In the vein of posting things which maybe I and two other people will find interesting, today I want to talk about John Kricfalusi. John K is best known for creating the wildly popular cartoon Ren & Stimpy, then sort of falling off the map of popular culture. Thanks to Aaron, I recently became aware of John K’s blog and after many painful hours of reading it, have come to the conclusion that John is a bitter dick-hole of a man. Much like my Clonus Island and Clonus Island II posts, there’s a lot of hilarious ground to cover in making fun of this man, so once again I’m going to split this into a 2-day post. First, a little history.It seems that after selling Ren & Stimpy to Nickelodeon in 1988 John K had battle after battle with network execs and was summarily fired in 1992. Considering the show only ran from 1991 to 1996, it’s arguable that John K was not responsible for the best work of the series, evidenced by the astoundingly terrible re-vamping of Ren & Stimpy for Spike Network which was nixed after 3 episodes. Judging from the fact that every program he’s worked on since then has been cancelled within a few episodes, I submit that John K is a very angry, marginally talented man who completely burned all his bridges because he thought he was King Shit of Turd Mountain.
John K’s blog reads like the deranged manifesto of a man who has come to blame the entire cartooning industry for his frustrated career. If it’s a popular cartoon today, you can bet that John hates it like sour-grape poison. Fiery spittle flying from his lips, John K rails against
everything from how nobody can draw in today’s cartoons, to how awful the color schemes are and, I can only assume, how there are far too few matte paintings of boogers and scabs. The Simpsons and Family Guy are two examples of extremely popular shows that draw John’s sad little ire.His blog is very well frequented, mostly by young K-disciples who identify with K because they too aren’t getting paid to animate, and seem to believe that despite any evidence to support it, they totally kick ass and it’s “the industry” standing between them and countless riches and fame. Either that, or the fact that it’s hard to get a job when you’re an emo teenager with no professional training who sits in your parent’s basement all day long farting up the furniture. But John K does make converts like gang-busters. Here’s a comment one fan left on his blog:
“I was watching The Simpsons today and all of a sudden it hit me how horrible
all those pinks and purples and yellows all mashed together really are. Bit of a
shock, really, considering how long I've been watching the show.”
Yeah, thank the gods that John K has come along to inform us why we should arbitrarily hate something we’ve been enjoying just fine for years. It’s sort of as if K is screaming at the top of his jaded little voice that “the emperor really is wearing clothes; can’t you see it?!” And, naturally, scream anything loudly and long enough and there are bound to be fanboys out there who will eventually agree with you because of the one good show you did fifteen years ago.
John K seems to be laser-focused on one tiny aspect of cartoons, and that is the artwork. While important, you could have the best artwork on the planet but unless there’s a good story and interesting characters to go with it nobody is going to watch your abortion of a program. I speak, of course, of The Ripping Friends.
John K seems to believe that there’s really no reason for art to evolve, ever. I can only assume that’s what he was thinking when he churned out the mindless vomit-fest that was The Ripping Friends. “Hey, people really liked Ren and Stimpy ten years ago. I know! Let’s recycle the same exact style and feel of the cartoon, only let’s take out all that bothersome story and character. What’s that you say? The script sucks? Nobody cares about the script! Just cram some disgusting images up there and call it done!” Either it was something like that or he was high on PCP because that cartoon s-u-u-u-u-u-ucked. In case you missed it, The Ripping Friends was 4 brain-damaged, superhero brothers who ineffectually fight crime in between doing unspeakable things such as biting pustules off their feet and being subservient to their extremely masculine mother. (Paging Dr. Freud) It was cancelled after only one season on Fox’s Saturday morning lineup, but inexplicably reared its inane head on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, one of my favorite blocks of programming. I can scarcely put into words the frustration and confusion I suffered when that asinine fever-dream of a cartoon ate up a half hour of my Adult Swim time every Sunday.
In fairness to John K, I do like the work he does for music videos, especially the Tenacious D and Weird Al Yankovic spots. I probably like them because he does just the animation and has nothing to do with the content of the video. Were that the case, I’m sure it would be a psychotic cavalcade of small, dangerous woodland creatures sodomizing a tree trunk or something. Man, John K is one deranged prig.Tomorrow: John K gets medieval on modern cartooning AND John K’s deliciously oblivious racism.
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