were exacting that. He just pushed and pushed and pushed until he got so somehow he managed so he manages to get in front of all the big networks and like they all turn him down.
Speaker 1:He wasn't pitching Ren and Stimpy. I think this is important. He was pitching a show called your Gang. That was about a bunch of kids who happened to also have a cat and a dog named Stimpy and Ren. And so when he pitched to Vanessa Coffey, who was working with Nickelodeon at that point somewhat independent contractor kind of it's unclear to me exactly how that worked, but Vanessa Coffey was working with Nickelodeon to experimentally try this Nicktoons idea and she was the one who was like those two, that's it, the cat and the dog. That's what I want to see. I don't care about the kids, but bring me this. And so she commissioned the pilot and if it did well, they were going to go further. So they did the pilot. It went really well.
Speaker 1:Now in the pilot we have like a narrator and it says how hunger makes weird odd bedfellows and we. And then we see Ren and Stimpy and they're starving and they're shivering and they're huddling together for warmth and the dog catcher catches them and puts them in the pound and they're like they're loving it. They're having parties because they get a square meal a day and they have a roof over their head and it's the best right. But then their friend Phil, who's like a big, like bulldog maybe, gets yanked away by his party hat and Ren's like yo, jasper, what happened to Phil? And Jasper says oh, they put him to sleep. And Ren's like, oh, yeah, i'm'm pretty tired too and he's on some, whatever he goes. And the next day he says where's phil? And jasper's like I told you, you know he went to sleep, you don't go back from the big sleep. So now ren knows what's going on. He's like we gotta get out of here. We're gonna die too. And then stimpy coughs up a hairball, which I can remember in the 90s.
Speaker 1:Yes. I thought, that was so funny when I just say, cough up a hairball, listener. I know that's not funny, but it was the way they rendered it. It's like what happens to a cat when they just get kind of taken over by the gagging.
Speaker 2:It is an extended moment, if I recall correctly. I just remember you laughing so hard you were wheezing at that.
Speaker 1:I thought it was so funny. Well, especially because then when he finally gets it up, it lands on Ren in such a way like poodle grooming. And then there's a little girl at the pound to try and adopt a puppy and she wants the poodle, which is ren, covered in fur balls. So, and ren tells the little girl I want, like well, he's being taken away. And we see this like sad view of stimpy, like holding the bars, like in jail, like with tears coming in his eyes, and ren, almost reluctantly, is like you, I won't go without my friend stimpy. And so the little girl says okay, and so they both get adopted. Ren immediately has a sweater put on him, which is absolutely ridiculous, but whatever, and then stimpy is given the.
Speaker 1:The child's mom gives stimpy a cat box and he's like joy, my first material possession, and he, like plugs it to himself, which squishes Ren into the cat box against Stimpy's chest. So these are the kinds of gags that, like, are still making my sister laugh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm kind of I'm recalling like the visuals of it, until you said that I totally forgot about the hairball. But as soon as you said, oh yeah, the hairball, yeah, I remember these things, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So the pilot does well, she orders six episodes and initially at least, according to this documentary I watched john and vanessa coffee work really well together. So she's giving him notes and kind of pushing him to be a little, put a little more heart into it, because ren is just all snarl and he's constantly like hitting stimpy and vanessa coffee like loves stim. I mean she loves them both, but like these are like she has a lot emotionally invested in these characters and she's pushing him to make it a little, give a little more heart, to make it more balanced. And he doesn't always take her notes. Well, but he takes her notes. You know, like it's, it's a, it's a working relationship, it's a working relationship. So things are going pretty well.
Speaker 1:People love this cartoon show. They actually end up hitting like the top level whatever the Nielsen rating thing is like more than 2.2 million people watching this Wow cartoon show. You know, within the first few episodes which is unheard of in animation. And Nickelodeon wasn't like, this is like Nickelodeon is like oh my gosh, we were wrong because they were reluctant. The network was initially reluctant. Vanessa Coffey kind of had to convince them. So they're like this is awesome, we want more. So they asked him for a second season of 20 episodes. Now he's already not making the deadlines on their initial six episodes. Like he's been like slipping deadlines so that they ended up having to like actually air the first episode twice, like two weeks in a row or whatever, because he didn't deliver the final episode. And that's in part because of his exacting standards. He's like redrawing artists work even after it's been shot.
Speaker 1:So they get the second season and they decide they need to like expand the team by 300% he's three times as many people as he's got and they bring in a network guy to help like kind of manage the deadlines and all of the different things.
Speaker 1:And john k gets kind of drunk on fame and success and stops accepting feedback and starts like hiding things and like green lighting things that have not been greenlit. So actually their first episode that was completed for the second season never aired because it was just too too violent. So Vanessa coffee was like I can't, I can't do this. Meanwhile John says he tells Vanessa, he calls her about some notes that she offered, about something, about a storyboard or whatever, and he tells her she can go fuck herself and he will not be accepting notes from her anymore. And then he says to the network execs not Vanessa, like above her head, like I, will not be held responsible for budgets or deadlines any longer. So basically, I won't do what you tell me to do, it'll take how long it takes and it'll cost what it costs. So they fired him.
Speaker 1:So they fired him, which you mean part of part of him taking himself too seriously. He thought for and got. If you watch the old shows now and this is actually now normal other other creators do this but at the beginning it's like the Ren and Stimpy show created by and it's his, it's got his name. And then it's like story by and it's his name or whoever it was. So the credits at the beginning, like he gets a title card, he gets a created by card which was new in the 90s, or it was renewed, I should say, because we had it with Chuck Jones, right, we had it with Tex Avery, but in the 90s, in the 80s and 90s, they weren't doing it that way, we lost it with the product placement cartoons basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the long-running franchises like the Transformers that you and I were watching at the same time did not have a created buy card. It was just schlock, it wasn't. It was just schlock, right, it wasn't, it wasn't. So he kind of re-elevated it cartooning to like the auteur kind of a vision and because of that, like he bought into that himself. This is me speculating so deeply that he thought that he was irreplaceable, that he was, that there would be no show without him, and I'm assuming contractually he didn't own the characters Correct?
Speaker 1:He did not own the characters and so the intellectual property was Nickelodeon's for Ren and Stimpy. Now he asked for this one character that he had created, called George George liquor American, and Vanessa was like fine, take it, it's gross, I don't like that character. George liquor was actually the star, or the you know the guest star, of the unaired first episode, which maybe was John working through some stuff about his own dad. So I didn't watch the whole thing, but in the documentary they give some snippets of it and you kind of get us and I vaguely remember the guy does show up in other places, but George liquor is like a caricature of sort of like Midwest American In fact, is George liquor American, is his full kind of title American, In fact his George Liquor American is his full kind of title.
Speaker 1:And so like trying not to feel emotions, trying to like, he's all about like tough love. So he's trying to teach the Ren and Stimpy like love through discipline. But in order to be disciplined you have to misbehave. So he tells them that they're not allowed to get on the couch, but then he makes them get on the couch so that he can then discipline them. It's gross.
Speaker 1:Sounds like someone needs some couch time. Yeah, and in the documentary John Kay says you know, george was like my dad, like I was channeling my dad, like I don't identify with Georgeorge, but that was my dad. So john goes off, does this george liquor show which, just from the snippets that I saw, is like gross, like leans on misogyny and like violence and violence against women. I mean it's just yucky. So he, I mean he keeps making stuff, but he's kind of he's. He's out. Bob camp, who was his second in command, who's apparently a very, very talented animator and and was a good partner to john uh, not a romantic, but no, no, creative partner to john takes over, like nickelodeon has offered him this because he seems to be able to kind of like get shit done, which john was such like, so exacting and such a perfectionist that he became a bottleneck for the shows. So the the show goes on for another, um, so they finish the second season and there are two more seasons and then they call it quits in 1995. So the whole thing didn't actually last that long. It was a juggernaut, though. I mean the merchandising. In year two they quoted some number in the billions which like in 92. Yeah, wow, wow. So a couple of things that really struck me about this that I learned in the in the documentary, that now, looking back on the show, kind of make a certain amount of sense.
Speaker 1:John's girlfriend was an animator named Lynn Naylor Lynn Naylor they went to college together and she was the other animators identified as the heart. She was the heart, she was Stimpy. John was Ren Right and after the first, after they actually produced the, the pilot, and then, like the first episode of the first season, she had had enough and she broke up with him and she left and she left the animation studio as well and that like no, no, it really like brought a lot of like. It gave me some feelings watching this in. She was with him and he was so talented and he would throw these, he would like draw things and just like throw the papers and she would go around and like collect them and even put them into files sometimes and like they all were just devoted to this guy who completely psychologically abused them. And then and John Kay even talking about it I was like he.
Speaker 1:He says I hated path, I hate pathos, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I only like to include it, if I can make fun of it. So like to illustrate that they talk about one episode that is now titled the son of stimpy but was originally working title was simply stimpy's first fart, where there's this like meant to be I mean he's making fun of it but like a poignant relationship between this kind of personified fart cloud and stimpy as its parent, and so the the fact that he says out loud I hate pathos. And lynn was the heart like she was the one who was animating the sweet parts. She was, at least in part, a model for Stimpy and the whole.
Speaker 1:Stimpy's whole personality is that he loves Ren, regardless of how much he's abused. Yeah, and in fact, in the very first episode Stimpy like wins a contest and goes off to LA and becomes like a famous star with a whole bunch of money and like gives it up to go back to Ren who then abuses him for giving up the money, like that was Stimpy's reason for being and that was Lynn. And I'm like, oh, gross, yeah, so yucky, yeah, and I don't know, like I'm kind of grateful that stimpy was male, that this wasn't depicted as like ren as male and stimpy as female, even though that's what was being reflected like the real life.
Speaker 2:In john k's life that was being reflected like the real life in John Kay's life that was being reflected. Does Lynn Naylor like say she was Stimpy, like, is that something like? Like they say she was her heart and and and did the pathos and stuff like that. But did she say that?
Speaker 1:I don't think Lynn said that Okay, but did. Others said it about her. Others said it about her, okay, gotcha, okay, but the others said it about her. Others said it about her, okay, gotcha. And John is definitely Ren. He actually says they asked him, who do you identify with? And he says, like that's a really hard question, cause like I'm not gonna say I identify with an idiot, but I guess I have to say I identify with an asshole because I'm Ren, I'm like Ren or something like that. And John voiced Ren in the beginning because he couldn't find a voice talent that could give him kind of what he was looking for, and so he ended up voicing Ren as well. So he was Ren in multiple ways.
Speaker 2:It's interesting, like you pointing out the fact that had it been a male-female relationship, I doubt you and I could have found it funny. Yeah, I hope that that is true.
Speaker 1:I hope that that is true.
Speaker 2:Just because the codependent friendship relationship was not one that I had a model for, whereas there's so many models for an abusive relationship. I also think it's interesting that in our culture we tend to treat dogs as masculine and cats as feminine. Yeah, that's true, that is true, but there are there are some subversions of that. I mean the fact that Stimpy is so much bigger than Ren and, like some of what I kind of remember liking about it is that because Ren is this tiny little chihuahua, he's like he was a chihuahua, like the chihuahuas are like they don't know how small they are, but they're so angry and they're so like, and there's this kind of subversion because it's the gentle giant I mean not that that's not a trope, but that is Stimpy who is so devoted to this tiny angry little ball of nastiness. Yeah, I mean there is something there that is compelling. Yeah, for sure. Oh man, oh man, I am thinking so you're saying that you believe and I can understand where this is coming from that there might be some sort of neurodivergence going on with John Kay, that idea of I don't care about deadlines, I don't care about budgets, about deadlines, I don't care about budgets.
Speaker 2:My spouse is an automotive engineer. In engineering there is something, a process they call shoot the engineer, which is, if you're in engineering, you are generally working for a corporation or for something that has a deadline of some kind. So even if it's not a corporation, even if it's a government or military or something, so even if it's not a corporation, even if it's a government or military or something, there's a deadline. And so if you leave it to the engineers, they will tinker and like I can maximize, oh, I can make this more efficient, I can change that. If I change the X axis, the Y axis will do this and I can make it slightly better in that way. And there gets to be a point where my spouse has always been in corporate engineering but anyone but so in corporate engineering, where basically the marketing department has to shoot the engineer just to get them out of the way so they can get the product out to the customers, and that there is a high degree of neurodivergence among engineers.
Speaker 2:And it is reminding me of that that that's kind of the perfect, yeah and the perfect is the enemy at the done, yes, yeah, and the the sense that like no, no, no, I can make this, I can maximize this, and who cares about if that goes over budget, if that means that we never make a deadline?
Speaker 1:I know that you see that in the arts as well, but this feels like a very engineering, coded way of feeling doing that and actually, in fact, the way that some of his former colleagues describe John Kay reminds me of some things that you and I've talked about about sort of engineering brain, where they said about him like if he didn't get it right the first time, he would try another 10 times and if it still wasn't right, he would keep going a hundred times, like as long as it took to get it right. And they were talking about like drawing the specific thing. But that reminds me of things that you and I have spoken about about sort of when engineering brain gets fixed on a problem. So I hear that I agree with that. I want to stay with John Kay for just a little bit longer and then maybe I'll circle back to some of the actual like content, because that's the reason that I wanted to talk about in the first place, but there's just so much here I feel like I would be doing a disservice to not mention this. So in 2018, actually a story broke and then it's featured in this documentary as well.
Speaker 1:In the 90s, a young fan wrote to John the first time when she was 13 years old, the first time when she was 13 years old and she she was writing a lot Like she wrote she had this 13 year old had like a parasocial relationship with John K because she just loved Ren and Stimpy so much. She wanted to be an animator, she wanted to work for him, she wanted to, like do what he was doing and he was reading her letters and like was deeply compelled by these letters and then she sent a video of herself and he started to fall in love. Those are his words, his words. So he meets.
Speaker 2:I mean he had to have been 30s, 20s, adult definitely.
Speaker 1:But I think he had to have been in his 30s.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean not that, not that it would have been okay if he'd been 24, but okay.
Speaker 1:So when she was, um, had just turned 14, he actually like meets her, like he flies to wherever she was in the Midwest and and like meets her, meets her family, and and then her family like flies her out to la to like be his intern and she's like kind of sort of working for him and then she's 16 years old, she moves in with him. Thank god, yeah, that was pretty much my Like what you just said and like what you just did with your hands and your face. Like that's what I did while I was watching this documentary this morning.
Speaker 2:So and this woman is I mean she's like our age. Yeah, like that's a lot of times when you hear about these things. For me at least, I'm imagining as a parent, because I'm a parent of a 13-year-old right now. From the time I was 14 until I was 21 was owned by this man.
Speaker 1:So she was working for him, she was living with him and eventually, like she realizes, like what has been happening is not normal and she leaves. But she can't like apparently, two days after she moved out of his house, he was offering an internship to another teenage girl oh god whose name is katie.
Speaker 1:I don't remember katie's last name. So so like, like vanessa coffee, the nickelodeon person who, like originally, like kind of picked out these two characters and really has a feels a lot of like ownership and and emotional attachment to Ren and Stimpy as, like her babies the way she talks about it, you know she's like it makes me kind of she's crying in the interview on the documentary, or at least like wiping away a little bit of of tears. That like he would have used this project that she loved so much to lure in and then exploit girls and like the other animators sort of were like I was surprised but not shocked. Sort of were like I was surprised but not shocked and like I wish I had I didn't take it seriously enough when he would sort of make jokes when we were you know about like teenage girls being the hottest and stuff like that. Oh god, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think that the taint of john k's sexual predation and emotional abuse, he was emotionally abusing the animators who worked for him. I mean, that is there. That's crystal clear from everything they all said. Right, like one of the animators I'm like and it was a pretty mixed gender act well, relatively mixed. There were still more men than women, but there were more women drawing for uh, for spumco, than I expected when we look back at the it wasn't particularly for the early 90s, yeah yeah, so it wasn't.
Speaker 1:Lynn was not the only female animator in the, in the room or in the company. Um, there weren't many, but it wasn't 50 50, but thinking about animation studios in general, like there were often none. So, anyway, one animator talked about how you know he would just, he would just tear into it Like you would put all your heart into it, and then he would just like be like this isn't even a drawing, and like really. And the guy was like and I would sit there and I would start to clench my fist and I would say one more thing, and I'm gonna knock him off of that damn stool. And he must have had a sixth sense for knowing when I was at that, at least with me, because then he would say but this thing is great and you did this thing amazing. And so he like kept them like right on the edge of that's a very common yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so he was apparently like, psychologically, emotionally, abusing all the people that were working for him. Meanwhile, he's grooming and and and sexually abusing girls, children.
Speaker 2:So when Robin Bird came to live with him when she was 16, was he still working on Ren and Stimpy, or was that after he'd left?
Speaker 1:I'm not sure. Okay, that was unclear to me in the timeline from the documentary and I didn't. To be frank, I don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out the specific chronology. Fair enough, and it wasn't clear to me from the documentary, so I don't know for sure.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. The only reason I ask is one would hope that if he still had co-workers at the time.
Speaker 1:I think not, because I think they did say. One of them said, after he lost the show, his behavior got really bad. And then they also like I wish I'd paid better attention when he was sort of making jokes that felt like locker room jokes that I didn't take as seriously as I should have, which makes me think that they weren't his coworkers when he was living with a 16 year old, but I don't know that for sure. So even before this documentary revealed like I'm watching it and they do it as a reveal even before this documentary revealed like I'm watching it and they do it as a reveal Like they introduced you to Robin Bird fairly early and her like title is just like artist and she talks about how much she loved Ren and Stimpy and she's like started drawing by, like drawing the characters, like that was one of the things that she was doing. So you meet her in that way in the documentary before you learn about their connection.
Speaker 1:So even before I realized that he's a pedophile, sexual predator, I'm like I don't know how I feel about this guy Right, like he drops the R word, uh, without you know, completely unapologetically he's talking about Stimpy, he and he. He drops the R word and he's, he's just like he just he doesn't come off well and even which editing the movie makers know who he is Like, so maybe they did that for me on purpose. It worked the way that the, his former coworkers talk about him. We're like, you know, outsiders looked at it and they said you guys are in some kind of a cult. And we were inside and we were like we're not in a cult. But we also, like, the moment he walked in the room we were like oh, john, john, and they were like doing the like, bowing down. So yeah, I guess it kind of was a cult of John, like that's why his former coworkers. So everything about this art is now sort of tainted by this huge personality who is undoubtedly talented and also unwell in painful and hurtful ways.
Speaker 2:Abusive, yeah, abusive ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So let me talk about some of the things that we actually were getting like that were the lessons. Some of the lessons were getting in addition to this, like enabling and toxic relationship, like some of the negative things. There were definitely some fat phobic stuff.
Speaker 1:There aren't a lot of actual humans in the show and when we get them like there's one episode called fire dogs, where they see the boys see an ad for at a fire station that they're looking for Dalmatians, and so they paint themselves in Dalmatian paint entirely and then they go apply for the jobs and they end up being firefighters and so they actually get called to a fire.
Speaker 1:So there's a woman in a window at the top of this high-rise building, high-rise building that's on fire, and she says save my baby, save my baby.
Speaker 1:And the joke is sort of a visual gag because it looks like a regular-sized baby but then as it falls it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it's just this giant like the size of an elephant that lands on these, on these two, and then the gag keeps going save my walrus, save my horse, save, save my elephant. And like the horse is Mr Horse and he seems to have broken both of his back legs and then does the catchphrase about it, which wasn't as funny. And then she jumps and they save her and she is really fat and like that's the joke. So I mean it's just straight fat, phobic joke. It's like not, there's, there's nothing to redeem it. So and then there are other. Occasionally there are jokes which is like harkens back to Bugs Bunny and Tex Avery, where someone or something is dressed up like a sex, like there's in one of the space episodes, they go through a black hole and they end up in this alternate reality, alternate universe.
Speaker 2:oh yeah, where like ren is the, is the cat and stimpy is the dog. Isn't that? No, in that alternate universe, okay that may happen, but not in this episode in this episode.
Speaker 1:It's like physics don't work and like their bodies keep changing and like at one point, like ren has like lobster claws for hands, or like their bodies keep changing and like at one point, like Ren has like lobster claws for hands, or like their, their eyes, his eyes come out of his like. It's just absurd. It's absurd. And they're sleeping in a tent and there's a knock at the tent and when Ren goes to answer it, it's like a sexy Chihuahua, like a, like an anthropomorphized chihuahua with big boobs and a big butt and lipstick, you know, which turns out to actually be like a tentacled monster, that's, you know. Okay, okay, it has a glamour on.
Speaker 1:So there aren't a lot of humans, there aren't a lot of female characters. When they are, they're either hypersexualized or they're sort of. The joke is that they're fat. You know, there's not a whole lot to redeem that piece of it. Occasionally there's like we see just the legs of a woman who's like the. At one point they try to get food. They try to get food. Ren pretends to be a mouse and Stimpy gets like a job I'm putting quotes around that word as like a mouser, and so in that scene we sort of see like the woman in high heels like 50s, like Tom and Jerry style.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's like the first cartoon in Roger Rabbit, the same sort of thing, where there's the woman. You only see her from the knees down. Yep, exactly. Well, there's the little girl in the pilot episode.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, she's, yes and she's fine. There's actually I have no complaints about her, she's adorable and sweet and yeah, so that there's that other piece of sort of the lessons we might have been getting. And and if I look at the sort of positive side, like again it took the medium seriously and it used. There was this absurdist humor that was sometimes meta, that was delightful and challenging in the best way, like in Space Madness, which is one of the most famous ones, that's. You know, ren is sort of floating around anti-gravity in this cube of bathwater and he's kind of like losing his mind and he's holding this bar of soap and he's saying it's my ice cream bar. I've had it since I was was a child and he's like eating this bar of soap and it's like so ridiculous and absurd and it's hilarious and it's just like I mean I think that kind of subversive storytelling like from the absurd that just kind of leaned into it. I'm glad that's in the furniture of my mind.
Speaker 1:Like I feel like that like is a useful thing, and even like some of the meta stuff, there's an episode, there's a recurring, there's one recurring sketch where Stimpy asks Ren to tell him a bedtime story and Ren's like, no, read it yourself. And so Stimpy goes to read it himself, but he clearly can't read, or can't read well, so he's sort of telling himself the story from memory and so we are watching it because Ren is sleeping and it's kind of going into his dreams and so we're watching it. These two are the only actors in the story, but it's like Robin Hood or it's the giant, like a Jack of the Beanstalk style, like littlest giant story in another episode, and stimpy keeps like sort of changing the narration because he's kind of remembering the story. So we see it and then we see it disappear and happen again and it is so funny. It's like on the level of like in the looney tunes, chuck jones I think it was chuck jones did one duck a muck where it turned out that Bugs Bunny was the animator. Yes, yes, that like. It's hilarious. Oh my goodness, yeah, and that sort of like meta. There's a, there's I don't, I don't know how to what like, what the actual names of the techniques are, but it's a. It's akin to dramatic irony, because we're kind of in on the joke that the story is kind of evolving and the characters are forced to kind of move through it.
Speaker 1:So in the one that I'm the robin hood version, like stimpy says you know, ren is playing robin hood and stimpy says robin had to pull out. He pulled out his trusty bow and and and and he's trying to remember the word arrow or like what it is you use with a bow, and he can't remember it and so he says melon. And then we actually see ren like struggle to shoot a watermelon straight up into the air, which then falls back down on him and and breaks and turns into like a helmet and it's and and he's giving us, he's giving us the camera, like uh, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this is happening. So he totally breaks the fourth wall for us and it's so funny like I was laughing out loud now in 2024, I was laughing out loud watching this. So I think there's a lot that is deeply amusing.
Speaker 1:To recommend the art itself If we are able to divorce it from its creator, yeah, and we can come back to that. And there's also stuff that like when the point is to push the envelope and then you get away with it. So then you have to go even further, like eventually you'll lose me, and that happened pretty quickly. To be honest, on the in terms of the gross out stuff, like even in the Robin hood thing, at one point it's like a Rapunzel type thing. So Robin asks, made Marian to let down her hair and he climbs up like a single hair and it turns out it's a nose hair and like yeah, I had a hard time, like I actually like had to like hold my hand over the screen and so it was like I had a hard time watching it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and like some of the close-ups of, like the boogers or the like. There's one episode where Ren has rotted teeth and his teeth fall out and you see his gum holes, and there's these close-ups that are again very skillfully technically rendered and I don't want to see it.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's like it's walking a line with me as a viewer and crossing it sometimes, and that's just the stuff that actually made it through, because Vanessa Coffey was on the other side going no, no, no, no, no. And Vanessa Coffey was on the other side going stop hitting Stimpy. So it's an interesting kind of thought exercise to think about. Like, where are the lines between sort of humor and offense and I think this is a thing that comes up forever for all kinds of comedy, right? Where are the lines between sort of lighthearted comedy and toxicity? And where are the lines when we're sort of lampooning something that is toxic and when we're actually perpetuating that toxicity?
Speaker 1:I think those are really interesting questions that I think ren and stimpy is a case study for. It's a case study for that. It's also a case study for like. I mean, I think we could probably do a whole nother episode of like a meta episode about divorcing the art from the author, when, when the artist is has intentionally cultivated the role of auteur, right, like that does that make it harder. You know, I think there's there's really interesting things there too, because over and over and over again we see characters in Ren and Stimpy on the verge of breakdown, and that breakdown threatens to be violent and becomes violent regularly, and so I think that's also become sort of a thread that we could pull on. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:So something that you said that I'm just kind of like thinking through aloud right now. But I want to go back to what you're talking about, about the fat phobia and how the female characters there's you've got little girls who seem to be fine, got fat women who are the butt of the joke and you've got sexualized women. Yeah, so I remember reading something several years ago that blew my mind. I was talking about the fact that part of the reason why we prize blonde hair is because it is a marker of youth, because most people with blonde hair in childhood their hair darkens as they get older. So a young woman with blonde hair seems younger, younger in a way, and considering John Kay's predation on adolescent girls, I think that, and not that fat phobia doesn't exist for other reasons.
Speaker 2:But I am wondering if part of the fat phobia we see specifically against women might be similar to that, in that a slender female body is generally a young body. It was perceived that way. Certainly Perceived that way, yes, and so you know a like hatred of fat women, a hatred of fatness, so that it is the butt of a joke of fatness. So that it is the butt of a joke, and I don't think I would have come up with this if we hadn't been talking about john k's predation of adolescent girls, and so that that puts another like and it's also a socially acceptable hatred. Like how dare women age we? Yeah, we, we feel that. Like, how dare women age we? Yeah, we, we feel that. And part of the you know young women who are not slender are like god, you're, like you're ruining the only chance you have yeah, I think that's a really interesting insight.
Speaker 1:That is much, much bigger than run and snippy. Oh sure, yeah, I, I, I think you're right. I think you're right, and in that there is certainly a resonance around fat phobia and age ageism or that.
Speaker 2:That's sort of like I feel like how dare you not be someone who makes my dick hard?
Speaker 1:you not be someone who makes my dick hard? Exactly, yeah, that's not. Those aren't the words I was going for, but that's exactly the sentiment that I was, that I was trying, like, like, like our biggest defense is to not be fuckable. Yes, yeah, yeah, and fatness is associated with that and age. Like they're, they're, they go together. It's a constellation. Yeah, yeah, I think that's.
Speaker 2:I think you've hit on an insight into sort of the you know, sort of psyche of the culture that is much, much bigger than the run on stumpy show well, and that the psyche of that culture is why his co-workers were able to say I thought it was just locker room jokes, yeah, yep, yeah, we were hoping for a palate cleanse I know I really I yeah, yep, yeah, woo, we were hoping for a palate cleanse.
Speaker 1:I know I really, I really I really was, but yeah, so we've been recording for for about an hour, so let me um unless you have any other things that you wanted to lift up.
Speaker 2:No, I think um the gross out humor that you're bringing up. I remember it losing me in the 90s, but I kind of had convinced myself that I was being too sensitive to it.
Speaker 1:Unbearingly. There was something about it that was like edgy, that it was like punctuation. You know, occasionally when it became sort of the main vehicle I wasn't interested. Yeah, and even in the sort of as punctuation sometimes it went too far right, like the nose hair Rapunzel joke I didn't enjoy at all, even a little. My first material possession was the cat box and he like hugs it to himself and Ren gets stuck inside the cat box. That was funny. The jokes when the cat litter becomes food not funny so like to me. So I I feel like they were. My lines were different than the animators lines and sometimes I did find it funny and sometimes I didn't. I think when I sort of stopped a lost interest like I never. I was never a beavis and butthead fan ever because I feel like the gross out was the sum total of the comedy. There was no comedy aside from the gross out and I'm not interested in that. If it's like part of, like a, like one tool in the toolbox, I'll go with you, it's not my favorite tool.
Speaker 2:I had that experience with family guy Like I remember it came on after X files, so I would watch it back in like the late 90s. And then I kept watching for a few years and it was the same sort of thing where, like there was there were gross out punctuation that became like well, we've pushed it this far. We got to keep pushing if we want to continue to be edgy, and it's like no, you really don't.
Speaker 2:We want to continue to be edgy, and it's like no you really don't find something different to be edgy with yeah yeah, to the point where I can't even watch the stuff that I enjoyed originally anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting about Ren and Stimpy in terms of that is that some of the edgy things were not the gross out things at all. Right, like they worked very this is what and this is part of the taking the craft seriously they worked very hard to convey in the facial features like I mean it was overacted, but like they were watching old kirk douglas movies to try and like really capture like sort of the facial expressions and not just like a lot of the animation studios had style guides like here's how we convey anger with this character and here's. They weren't doing that, they threw those guys out and each time they were like all of the different, like facial muscles and whatever and and so like.
Speaker 1:In the episode where we get the song happy, happy, joy, joy, it's called stimpy's invention. Well, that's the story. Like there's this one point where ren says I have to go and like in his mouth are the letters g, o, like, like and so that was edgy because they were pushing the art, they were using the art in in unusual and edgy ways. It didn't rely on like a very realistically rendered booger, and they had those two. I find that uninteresting. I find the realistic rendering of a booger uninteresting. I find the letters G, o in the guy's mouth while he's saying I have to go, while he's like kind of going, you know like losing his mental faculties. Now that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So you know, I I have this thought that we get like edgy humor these days. Like as soon as someone says like I'm kind of an edge Lord, I'm edgy humor, I immediately know like to discount, because that generally just means like I'm a misogynist or I'm racist and I don't want you to call me on it, I'm a transphobe. But I feel like what happens is like the way that you put that, their style guides. This is how we show anger and they threw it out. So I feel like a lot of times what's going on with people are being edgy is they're saying I was told not to do this and I'm going to do it. And in some cases what that is is taking art in new directions. No-transcript me not to do it, so I'm going to do it.
Speaker 1:It's really interesting point that you're making, because when I say they threw out the guides about this, this is like how we draw anger, it wasn't. It was less. They were told what not to do, as they were told these are the lines and how you do it, and they said, well, we were, we're going to make our own way. We're going to go back and look at Kirk Douglas's face. What was he doing? I don't want to see your rendering of anger. I want to render anger based on other models. So it was less about sort of saying I'm not going to follow your rules, nah, and more like well, no, I want to figure out how to convey that I think I can do it more authentically. And that's where I think they really captured something new and interesting. It was truly revolutionary and changed the art.
Speaker 1:Yeah Is when they said, no, I'm not going to do it the way you've done it. No, I'm not going to do it the way you've done it. When they just throw out the rules, so-called, or the please don'ts. That's when they, you know, got in trouble, lost me, lost Vanessa Coffey, who was she was John Kay's like. She was his brick break. She was the reason he had a Nickelodeon show and he told her to go fuck herself. And then, by the way and by the way, by the way, this poor woman got like vicious death threats as a result. I'm sure she did. Yes, how dare you steal ren and stimpy from john k, from John Kay?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's. The chafing against restrictions is human nature, and saying I'm not going to follow these restrictions can lead to amazing art, but sometimes it's just fuck, you won't do what you told me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I feel like the why is important, right, like if the why is because I think I can do it better, I think you're keeping me from something authentic, but if the why is just fuck you.
Speaker 2:Well and, but the thing is, cult of personalities like John Kay think that, yeah, they think that just fuck you is actually keeping me from being authentic, and it's because we revere people who are brilliant, and people who are brilliant and abusive are effective, and so they don't have the moment where they have to stop and get a gut check, like am I really doing something that is expanding the medium? Am I really doing something that is more authentic with my artwork than I would have, or am I just chasing against restrictions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, being an asshole.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is why my family, we have two rules in the family. One don't be an asshole. Two, you don't take notes during an emorafic criminal conspiracy which we stole from the wire.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. Well, you know we've been talking for over an hour, so let me see if I can do a quick like highlights tour synthesis. This show hearkened back to a previous age of animation, like when this came out in the early 90s. Animation was cheap and dirty. It was basically what we, you and I, were watching on saturday mornings were basically extended commercials for toys, and john k and a group of people very talented people, who he had sort of gathered around him, were going to change that. They were going to bring things back and they were going to like, really recommit to this as an art form, and they did that with the Ren and Stimpy show with the help of a frankly visionary executive at Nickelodeon. Vanessa Coffey, by the way, was also responsible for Rugrats Doug Rocco's Modern Life.
Speaker 2:She is A fantastic show. I love Rocco's Modern Life. Rocco's Modern Life was so good she was.
Speaker 1:she's an Emmy Award winner. Like this, woman was a visionary right. John Kay would not have had the success that he had without her help and vision and focus. So I just wanted to name that, because he gets a lot of credit for kind of reinvigorating the medium, but he didn't do it alone.
Speaker 2:It's similar to the conversation we had during Four Weddings and a Funeral is we don't give enough credit to curators, where that is a talent, and because of that I for a long time felt like I couldn't claim Funeral Blues by WH Oden as a poem I loved, because I had found it in a film and it hadn't been written by the filmmaker and all of that. So, yeah, I mean we don't give enough credit to the people who are those kinds of visionaries who see what's there and give the notes that get it there Right.
Speaker 1:Right. So one of the things, one of the ways that this show really reinvigorated the medium, was unrelenting focus on quality, the actual quality of the drawings, the layouts, like the characters and the sort of character driven stories and in fact I didn't even talk about this. Apparently john k like really believed in sort of the animator as the driving force and so the storyboards, the storyboards drove the stories. He didn't think writers were useful. There's no point. You don't need a writer for a cartoon. Uh, because they don't know what it is to animate and there are things that happen in the drawing that cannot be sort of written. So it needed to be kind of storyboard driven. So this show really paved the way for modern animation as we know it. So Beavis and Butthead, as we named Family Guy, the later seasons of the Simpsons, spongebob, squarepants, like a lot of sort of the pillars of contemporary animation, would not have been possible without the Ren and Stimpy show. It was edgy and funny in really great ways and also in some problematic ways. A lot of the characters are often like on the edge of breakdown, especially Ren, but there are others who have that experience and that breakdown threatens to be, and often becomes violent. Ren and Stimpy is depicting toxicity, a toxic relationship that unfortunately was reflecting toxic relationships in its creators real life, those included with fellow animator and sometime girlfriend Lynn Naylor, and then later it devolved into actual sexual predation of teenage girls from John Kay. There was a ton of drama within the studio, so where success actually was their enemy because it was it was being given the contract for a 20 episode season. That really the pressure of that of delivering that sent John Kay's already sort of abusive management style over the media and megalomania like really over the edge, so that we found him telling his producer, who had been a partner and his ticket to success, to go fuck herself and also telling the studio execs I will not be held responsible for deadlines nor budgets anymore. Some of the actual like story beats and like storytelling mechanisms were super funny, like there we broke the fourth wall lampoon sort of corporatism with the commercial for the toy log from Blamo that you remember that was really really funny in the 90s. They also walked the line and often crossed it with gross-out humor and with violence Because of John Kay's unacceptable behavior. I think that has tainted the show and so you named that maybe it doesn't have the same kind of nostalgia resurgence that some of the other cultural touchstones from the same moment have. Touchstones from the same moment have though there was john k himself kind of did like a reprise. It was like ren and stimpy, but without the confines. So in like 2003 it was called the ren and stimpy adult party, it was on vice or something. Three episodes aired before it got canceled because it was so far out. There it was it was, and I read there are rumors at least that they're talking about doing a reboot, such spinoff, soon with not with obviously not with john k. So we'll see about that.
Speaker 1:And regardless of, like our outward facing nostalgia, it's clear that this show was deeply influential for a lot of people, both animators, I think, a lot. I would hazard to say that there are very few North American animators working today who are not influenced in some way by Ren and Stimpy, but also comedians who are not animators. So some show up in that documentary, including Jack, blackby, lee and and eliza schlesinger, but I think I would hazard to say that a lot of comedians who gen x comedians and older who are working today, were influenced in one way or another by ren and Stimpy. I think it had. I actually do think that the cultural effect is pretty big.
Speaker 1:Now, some of the kind of like sociological, psychological, cultural insights that came out of this conversation. I think you articulated something that we haven't said before that I think is really significant, which is that fat phobia and sort of a fat hatred goes along with. It is sort of like tied to ageism and the erasure and invisibility of especially middle-aged and older women, because how dare they be unfuckable, and that that the fatness and the age go together and the that sort of has become kind of like a, a constellation in a way to hide a form of misogyny behind humor. That we have been doing for a long time, not you and me way, but we, our culture has been doing, has been doing for a long time not you and me, we, but we our culture has been doing has been doing for a long time.
Speaker 1:What did I forget?
Speaker 2:We did talk a little bit about how there's reason to believe that John Kay might be neuro spicy in some way, and it reminded me of the ways that I've seen engineers hyper fixate on perfection, efficiency maximization, whatever it is, to the detriment of completion of a project.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the hyperfixation and the perfect being the enemy of the done. Both read sort of neurodivergent potentially to me, yeah, okay, so well, that was a lot and totally unexpected, maybe. I mean, obviously I haven't been paying attention because this documentary is from 2020 and the new story about Robin Bird and Katie broke in like 2018. So this, this isn't this maybe isn't news to Ren and Stippy fans, but for those of you who are just sort of casual fans, that it's in the furniture of your minds, sorry, yeah, yeah. So next time, em, it's your turn. What are we talking about?
Speaker 2:So I am actually pretty excited. Next time we're going to be talking about the Matrix oh wow, the original. So, wow, the original. So yeah, and I actually I just watched it with my 13 year old yesterday and partially because I realized I'm gonna have to do a lot of research because there is so much there. This is a I talked about.
Speaker 2:There are some films that are like fractals, and Jordan Peele is who, I think, makes fractal films, where if you look at an individual scene, that's the same message you're getting from the entire film oh cool. And the same thing with costume design and everything. And so this is a fractal film, and so there is so much and I want to make sure I do it justice, and I also really want to make sure I talk about how offensive it is that red pilling has come to mean what it does, particularly considering the fact that this was a film made by two trans women, though they were not out of the closet at the time that it was made, but I'm really excited to talk about it. I was delighted to revisit the film and it's 25 years old and it holds up for the most part.
Speaker 1:Cool, all right. Well, I'll look forward to hearing about it next time. Next time, do you like stickers? Sure, we all do. If you head over to guygirlsmediacom, slash, sign up and share your address with us, we'll send you a sticker. It really is that easy. But don't wait, there's a limited quantity. Thanks for listening. Our theme music is Professor Umlaut by Kevin MacLeod from incompetechcom. Find full music credits in the show notes. Until next time, remember, pop culture is still culture, and shouldn't you know what's in your head?