John K. is posting his layouts from the unmade Ren & Stimpy epic The Wilderness Adventure, to illustrate his process of ‘maintaining guts’ of the storyboard. So I thought this would be an opportune time to share the whole unmade journey in board form. (I’m missing page 89, unfortunately, but there’s no loss of continuity).
As he writes, this was boarded in the Summer of 1990, before production on the series started. It looks to be primarily the work of John K. and Jim Smith, but there’s definitely a lot of Bob Camp in it and some Lynne Naylor too. Though it was rejected three times as is, a lot of the material found life in other cartoons, Man’s Best Friend most notably. The mosquito scene was used in The Great Outdoors – in fact, the board for that cartoon uses the exact same drawings as seen here. There was talk of using it to start off or be part of that fascinating fiasco, Adult Party Cartoon, but it never materialized.
Aside from the incredibly appealing drawing and staging, there’s a beautiful dynamic between George Liquor and his pets, only making me wish there were slews of R&S cartoons like it. ome of this material is funnier than much of what actually made it into that historic cartoon series. Maybe a naked fight between G.L. and a bear or Ren leaving his master to die seemed a little raw, but there’s at least that wonderful reassurance that this is just a cartoon and none of this is real – hell, the stuffed heads are revealed to still be living animals.
