A mature John Kricfalusi Discussion Thread

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rizley

New member
I was looking through past threads discussing John K.

Dear lord..do they divert into name-calling and flaming pretty quickly. It's kind of concerning but interesting nonetheless.

What is it about this controversial animator that causes people to go crazy. Some adore him, others hate him.

I can't stand a lot of his work outside the original Ren & Stimpy, but I'd be a damned liar if I said his work (no matter how weak or gross it is) is beautiful to look at. His business ethics are horrible, but let's open this up to some mature discussion. Let's see how long we can keep this going before it inevitably is closed.
 
If he is the animator of Ren and Stimpy, I can understand the controversy, he did the 4 or 5 "mature" episodes that aired on MTV. Parents must have been apauled, and that gave him the bad rep.
 
His bad rep isn't with parents, it's with everyone in the animation community, and I can completely understand his bad rep, he comes off pretty arrogant in almost every interview. He's a fantastic cartoonist though and can produce some breathtaking animation, he isn't very good playing with others though.
 
I like and respect John K. for his contributions to the animation field, but I kind of view him in the same light that I view John Lydon, AKA Johnny Rotten, from the Sex Pistols. Both of them made great contributions to their medium, John K. animation and John Lydon punk rock, but both of them are really uptight and too busy criticizing other artists in their medium. For instance, John Lydon likes to think that the Sex Pistols were the most influential band to punk rock, and they may have been, but the thing I don't like about him is he writes off most modern punk like Green Day. It's the same way with John K., he did do great work, but that doesn't mean his work was the greatest or that everything to come after it was complete garbage.

I'm not saying I hate John K., on the contrary, the only episodes from the original Ren and Stimpy that I like are the ones he worked on, I just wish he wasn't so quick to criticize other peoples work. Two of the biggest series that come to mind are The Simpsons and Tiny Toon Adventures. Yeah, they may not be the greatest peices of animation, but they both didn't deserve the criticism that John K. gave them IMO. And besides, The Simpsons has a greater legacy than Ren and Stimpy, and the Tiny Toons have an argueably bigger legacy than R&S, so that means that they weren't as bad as John K. said they were.
 
What has he said about Tiny Toons and The Simpsons? I almost always disagree with his bashing of these kinds of show but it's always interesting to hear what he has to say about them

In one of the other closed threads I read, I saw someone said Spumco animated an episode of Dexter's Lab. Is this true?
 
The Simpsons he disliked because of the lack of expression in the characters(this was back in the early 90's mind you, I wonder what he thinks of it now), and the Tiny Toons he derided because he thought it was the greatest insult to the original Looney Tunes, even though the characters were not directly related to the Looney Tunes characters, merely they were proteges of them. I think he saw the Tiny Toons as in the same boat as The Flintstones Kids and Tom And Jerry Kids, you know baby versions of the original characters, even though in the Tiny Toons case they weren't.
 
I don't think he's ever flat-out bashed The Simpsons; he's just stated he's not fond of animated sitcoms as a genre. Tiny Toons and particularly Animaniacs, on the other hand, he constantly tears to pieces as "fake cartoons". The fact he worked on Tiny Toons in its early production, which by all accounts was something of a hell, has probably made him biased against all WBA work.

Spumco animated Chicken Scratch, the short that played before the PPG movie, though John K. himself didn't actually work on it.
 
I wonder what he would've said about Baby Looney Tunes then.

I liked Ren & Stimpy but I never loved it. His animation style is unique and expressive, but his shows are often too bizarre for most people's taste, especially Adult Party Cartoon.
 
Just watched Chicken Scratch and yeah, definitely had some Spumco vibes in it, but it seemed more like a Spumco imitation than actual Spumco people worked on it.
 
Oh, he did directly bash The Simpsons, long before other animated sitcoms like South Park or Family Guy(two others he has criticized) came into the picture. That Ren And Stimpy joke in the season four episode The Front? Yeah, that was a direct jab at John K from The Simpsons, pretty much as a retaliation.
 
Spumco had nothing to do with "Chicken Scratch". That was animated entirely by Genndy Tartakovsky himself (with Barbara Krueger as his assistant)
 
John Krickfalusi brought back an appreciation for old-school animation that I'll always be grateful to him for. But...man, did he go on a bender when it came to Ren and Stimpy! As I understand it, he got mad at Nickelodeon for censoring some of his ideas for the show, apparently forgetting that Nick is first and foremost a kid's channel. His affection for that John Liquor character of his is something I'll never understand. And what he did to the cat and the Chihuahua in that MTV stuff...egad. I guess I just don't understand the guy. IMO, he had a good thing and he ruined it. Why? We'll probably never know...
 
I've never understood George Liquor, he's not as easy on the eyes to look at like Ren & Stimpy, he's ugly and obnoxious. I don't find anything he says or does very funny. I guess the reason John K. uses him so much is because he owns the rights to the character. And the SpikeTV episodes turned a lot of R&S fans off, IIRC, the series premiere for Adult Party Cartoon was pretty big, but fell like a rock afterwards.
 
He said that the Tiny Toons are a superbastardization of the original Looney Tunes, that the animation is bad and is dominated by bad writers pretending they emulate the original shorts but they don't because they can't draw and thus commits a lot of "sins", like stole plots from current movies, refer to other current cartoons all the time and explaining the jokes. Also says that if something have 'toon' in the title, is a guarantee that isn't a cartoon.

He said that the Simpsons is also dominated by the bad writers and it should focus more in the characters. And cartoonists that worked on the show has had a bad experience due to being obligated to work stiffly "on-model". He likes Matt Groening thought, and thinks that the show will be better if he was 100% involved, because he preferred the cartoony Tracey Ullman shorts over the half-hour show. He even talked with Matt about having the Simpsons appearing in R&S and vice-versa, but Nickelodeon took over the show and didn't happen.

Oddly, in an interview in TV guide John K. said that the Simpsons pushed the boundaries about what was allowed in animation and thus allowed R&S to exist.



Really? The credits of it says that it was completely storyboarded and animated by Tartakovsky.
 
A mature discussion? Well, O.K., but just so you know, this post would be both longer and funnier if I was allowed to be immature.

John Krickfalusi is an amazingly gifted animator who, after getting fired from his cash-cow Ren & Stimpy for missing deadlines, used his extraordinary talent to... not do much of anything, really. He now spends most of his time telling his dedicated group of fans about the glory days of animation (they listen) and trying to tell the industry what they should do to bring back the glory days (they don't).

His show, Ren & Stimpy, was instrumental in animation's return to the mainstream in the early 90s (during the 70s and 80s, animation was chiefly regarded as either kid stuff or artsy crap), but it was not alone in this (The Little Mermaid, PowerPuff Girls, The Simpsons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Rugrats all helped).

It also created almost single-handedly the "shock" or "gross-out" forms of animated humor, one of the shows only aspects not inspired by 1940s animation.

I respect John K.'s art best I can, but there's not much to respect, besides the first three seasons of Ren & Stimpy (and, of course, there are people who don't even like that). I also think his actions on his blog and elsewhere are quite immature (his review of Animaniacs, for example, is bizzare no matter what you're feelings on the show are).
 
Outside of overusing anvils (which Animaniacs did more, I think) and reusing a few plotlines only not as well-done, I really don't see how it bastardizes Looney Tunes. It's not like it disgraces the classic characters, as the show stars new ones and doesn't disrespect the vets. And actually, it was possibly the closest any property got to emulating the general feel of Looney Tunes. The seven minute stories, the emphasis on gags, the music style, all felt like LT. At least to me. TMS wasn't bad. StarToons wasn't bad. Wang, after they got the thick-lined stuff out of their system, was certainly respectable. -Some- of Kennedy's work wasn't bad. About the only studio that generally sucked was Encore.

The problem was their was no overall solid look of the show. It kept changing due to whoever was doing the animation. If that's what he meant, yeah, I can see that. But to say there wasn't any good animation in TTA... I disagree. Maybe it's just selective memory, but I don't recall Tiny Toons referencing other shows of the time very much. Now celebrities, that's a bit more accurate. Which, by the way, Looney Tunes did also. 'Stole' is not the same as parody. Unless you've seen an episode of Star Trek where the crew goes to a planet that's a scalp and hair. Well but most of these were relegated to "Toon Physics", where the concept of explaining jokes made sense. There were a few other instances in the show, but it's not like it regularly stopped the action to say, "See this? If I look down, I fall!" Then what is it? Live action? I really don't understand this criticism at all. Animation is animation. Just because it isn't animated like Clampett doesn't mean it isn't a cartoon.
Has he even seen the show? It's all about the characters! It has thousands of them! The plots, outside of the episodes that are just wacky adventures which could happen to any character, are completely character-oriented. Like Bart going through guilt because he stole a video game. Or Marge desperately trying to fit in with a country club where she obviously doesn't belong. Or Lisa being humiliated by her dad's behavior around the teacher she has a crush on, and becoming sad when he left.

I really don't understand his criticism here. Does he hate the pop culture references and social satire? Hard to tell; his comment is so vague. A half-hour series in the vein of the Tracey Ullman shorts would be horrible. Those shorts work in short, 1-2 minute bursts for quick blackout gags, but that's it.
 
Ya know, I disagree with John K about pretty much everything (he's delusional if he thinks half hour Tracy Ullman shorts would work) but about Tiny Toon Adventures and and to a lesser extent Animaniacs he's spot on. The shows are basically considered classics by the people who grew up with them but back in the day animation snobs looked at them the same way current animation snobs looked at Loonatics Unleashed. I was a teenager when TT debuted and already somewhat of a snob when it came to cartoons so I bought a LOT of animation magazines and most of them hated both shows with a passion (ESPECIALLY Tiny Toons). They thought TTA was no better than the "baby" versions of shows like Muppet Babies (which I personally love but was roundly hated by most animation snobs back then), Tom and Jerry Kids, Flintstone Kids and Yo Yogi. And I find it hard to disagree with them. One of the biggest problems they had with Tiny Toons was how completely watered down it was. Anvils may have been a HUGE part of the old Looney Tunes but they were nothing compared to the old shorts' use of dynamite and other explosives. Without dynamite, bombs or guns Tiny Toons felt very limp when compared to the outrageousness of the original Looney Tunes.

I personally think there were some shorts on Animaniacs that worked (the Warners and ESPECIALLY Pinky and the Brain) but the rest were terrible. And I can only think of one sketch on TTA that I enjoyed (Baby Plucky and the toilet) and found the rest insufferable. The Simpsons parody where it basically criticized that show for not being "cartoony" enough was full of hypocrisy and the one where it claimed Bosko's girlfriend Honey was a revolutionary cartoon character in the mold of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck was so insulting I was actually angry at the end of the episode. I'll admit that I haven't seen every episode of either show. But I've seen enough of them both to see that they weren't very good. (Pinky and the Brain on the other hand was fantastic, at least until Elmyra, the absolute worst character on Tiny Toons joined the show).
 
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