![]() “How can he possibly resist the diabolical urge to push the button that could erase his very existence?” The Ren & Stimpy Show is set in the repressed-cornball ’50s and ungroovy ’60s, late in animation’s fabled Golden Age, and serves as both a loving tribute to and vicious parody of various cartoon classics, from Looney Tunes to early Disney to the Hanna-Barbera empire (Yogi Bear and the Jetsons aesthetic especially) to live-action slapstick kings like the Three Stooges, all filtered through 50 years or so of howling suburban repression and the blackest, bleakest Gen X humor that Nickelodeon could bear. “Oh, how long can trusty cadet Stimpy hold out?!” We’ve got an old-school boxing-announcer type bellowing now. Plus, Kricfalusi left the show during Season 2, so West handled both Stimpy and Ren for the last three seasons, and probably thousands of impressionable kids watching Nick at home never even noticed. Ren and Stimpy, above all, are stupendous, indelible voices. Whereas Stimpy (a stentorian and lovably dunderheaded Phil Hartman type) is handled by voice-actor megastar Billy West, who also did Doug on Doug, Fry on Futurama, and Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in the original Space Jam. For the first two seasons, Ren (who despite the Dutch last name shrieks in a hybrid Mexican German accent, so the line comes out “That’s just eeeet!”) is voiced by Quebec-born (and now-disgraced) series creator John Kricfalusi. “We don’t know! Maaaaybe something bad! Maaaaybe something good! I guess we’ll never know! Because you’re going to guard it! You won’t touch it, will you?” First thing to know about The Ren & Stimpy Show is that the voice acting is phenomenal. What does happen if you push that button, though? “That’s just it!” Ren shrieks, gleeful, taunting. The Best Nickelodeon Character Bracket: The Sweet 16 An Oral History of ‘Nickelodeon GUTS’ Between Two Petes (He refers to a bar of soap as “my beloved ice cream bar” and gnaws on it at great, visceral length.) Now he’s making Stimpy guard the History Eraser Button in the hopes that he-and maybe you-will go mad, too. This is Season 1, the third of six episodes, wherein Ren and Stimpy are intrepid interstellar explorers in a fan-favorite segment entitled “Space Madness,” to which Ren has succumbed. Any given episode of this belligerently surrealist series might find our heroes playing nature-show hosts, or rubber-nipple salesmen, or cheese miners, or hitchhikers terrorized by circus performers, or dalmatian-painted firemen, or Canadian weiner farmers. “So what’ll happen?” Stimpy mewls, intimidated and yet mesmerized by the History Eraser Button. ![]() Orange juice, Sprite, and flaming gasoline. What an explosive cocktail Rugrats, Doug, and The Ren & Stimpy Show turned out to be. ![]() They’re best friends whose wacky, violent escapades comprise The Ren & Stimpy Show, which debuted on Nickelodeon on August 11, 1991, alongside Rugrats and Doug in a cataclysmic 90-minute block that ushered in the Nicktoons era and changed North American animation as we know it. It’s the History Eraser Button, you fool!” What we got here is a shrieking, abusive Chihuahua named Ren Höek berating a doofy Manx cat named Stimpson J. Throughout the week, we’ll be publishing essays, features, and interviews to get at the heart of what made Nick so dang fun-and now so nostalgic. To mark the anniversary, The Ringer is looking back at Nick’s best-ever characters and the legacy of the network as a whole. Introduced on August 11, 1991, under the brand of “Nicktoons,” Doug, Rugrats, and The Ren & Stimpy Show would quickly become hits and change the course of animation, television, and popular culture at large. Thirty years ago this week, a rising but not-yet-ubiquitous kids network by the name of Nickelodeon launched its first original animated series.
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