Stimpy's Invention

"Stimpy's Invention" is the second segment of the sixth episode and season finale of the first season of The Ren & Stimpy Show, as well as the thirteenth aired segment overall. It originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on February 23, 1992. The episode follows Stimpy, who, after subjecting Ren to several failed inventions, invents one that takes control of its user's happiness in hopes of making Ren happier in life. However, the invention causes Ren to go insane.

Plot
Stimpy – demonstrating more intelligence than usual – goes on a spree of creating useless and impractical inventions. Stimpy subjects Ren to his ridiculous inventions one by one. After Ren becomes enraged at being trapped in the next invention, the glue-filled Stay-Put Socks, Stimpy worries that Ren is unhappy in life, so he resolves to invent something that will put Ren in a better mood. Stimpy invents the Happy Helmet in a lab that resembles the lab of Dr. Victor von Frankenstein in the 1931 film Frankenstein. Via subterfuge, Stimpy plants the Happy Helmet on Ren's head and uses its remote control to repeatedly increase its effects, overcoming Ren's resistance. Once Ren has succumbed to the helmet's influence, he feels compelled to perform a variety of chores for Stimpy, while steadily losing his mind.

In an attempt to make Ren even more happy, Stimpy plays a record of his favorite song, Happy Happy Joy Joy, performed by the Burl Ives-like folk singer Stinky Whizzleteats. Ren and Stimpy dance manically to the song, which consists of Whizzleteats mindlessly repeating the line "happy, happy, joy, joy" while uttering random and nonsensical statements during interludes between choruses. When Stimpy becomes engrossed in the song to the point of distraction, Ren goes off to the kitchen, where he finds a hammer and uses it to smash the Happy Helmet and his own head as the song nears its end. Freed from the helmet's control, an enraged Ren confronts Stimpy and starts to throttle him. Ren then has the epiphany that being angry is what makes him truly happy, and he expresses his gratitude to Stimpy for helping him realize it.

Cast

 * John Kricfalusi – Ren
 * Billy West – Stimpy

Production
The episode had a very troubled production, taking a year to complete from the beginning of production in February 1991 until it aired a year later in February 1992. The story had its origins in 1990 when Bob Camp developed the idea of a story called Stimpy's Inventions in which Ren serves as an unwilling guinea pig for Stimpy's impractical inventions. John Kricfalusi was greatly taken with Camp's idea. Camp later stated that Kricfalusi "fell in love with the idea, that he constantly refined everything in it to the point of ridiculousness, until everything was perfect". Kricfalusi changed the focus on the story as Camp stated that he told him: "Look, why don't we have him [Ren] have a real fit and go insane at one point, and then Stimpy decides he's going to make an invention that's going to cure Ren?". Kricfalusi developed the idea of the Happy Helmet that enslaves Ren, and make the focus of the story Ren's struggle for freedom.

Writing
The executives at Nickelodeon greatly disliked the concept of the story and were loath to approve it, as they felt it to be inappropriate for children. The executives wanted to have the scenes where Stimpy uses a duck as a tool; Ren whacks Stimpy with a folded newspaper; and where Ren laughs so hysterically that his head splits into two removed. Some of the more extreme elements of the story were removed, but much of the material that the executives objected to was not removed and went to air anyway. In a 2008 interview, Kricfalusi claimed: "I literally had to beg Vanessa [Coffey] to let me put Stimpy's Invention into production. By that time, we had lost a month through no fault of our own. Stimpy's Invention and Space Madness were both rejected by Nickelodeon before I talked them into letting me do them. And they turned out to be our two most popular episodes". Vincent Waller stated the network executives disliked Stimpy's use of a duck to solder together the Happy Helmet out of the belief that this might inspire children to imitate using ducks as tools, and wanted Stimpy to use a woodpecker instead as the tool. Waller stated: "They thought it looked too painful for a duck, because it might hurt a duck to have his head do things to hard metal like this". Kricfalusi sent out a memo that stated the animation team was going to draw a duck as he recalled: "I just sent them back a note saying, 'No'". Kricfalusi stated in an interview: "It took longer because it took them forever to approve it. They wanted me to throw it out completely when they saw the storyboard – they just did not get it. Finally, I had to throw myself on my knees and just beg Vanessa to let me do it". In another interview, Kricfalusi claimed: "Vanessa had already signed off on the story outline, but Will McRobb had been against the story from the beginning. He kept telling me that we shouldn't make a cartoon about mind control for kids. I had no idea what he was talking about". Vanessa Coffey, the producer of The Ren & Stimpy Show, admits to having disagreements with Kricfalusi over the contents of the story, but she denies Kricfalusi's claim that she wanted to veto the episode. Several scenes were censored by the network executives, most notably the scene where Ren under the control of the Happy Helmet submissively licks Stimpy, which did not make it past the storyboard phase, owing to its homoerotic elements.

Storyboarding
The storyboard phase of the episode started in late 1990 and was finished by late February 1991. The cartoonists who worked on the episode have stated that it was Kricfalusi's obsessive perfectionism and micro-management leadership style that delayed the production. The animators who worked on Stimpy's Invention have stated in various interviews that the network executives censored several scenes contained in the storyboard phase, most notably the licking scene, but afterwards were content to let production proceed after it started in February 1991. Stimpy's Invention was scheduled to premiere in October 1991, but did not premiere until February 1992 due to the production delays. Camp said of the production: "We killed ourselves on it. That's why we never finished it. We kept fucking with it and fine-tuning it. That show was the magical combination. It was my drawings coupled with John being fanatical about this cartoon and not letting up on any point, beating everybody to death to get perfection".

Animation
Kricfalusi's insistence on drawing and redrawing many of the scenes himself greatly hindered production. One scene, where Stimpy presents his "Stay-Put Socks" to Ren, took an entire month to complete as Kricfalusi kept changing his mind about the color of the box that held the socks despite the box being shown for only a few seconds. The show's painter, Teale Wang, painted 50 different versions of the box in different colors and shades until Kricfalusi finally chose Wang's first painting of the box. Wang reported that she felt that Kricfalusi was even then not pleased about the coloring of the box. Likewise, another animator, David Koenigsberg, recalled that Kricfalusi would explode in rage at him over his coloring of the Happy Helmet, and that it seemed that he could never quite color the Happy Helmet in a manner that was satisfactory to Kricfalusi. Koenigsberg stated: "He [Kricfalusi] comes storming into our workplace, yells at me in front of everybody 'You're wrong!', and storms out. He wasn't kidding around, he was really fucking angry. And I remember looking at Chris Reccardi, 'I don't know what that was for'. And Chris says, 'Welcome to the club'". The animator Mark Kausler of the Spümcø studio who drew the scene where Ren and Stimpy dance and the scene where Ren used a hammer to smash his own head stated that Kricfalusi was "not an easy director to please" and that "he didn't always know what he was looking for". Kausler stated that he had to draw both his scenes five times as Kricfalusi kept changing his mind about how he wanted the scenes to appear. For the dance Ren and Stimpy perform to Happy Happy, Joy Joy, in which they repeatedly rub their buttocks against each other, Kausler drew five different versions where Stimpy's buttocks grew progressively more inflated with each drawing. The most extreme version of Stimpy's bloated buttocks was rejected by Kricfalusi as unsuitable. Kricfalusi then changed his mind several weeks later and chose that version for the broadcast version.

Frequent delays
The production on Stimpy's Invention was so far behind in August–September 1991 that the Carbunkle studio in Vancouver that had been hired as a subcontractor for the animation were forced to temporarily fire much of their staff as there was not enough material arriving from California to justify paying for a full staff. The scene where Ren, after having the Happy Helmet placed on his head, attempts to resist the effect and goes through a series of contorted facial expressions which show how difficult it is for him to smile, was especially onerous and difficult to draw. The task of illustrating the scene was assigned to Kelly Armstrong, the co-boss of the Carbunkle studio and the wife of Bob Jaques, who impressed the other animators with her ability to illustrate such a dramatic transformation. Armstrong recalled: "Ren was staggering and in a transition between two poses and he was delivering dialogue. Since Ren was talking, acting and transitioning all at once, the mouths had to be animated in one order, but 'pinned' onto his head in a radical stagger order, and all had to work with the staggering acting body". Despite the services of Carbunkle studio, much of the work on Stimpy's Invention was done at the Spümcø studio in Los Angeles under the watchful eyes of Kricfalusi. To the considerable annoyance of the other cartoonists who worked on the episode, Kricfalusi started to personally redraw much of the episode himself in October 1991, at a time when the episode was already supposed to have been aired. Koenigsberg stated that Kricfalusi had gone "a little bit nuts" by the fall of 1991 as he started to redraw scenes that already been sent to the Carbunkle studio, a practice that brought production to "a complete halt". The cartoonist Christine Danzo of the Spümcø studio stated that Kricfalusi at one point took the entire draft of the episode, locked it in his office, and refused to "let it out until he had gone though the entire show and had it the way he wanted".

By November 1991, Howard Baker had resigned as the overseas supervisor and Bob Jaques, the other co-boss of the Carbunkle studio, was hired to go to the Philippines to oversee the inking of the episode by the Fil-Cartoons studio of Manila. It was a common practice with American animation in the 1980s–1990s to subcontract out the laborious and time-consuming work of inking in a cartoon frame by frame to cartoon studios in Asia as a cost-saving measure. Jaques, who disliked the task of overseeing production in various Asian studios whose poorly paid cartoonists usually had a level of craftsmanship that was not up to American standards, at first refused Kricfalusi's request to work as the overseas supervisor. Jaques only decided to go to the Philippines when he saw how the drafts of the Fire Dogs episode had been vandalized by the staff of the Fil-Cartoons studio. The version of Fire Dogs that was aired in 1991 was much shorter than intended as much of the footage had been vandalized beyond repair. Jaques was fond of Stimpy's Invention and did not want to the episode ruined the same way much of Fire Dogs had been ruined. When Jaques arrived in Manila in November 1991, he reported that much of the footage had been ruined due to incompetence, and he had to redo much of the episode himself using the original pencil drawings. Jaques called Fil-Cartoons "the cheapest shithole studio I've ever had the displeasure to work with". The American scholar Thad Komorowski wrote that Fil-Cartoons was the animation equivalent of a sweatshop as many of the Fil-Cartoons cartoonists slept outside of the studio as they were unable to pay rent owing to their extremely low wages and the studio had no toilet paper in its washrooms out of the fear that the employees might steal it.

Jaques reported that the Filipino cartoonists of Fil-Cartoons were inept and that many of the visual flaws in Stimpy's Invention was due to their poor workmanship. Jaques described one incident where: "There was one instance when I was checking an exposure sheet and noticed the camera move had been rubbed out and changed from a three-frame move to an eleven-frame move. I asked the checker why he had changed the exposure. He told me you couldn't do a three-camera move. It was almost like dogma to him, and clearly the result of faulty training that impacted our animation. If you know what you're doing, you can do pretty much anything in animation. The fact is, you can control everything in a frame". Owing to the demands from the network to have the episode finally finished, Jaques had several scenes of Stimpy's Invention discarded and only chose to focus on having the staff of Fil-Cartoons ink in and paint the scenes that he deemed essential for the story. To save time, Jaques used the workprint rather the negative for the scene where Ren cleans Stimpy's filthy underwear, which was the reason for the dirt lines that appeared in the final version. Over the course of November–December 1991, the Fil-Cartoons staff painted and inked in Stimpy's Invention.

Jaques reported that the cartoonists of Fil-Cartoons sabotaged much of the drawings of Stimpy's Invention out of anger as he showed them American animation methods much superior to their own. The scene where Stimpy has an epiphany and says "I must use my gift of invention to save Ren!" had to be reshot in the United States as it was intentionally damaged in the Philippines. Jaques stated: "Fil-Cartoons had done what I told them not to do – tamper with the animation (I assume it was a final 'fuck you' to me for shaking up their system)". The problems with the Fil-Cartoons studio in the first season led to the work of inking in Ren & Stimpy Show episodes being subcontracted out to the Rough Draft Korea studio in South Korea for the second season. The frequent delays on Stimpy's Invention led Nickelodeon to present it as a "lost episode" of The Ren & Stimpy Show when it finally aired on 23 February 1992.

Reception
The American scholar Thad Komorowski called Stimpy's Invention among the best of the series, with "an ideal balance of genuine turmoil with uproarious comedy". The American journalist Joey Anuff wrote that Stimpy's Invention was Kricfalusi's "finest moment". In a review, the critic Dawn Taylor called Stimpy's Invention one of the best of the show that featured the "dastardly catchy Happy Happy Joy Joy song". She further noted that "the psychotic rant by the Burl Ives-esque singer Stinky Wizzleteats is actually dialogue spoken by Ives in the film The Big Country". The American scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser wrote that Stimpy's Invention, when it premiered in 1992, was a refreshing change from the banal and bland cartoons of the 1980s. Banet-Weiser wrote that much of the dialogue in Stimpy's Invention, such as Ren's threat, "You filthy swine, I will kill you!", would not have been aired in a 1980s cartoon. Banet-Weiser noted that the episode cheerfully satirized many of the conventions of modern American culture, such as Stimpy's use of a duck and a beaver as tools which mocked the "no testing on animals" disclaimer often used in American marketing. Banet-Weiser noted that Stimpy's Invention lampooned the ideals of happiness and conformity in modern American culture as it is being unhappy that makes Ren happy and the Happy Helmet is a form of slavery as Ren no longer has control of his mind and his emotions after Stimpy places it on his head.

Themes and analysis
Much of the story of Stimpy's Invention is a parody of the idea popular in certain quarters that being perpetually happy should be the norm for everyone. Likewise, the story satirizes the belief that any form of sadness is a mental disorder that needs to be whisked away via a regime of drugs and therapy. The Happy Helmet appears to be a metaphor for the way that some American parents have their children constantly take anti-depressant drugs regardless if they are needed or not as a way to ensure permanent happiness. The over-prescription of anti-depressants for children, especially in the United States, has been described as a "crisis" with 1 out of every 12 American children taking some form of anti-depressant drugs, in many cases due to vague diagnosis of some psychological disorder. One example of the extent of the level of anti-depressant drugs in modern United States is the level of anti-depressants discovered in the brains of the fish of the Great Lakes. The number of American adults who take anti-depressant drugs rose from being 7.7% of all American adults in 1999–2002 to being 12.7% in 2011–2014. As the anti-depressant drugs pass out of human bodies via sanitation systems into the Great Lakes, this has resulted in the fish of the Great Lakes have twenty times the level of anti-depressants in their brains than what are in the water, leading to the fish being exceedingly happy and hence less risk-averse, to the extent of damaging the fish populations.

Komorowski noted the story of Stimpy's Invention is a story about freedom as Ren asserts his identity in face of Stimpy's efforts to impose his version of happiness on him. There is nothing that indicates that Ren likes the song Happy Happy Joy Joy, but he is forced to dance to that song under the control of the Happy Helmet because it is Stimpy's favorite song. The notion that Ren might have another favorite song of his own did not seem relevant to Stimpy's way of thinking. The way that Stimpy casually assumed that because Happy Happy Joy Joy made him happy that it would also made Ren happy reflected his utter disregard for Ren's feelings that stood in an ironical contrast to his desire to ensure Ren would always be happy. Komorowski noted that Ren under the control of the Happy Helmet was being "tortured, physically and mentally" while Stimpy was completely "oblivious" to the pain he had inflicted on him. Stimpy was quite surprised when he learned at the climax that Ren was angry with him. Komorowski argued that Stimpy displayed a parental love and concern for Ren as he only wanted him to be happy, but that he went about helping his friend in a manner that was brutal and callous, albeit only because Stimpy was so lost in his "brainless ecstasy" that he was incapable of understanding the torment that he inflicted.

Banet-Weiser noted that Ren under the dominance of the Happy Helmet has an unnaturally wide, crazed smile perpetually stuck on his face with bloodshot eyes while he attends happily to Stimpy's utterly repulsive desideratum of needs such as cleaning Stimpy's filthy litterbox and his equally filthy underwear. Banet-Weiser noted the song Happy Happy Joy Joy is, despite its title, rather menacing as the singer threatens at one point: "I don't think you're happy enough. I'll teach you to be happy!" Banet-Weiser wrote: "The transgressing of boundaries of taste and convention in Ren & Stimpy is playful; Stimpy's Invention consciously mocks the authenticity of 'being happy', so that the unofficial anthem of Ren & Stimpy, Happy Happy Joy Joy, is provocatively ironic." The phrase "happy happy joy joy" introduced in Stimpy's Invention has entered the English language as a slang term to describe someone being forced to feign happiness and to hide their own unhappiness in order to conform. The 2020 documentary Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren and Stimpy Story took its title from the song. In a review of Happy Happy Joy Joy, the British critic Andrew Pulver wrote: "Here is a documentary whose title contains radioactive levels of irony: happiness and joy are very far from what is to be found within".

Links

 * Happy Happy Joy Joy
 * Review of Stimpy's Invention
 * Non-consensual happiness and triple buttock syndrome Review of Stimpy's Invention