Ren's Retirement

"Ren's Retirement" is the 11th episode of the third season of The Ren & Stimpy Show that originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on April 2, 1994.

Plot
Ren celebrates his 10th birthday, but he is upset when Stimpy tells him that as a 10 years old dog he is the equivalent of 70 years old in human years. Ren continues to insist that he is still young, but his body begins to decay much to his horror. Stimpy takes Ren to a golf course to introduce him to golf, but the Scotsman Haggis MacHaggis who runs the golf course attacks Ren. Ren accepts that his death is inevitable as his body continues to decay, and asks Stimpy to bury him at a spot in the golf course as he watches the sun set. Death who is sitting next to Ren agrees that this will be the best place for Ren to die. Stimpy takes Ren to a mortuary run by the Salesman character first introduced in Space Madness who sells Stimpy a grand deluxe coffin to bury Ren in. Wilbur Cobb arrives to give the eulogy for Ren's funeral, but his mental decline is such that he thinks he is supposed to be conducting a wedding. Stimpy cannot stop crying, and chooses to be buried alive with Ren. Ren is struck with Stimpy inside of his coffin, and then a worm arrives to devour the duo.

Cast

 * Ren-voice of Billy West
 * Stimpy-voice of Billy West
 * Haggis MacHaggis-voice of Alan Young
 * The Salesmen-voice of Billy West
 * Wilbur Cobb-voice of Jack Carter
 * The Worm-voice of Billy West

Production
The episode originated in 1993 when Bill Wray, one of the cartoonists at Games Animation, declared that he would "really love to do a feature-length animated horror film". Wray's desire to do a horror-filmed episode became Ren's Retirement. Much of the episode was based on the body horror genre as Ren experiences a horrific body decay as he ages and is finally eaten alive by a worm. A sequence intended for the beginning where Ren wins a bar fight-which was meant to show Ren's strength and vitality-was censored by the network which felt that the subject of drinking was inappropriate. The network executives disliked the drawings by Lynne Naylor and those influenced by her that featured curvaceous women as "the exploitation of women". In response, the cartoonists who drew Ren's Retirement gave Ren a coffin that vaguely resembles the body of a shapely women. The voice actor Billy West recalled: "The guys drawing the funeral goers as window dressing; instead of women, they put Chippendale dancers wherever they could, the Full Monty except for a little thong. And they [the executives] were satisfied, 'Look, that's Ok'. But then they realized after it was made, when it was on TV: 'AHHHHHHHH!!! What have we done?'".

Reception
The American journalist Thad Komorowski wrote that Ren's Retirement had "several brilliant moments" such as the funeral for Ren which reflects the utter meaninglessness of his life as only Stimpy attends the funeral of his free will while everyone else is hired to attend the funeral. When Wilbur Cobb finally realizes that he is supposed to be conducting a funeral instead of a wedding, he says nothing about Ren's life as there is nothing to be said, and instead boasts about how he has outlived all of his friends. However, Komorowski wrote that drawing in Ren's Retirement was "profoundly weak and the direction misguided". Komorowski harshly criticized the ending under which Ren and Stimpy-while legally dead are actually still alive in the coffin-are eaten by a worm whose voice sounds like Fred Flintstone as the "most repellent" scene in the entire show. Komorowski wrote that the scene with the worm "descends to the irredeemable repulsiveness that Vanessa Coffey had claimed to want to keep at bay in the series". John Kricfalusi, the former showrunner whom Coffey had fired on 21 September 1992 in part for the amount of violence in the episode Man's Best Friend claimed that there was a "double standard" with Coffey as the ending in Ren's Retirement was considerably more violent than anything he had done as showrunner.

The American critic Martin Goodman wrote the Ren & Stimpy Show explored fears of illness, decay and death as the show "featured filth, illness, disease and mutilation to an unprecedented degree, making these horrors an integral part of the show". Unlike a somewhat similar episode, Ren's Toothache from 1992, there is no optimistic coda to Ren's Retirement. In Ren's Toothache, Ren refuses to brush his teeth and is punished by having all of his teeth shatter after years of neglect. By contrast, in Ren's Retirement, there is nothing Ren can do to stop his inevitable bodily decay and death. Goodman wrote that such repulsive imagery were key to the shop's appeal to young people. Goodman noted that most young people are aware that their youth will not last forever and inevitably they will age, bodily decay will set in, and the process will end in death. Goodman wrote that The Ren & Stimpy Show allowed young people to confront fears of their inevitable deaths in a comic context. Goodman concluded about The Ren & Stimpy Show: "On a surface level, they were funny, subversive cartoons with an offbeat retro look, but a deeper examination revealed them to be an encapsulation of some of our darkest fears, ones in which the soul and body are powerless against a world out of balance."