Stimpy's Big Day

"Stimpy's Big Day" is the first episode of the first season of The Ren & Stimpy Show, that originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on 11 August 1991.

Plot
In the first part of a two-part story, Ren and Stimpy are living together in a trailer park. Ren berates Stimpy for spending too much time watching cartoons on television and, in particular, The Muddy Mudskipper Show. Stimpy enters a poetry contest for the Nitty Gritty Kitty Litter company where he declares his love of their kitty litter desptie Ren's opposition. Stimpy's inane poem wins the first prize. As a result, Stimpy is awarded $47 million and an appearance on The Muddy Mudskipper Show. Ren tries to steal the $47 million by pretending to be Stimpy. Stimpy leaves for Hollywood while Ren becomes lonely in his trailer park. The story concludes with the next episode, The Big Shot!.

Cast

 * John Kricfalusi – Ren
 * Billy West – Stimpy
 * Harris Peet – Muddy Mudskipper
 * Cheryl Chase – Pool Babe
 * Darrin Sargent – TV Announcer
 * Jim Smith – TV Announcer
 * Vincent Waller – Pillow

Production
Production started in October 1990 in order to meet the scheduled premiere in August 1991. After The Ren & Stimpy Show was approved by the network in September 1990, the Spümcø studio was forced to expand by hiring new animators in order to do a television show. Most of the people whom John Kricfalusi hired were artists who had previously worked on The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil in 1988. The painter Teale Wang recalled in 2009 that Kricfalusi had an unorthodox way of recruiting artists, as she stated that, in early 1991, "John offered me a full-time job, but I told him I was going back to The Simpsons. He looked at me and said, 'oh I get it. You like it safe. You don't like to take chances. I understand'. I got so pissed off, I told him to fuck off and that I'd take his job! I was actually shaking. He knew exactly what he was doing. I only knew him two weeks, but he had figured me out in two minutes". In its early days, the Spümcø studio was described as more as a "mom-and-pop shop", and not until the first months of 1991 did the studio become a more conventional animation studio.

Much of the episode was drawn by the couple John Kricfalusi and Lynne Naylor, the co-founders of Spümcø. Naylor simplified the design of Ren and Stimpy from their look in their debut in the 1990 pilot episode Big House Blues under the grounds that it took too much time and was too expensive to draw the characters in frame by frame as was done in style of the Big House Blues. In the Big House Blues, Ren and Stimpy had an "underground" look that was gone by Stimpy's Big Day. Naylor argued that a simpler design was needed to save money and time. This was especially the case with Ren as he is a notoriously difficult character to draw properly, and many cartoonists have failed at drawing Ren. Naylor's redesign of Ren and Stimpy became the norm for the rest of the show, though Kricfalusi has expressed preference for the original look of the duo in the Big House Blues.

The production was greatly hindered when Naylor broke up with Kricfalusi in March 1991, which marked the end of her involvement with The Ren & Stimpy Show. Working on Stimpy's Big Day imposed serious strains on their relationships as Naylor was far more committed to reaching the deadlines imposed by the studio than was Kricfalusi. David Koenigsberg of the Spümcø studio recalled: "She was building up with all this tension because she felt the deadlines much more oppressively than John did". Koenigsberg recalled that the other animators would laugh and joke while working, but Naylor "was like the uptight librarian reminding everyone 'we have to go back to work now'. She was serious, it was not a joke. I remember talking to her one day about how we should laugh at this, and she really couldn't". Naylor had completed the layouts for Stimpy's Big Day when she broke up with Kricfalusi. However, despite the break-up, Naylor played a major role in Stimpy's Big Day as she drew the opening scene where Ren criticizes Stimpy for watching cartoons too much, which established a dynamic that continued for the rest of the show. Both Kricfalusi and Naylor had been born in the 1950s, and as result the couple set Stimpy's Big Day sometime in the 1950s as a tribute to the world of their youth.

Reception
The American journalist Thad Komorowski rated Stimpy's Big Day favorably, giving the episode three stars. Karen Schomer, the television critic of The New York Times noted in 1992 that the episode was different from other cartoon shows in the way that Ren insisted he was a "real" person and dismissed The Muddy Mudskipper Show as something fake. Ren tells Stimpy about Muddy Mudskipper: ""He's just a cartoon character, not flesh and blood like you and me!" T The American critic Matt Langer wrote in Stimpy's Big Day "Kricfalusi constantly made reference to the detritus of American culture, and deliberately violated norms of good taste."