Big House Blues (The Ren & Stimpy Show)

Big House Blues is a 1990 animated comedy short film which serves as the pilot episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show that was originally screened at a film festival on 10 August 1990.

Plot
Ren and Stimpy are homeless and starving as they wander about an unnamed American city sometime in the 1950s. The duo are captured by a cruel dogcatcher who does not care that Stimpy is a cat. Ren and Stimpy are sent to the dog pound, which is depicted as being like a prison. The other dogs live a sybarite lifestyle in their cell in the pound (the phrase "big house" is American slang for a prison). A guard appears and takes away one of the dogs, Phil, to "be put to sleep". Ren at first does not understand what the phrase "put to sleep" means, and nearly loses his mind when he learns that dogs that are not adopted are being killed. Stimpy throws up hairballs which covers Ren, causing Ren to slap Stimpy around. An obnoxious girl appears and adopts Ren, thinking he is a poodle. Ren insists that she also adopt Stimpy as well. Ren and Stimpy settle into a house in suburbia. The mother of the girl gives Ren an ugly sweater to wear while Stimpy is given a litter box. Stimpy speaking with a Yiddish accent calls the litter box his "foist material possession", and drags Ren into it, much to Ren's discomfort.

Cast

 * John Kricfalusi as Ren
 * Billy West as Stimpy
 * Jim Smith as The Narrator
 * Bob Camp as The Effeminate Dogcatcher
 * Jim Smith as The Dogcatcher
 * Henry Porch as Phil
 * Brian Chin as Jasper
 * Cheryl Chase as The Little Girl
 * Lynne Naylor as Mom

Production
In 1989, the Spümcø studio was founded by John Kricfalusi, his girlfriend Lynne Naylor, and two of their friends, Bob Camp and Jim Smith. In the summer of 1989, Kricfalusi met with the producer Vanessa Coffey of the Nickelodeon network in an attempt to interest her in funding several projects he had developed including Jimmy's Clubhouse starring Jimmy the Retarded Boy (later renamed Jimmy the Idiot Boy) and a series to be called Your Gang. At a meeting at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles, Coffey stated that Kricfalusi gave a sales pitch "so charismatic and so outrageous" that she was convinced she had to fund one of his projects. Coffey disliked the concept of Your Gang, but felt that two of the supporting characters in Your Gang, namely the dog Ren and the cat Stimpy had potential for a series of their own. This was part of Nickelodeon's initiative to support "animator-driven cartoons", although Kricfalusi held a cynical view of this effort: "The creator-driven thing is a press invention to make people think how noble they are. What [cable networks] really wanted was hungry studios [like his] dying to break out of the mainstream who would knock themselves out to make great shows and hand over the merchandising rights."

Coffey brought Kricfalusi to a meeting of the board of directors of the Nickelodeon network in New York. Kricfalusi impressed the board who wanted to fund Jimmy's Clubhouse, which was his first choice. However, Kricfalusi was unwilling to sell to the Nickelodeon network the intellectual rights to Jimmy the Idiot Boy, his abrasive uncle George Liquor, and Jimmy's Canadian girlfriend Soda Pop. The network insisted on owning the intellectual rights to any characters that were to be featured in a cartoon show that aired on their network, as they were hoping to build "a permanent library of evergreen cartoons," like Disney and Warner Bros.

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. In late 1989, Coffey agreed to fund a pilot for a TV show tentatively titled Ren Höek and Stimpy, and told Kricfalusi that if the pilot did well, she would commission a television series from his studio. Production on the pilot, titled Big House Blues, started in December 1989.

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 of his death. The storyboard for the episode was finished in January 1990. Half of the scenes were drawn at the Spümcø studio in Los Angeles and the other half at the Carbunkle studio in Vancouver. The Carbunkle studio had been founded in 1989 by the husband-and-wife team of Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong. Kricfalusi and Naylor had known Jaques since they were students at Sheridan College in the 1970s. 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. Jaques stated: "There was no way we could do that with the material on Ren & Stimpy. You couldn't just throw a timing chart on the layouts and have them inbetweened. Extreme or expressive movement and acting require extreme action". Billy West was recruited initially to provide the voices of both Ren and Stimpy, but Kricfalusi took the role of Ren for himself. West states that he believes that Kricfalusi always intended to provide the voice for Ren, and he misled the network executives by saying that West would play both parts as a way to gain the network funding. Big House Blues was in production for the entire first half of 1990 and cost $80,000 US dollars to make. The pilot only performed "moderately well" in testing, but Coffey was determined to support the show. She censored some of the scenes of sadistic cruelty being inflicted on Phil and changed the ending where Phil rises from the grave, which she felt undercut the gravity of Phil's death.

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 makes it clear that the duo were homosexual. Likewise, the scene where Ren washes his mouth in the toilet was censored, though curiously it was included in the opening credits of every episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show. This has been cited as an example of the inconsistency of Broadcast Standards and Practices.

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 the Big House Blues. In the Big House Blues, Ren and Stimpy had an "underground" look to them that was absent by Stimpy's Big Day, the first episode of the TV show. Naylor's redesign of the look of Ren and Stimpy was used for the rest of the show as a cost-saving and time-saving measure, through Kricfalusi has stated his preference for the design used in the Big House Blues as truer to his vision of the characters.

Reception
Big House Blues was played as a short in various film festivals starting on 10 August 1990. Despite the concerns of the Nickelodeon network executives, the reception to Big House Blues was very positive, with Coffey telling Kricfalusi: "The kids laughed a lot more at your cartoon than the others". In September 1990, Nickelodeon gave its approval for what is now titled The Ren & Stimpy Show to go into production, with the first episode set to premiere on 11 August 1991.