Big House Blues

Big House Blues (1990)

Ren and Stimpy, on the streets starving, are captured by the dog catcher. They end up in the pound and become frightened when one of the dogs tells them of the "big sleep".

Date of release
1990-08-10
TMDB
8.4 / 10 (8)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Comedy, Animation, TV Movie
Director
John Kricfalusi

Casting

Interesting facts

Big House Blues is a 1990 American animated comedy short film produced by Spümcø. Originally screened at a film festival on December 21, 1990, it was succeeded by The Ren & Stimpy Show on the network, which serves as a pilot episode. A censored version was later aired on Nickelodeon for its first season, while the full, uncensored version would air on Spike TV in 2003 as part of the "first" episode of Adult Party Cartoon.

Production

Kricfalusi sold the intellectual rights for Ren and Stimpy to Nickelodeon under the grounds that they were his "second-best characters". Coffey rejected Your Gang as a TV show, but stated she was willing to fund a TV show based on Ren and Stimpy.

The artists who worked on "Big House Blues" were Kricfalusi, Naylor, Camp and Smith. Camp described "Big House Blues" as a "nonsense story". Each of the four artists were assigned to draw what was felt to be their strongest area of expertise, with Camp drawing the comic scenes, Smith drawing the "manly" scenes with the dog catchers, Naylor drawing the "cute" scenes, and Kricfalusi drawing the "wild" scenes where Ren loses his mind at the prospect…

It was expensive to pay cartoonists in American dollars and the lower value of the Canadian dollar make it profitable to sub-contract the work out to a Canadian studio. Originally, "Big House Blues" was done in an animation style similar to the Ed Benedict cartoons at Hanna-Barbera in the 1950s. Jaques persuaded Kricfalusi to switch over to a more exaggerated style.

The design of Ren and Stimpy was far more complicated in "Big House Blues" than it was in the TV show as Naylor subsequently simplified the design of the characters under the grounds that it took too much time and cost too much money to draw the characters in frame by frame as was done in the style used in "Big House Blues".

The network executives were displeased when they first viewed "Big House Blues" in mid-1990 as it was stated that the material was not appropriate for a television show aimed at children. The episode was heavily censored by the Nickelodeon network, which banned the scene where Ren passionately kisses Stimpy and says he loves him, as the scene implies that the duo were homosexual, despite it being portrayed as Ren doing so unconsciously.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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