You’ve got to love the entire movie premise of a recent film—“Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story,” a documentary that debuted at Sundance earlier this year—and that posit being completely ignored just a few short months later. In ‘Happy Happy Joy Joy,’ directed by Ron Cicero, and Kimo Easterwood, the central running idea of the doc, among other themes of rebellion and chaos, is that the transgressive brilliance of the 1990s “Ren & Stimpy” cartoon on Nickelodeon was the product of several mad geniuses and auteurs. Chief among them was creator John Kricfalusi who drew, wrote, directed, produced, and voiced several of the characters. But Kricfalusi was about as an unstable genius as they come, and he was soon fired off the show at the end of Season 1. While the doc pains itself to laud the other creators and animators on the series that also went on to have amazing, important careers in animation—co-director Bob Camp among them—without Kricfalusi, the show lost its magic. But also, years later, when Kricafalusi was brought back on board to do the show by himself, the show also suffered without his creative collaborators reeling him in. The “Ren & Stimpy” magic was a confluence of all those specific artisans and auteurs and whenever any efforts were made to replicate the show’s genius over the years without the entire crew—it failed miserably (with lots of hard examples given throughout the doc, even by original Nickelodeon execs).
READ MORE: Comedy Central Reviving ‘Beavis & Butt-Head’ With Mike Judge Returning For 2 New Seasons
And so, good morning, all that is followed by the announcement of a new “Ren & Stimpy” series over at Comedy Central (part of the Viacom group that also owns Nickelodeon). Uhhh, ok. It’s as if the execs over at Comedy Central watched the doc, got excited about the first half, maybe didn’t watch the second half, and or just took all the wrong lessons from it.
No new writer or showrunners have been revealed yet, but Viacom recently announced Grant Gish, a veteran of Marvel Studios and Fox Animation, as the head of adult animation at Comedy Central. He developed “Bob’s Burgers,” oversaw “American Dad” and at Marvel, was responsible for developing the upcoming Hulu series “M.O.D.O.K.” and “Hit-Monkey.”
Viacom is definitely digging into their cable library to resurrect classic animated hits. The “Ren & Stimpy” revival follows news of revivals that include Mike Judge’s “Beavis and Butt-Head”; Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Bill Lawrence’s “Clone High”; and “Jodie,” based on the former MTV series “Daria.”
It should be noted that an adult version of “Ren & Stimpy” was already attempted once, an “Adult Party Cartoon” version on SpikeTV in 2003. Original creator Kricfalusi was brought back on board, with major creative free reign, but this version, extremely vulgar and offensive, was poorly received and was essentially taken off the air after three episodes (six were made in total and then eventually released on DVD). Kricfalusi won’t be back for this version either. In a 2018 Buzzfeed article, Kricfalusi was accused of sexual abuse with underage girls from relationships in the ’90s and early-’00s. In the ‘Happy Happy Joy Joy’ documentary, he doesn’t cop to abuse, but admits to having inappropriate relationships with underage women, and says he has retired from animation and public life.