Hermit Ren

"Hermit Ren" is the first episode of the fourth season of The Ren & Stimpy Show that originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on 1 October 1994.

Plot
Ren comes from work exhausted, and is annoyed by Stimpy's terrible singing and inept cooking. Ren goes on to live as a hermit, but first must join the Hermit Union. Ren lives in a cave and starts to talk to a mummified Bogman. Stimpy waits for Ren while being alone for months starts to drive Ren mad. In his insanity, Ren has hallucinations of his ancestors who play tricks on him. The Bogman tells Ren that he has only three emotions, anger, fear and ignorance, which appear as personifications of Ren's various sides. Ren attacks his illusions. Jasper appears and tells Ren that he has violated the rules of the Hermit Union by having imaginary friends. Ren returns to Stimpy and embraces him.

Cast

 * Ren-voice of Billy West
 * Stimpy-voice of Billy West
 * Jasper-voice of Harris Peet
 * The Salesmen-voice of Billy West
 * The Bogman-voice of Billy West.

Production
The story for Hermit Ren was conceived of by Chris Reccardi who wanted to do more dramatic cartoons via stylized drawings. Reccardi stated in an interview that Hermit Ren was "a great idea for a story that I wish I had another crack at". Reccardi was assisted in his lay-out drawings by his wife Lynne Naylor and Michael Kim. Reccardi composed much of the music used in Hermit Ren at his own home as he wanted the music in the episode to reflect Ren's deteriorating mental condition. Hermit Ren was atypical of the cartoons done at the Games Animation studio and was closer in spirit to the cartoons done by the Spümcø studio where Reccardi, Naylor and Kim had all started out working at. The American critic Thad Komorowski summed up the message of Hermit Ren that: "Ren learns-through self-torture-that to maintain his well-being, he needs to unleash his misanthropic personality upon others. With no Stimpy, he has only himself for company; without that balance, he is even more unhinged". Billy West who provided the voice of Ren in this episode recalled that Reccardi was a director "ardent about what he wanted" and "I think he looked at a lot of his own expressions, because I would see his face now and then in the characters, where the teeth kind of go down and the jaw's out".

Reception
Komorowski gave the episode three stars out five, and wrote: "This well-written and staged cartoon illustrates how Ren is probably the most complex and mentally challenged cartoon character in history".