John Kricfalusi (aka John K.) is responsible for some of the funniest post-Chuck Jones cartoons in history. The first 13 or so episodes of Ren and Stimpy were works of Super Genius ™. Then he left the show and it went downhill. And apparently, so did he. Nothing he has done since has been remotely as good.
Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network has been giving him a chance, but he’s blown it twice now. The Yogi Bear cartoons he did weren’t funny, and they weren’t surreal enough to be worth watching. And now there’s Ripping Friends , a super hero cartoon where he appears to be attempting more Ren and Stimpy style gross out humor. But it’s just not working. My SO and I decided on Sunday night that the problem is his comic timing is gone. Apparently he thinks long closeups of gross things means comedic money in the bank, but he’s wrong.
Has anybody else seen Ripping Friends ? Any other ex-John K fans out there? Anybody willing to defend his later work?
I’ll just point out that Ripping Friends is not an adult show. It was something like a Fox Kids show from last year that got canceled and CN’s Adult Swim bought the shows much The Oblongs and Mission Hill.
Not quite the surrealness that I’d enjoy but it’s ok.
That is “not an adult swim show.”
Actually, I’ve always been somewhat put off by his work, including the first season of R&S, even as a teenager when Ren and Stimpy were probably supposed to appeal to me. I like the " Happy happy joy joy" song, but the cartoons…they were always just sort of gross and sort of stupid <shrugs>
His best work IMO was “New Adventures Of Mighty Mouse”. (I’d kill to have a DVD set, with the “sniffing flowers/cocaine” scene intact. It’s a shame all those episodes are just collecting dust somewhere.) Maybe he needs someone like Ralph Bakshi to tell him what doesn’t work.
From the interviews I read after he got fired from R&S, he became a very bitter person, and it seems to have had an obvious effect on him. The funniest thing about “The Goddamn George Liquor Program” was the title, and the one episode I’ve seen of “Ripping Friends” was wretched. I’ll probably watch a couple of the new R&S shows on TNN, but I’m not optimistic.
I always thought R&S improved after Kric left. The early toons were static and dull, with long seconds passing of no activity or time wasted on transitional scenes, i.e. a character walks from his car to a house, and we see all ten seconds of that walk. ZZZZZZZZZ. I understand Kric was working with a limited budget, but his material wasn’t original or interesting enough to overcome its defecits.
Ripping Friends is just tedious.
elfkin477 wrote:
You say that like it was a bad thing…
FWIW, John and his twisted toon will be back in January with six new episodes. The bad news? it’ll be on TNN.