Category Archives: Ren & Stimpy

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.

There are reams of documentation covering abandoned shorts from Disney, MGM, Fleischer, and other Golden Age studios, but coverage of TV cartoons that met the same or a similar fate is sparser. An example of one with an interesting history: a rejected Tiny Toon Adventures story became one for Ren & Stimpy. No April foolin’!

Jim Smith and Bob Camp mostly storyboarded Hi, Spirits, a planned segment for one of the Acme Acres Zone half-hours, when he was in the newly formed Warner Bros. Animation unit in 1989. [UPDATE: See Kent Butterworth’s comment for the correct date and place, as well as some more info.] He and Bob Camp lasted a whopping six months on the show before becoming fed up with the industry altogether and joined partners John Kricfalusi and Lynne Naylor in forming Spumco, the haven for animation’s malcontents.

What follows is the entire storyboard Smith and Camp did. (They’re littered with great unrelated duck sketches of theirs too.) There are discrepancies in the page numbers, but the board is complete. It’s criminal the final shows never retained the sort of liveliness found in this board.

Fast-forward two years later when The Ren & Stimpy Show began its second season of production. The show had risen the bar for what TV animation was capable of far more than any of its contemporaries in the fabled ‘animation renaissance.’ Hi, Spirits was flip-flopped into a story premise with Ren and Stimpy in the roles of Hampton and Gogo. (The Paul Tsongas ghost and yak remained. A fat naked black man was added.) It was one of the “C” cartoons that John K. handed over to layout supervisor/timing director Ron Hughart to see through production as director in mid-1992.

For your enjoyment, here is the uncut version of the episode, unavailable on the “UNCUT” box set. See what remained the same from the Tiny Toons board – and what got changed!

Contrary to ‘facts’ circulating the Internet, the scene with the bloody-head fairy (here Doug Funnie instead of Elmer Fudd) was not added by Games Animation. The finished animation from Taiwan’s Color Key Studio arrived a week before the transition from Spumco to Games commenced.