On August 12, 1995, before Internet Archive or Google, Boing Boing conducted a charming interview with John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy. The Boing Boing Digital page still looks the way it did when readers read it on Explorer 1.0 or Netscape Navigator or what-not. Read the rest
Nerdwriter Evan Puschak put together a video about The Ren & Stimpy Show, a "seminal cartoon of the animation renaissance." When the psychotic chihuahua and imbecilic cat debuted in 1991, I couldn't believe how fantastically funny and weird it was. There was nothing else like it on TV at the time. Before Ren & Stimpy, television cartoons were awful. Show creator John Kricfalusi paved the way for all the great cartoon series we've seen since.
Stussy x John K. from Stussy on Vimeo.
My pal John Kricfalusi (creator of Ren & Stimpy) made an animated commercial for his T-shirt designs that Stussy released today. I love John's animation work. I asked John to write a bit about the making of the commercial and here's what he had to say:
Read the restA couple years ago Stussy put out a bunch of shirts featuring Marvel superheroes.
Stussy's art director Adam Jay Weissman cooked up the idea and asked some non-Marvel artists to do their interpretations of their favorite characters. I picked Crystal and Johnny Storm.
Then last year Adam asked me to design 4 new shirts using my own characters and to redesign their mascot, the Stussy Rat. Once the designs were done they thought it would be fun if I animated a commercial for it. I suggested we make it a story first and include the commercial within and they said yes. I always liked how early television and radio used the stars of their shows to perform the ads for their sponsors and I have been pushing this idea online for a few years now. Finally someone let me do it!
It stars Bobby Bigloaf, a nerdy kid who dreams of one day growing up to be the greatest comic book writer in the world, and Slab N Ernie, the neighborhood bullies.
I used my crack crew of John Kedzie, Sarah Harkey, Geneva Hodgson, Ben Anders, David De Rooij, Sandra Rivas and Amir Avni to make the cartoon.
