"a uniquely qualified molder of young minds"

March 29, 2018 3:08 PM

The Disturbing Secret Behind an Iconic Cartoon: Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend when approached by BuzzFeed News. [cw: brief descriptions of sexual abuse and descriptions of graphic underage imagery]

The journalist, Ariane Lange, has covered the issue of harassment in the animation industry before (and in 2015).

posted by Countess Elena (80 comments total)

Okay. This just f*cking pisses me off.
posted by grimjeer at 3:13 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

“The 1990s were a time of mental and emotional fragility for Mr. Kricfalusi, especially after losing Ren and Stimpy, his most prized creation. For a brief time, 25 years ago, he had a 16-year-old girlfriend. Over the years John struggled with what were eventually diagnosed mental illnesses in 2008.

Raise your hand if you have dealt with times of mental and emotional fragility or with mental illness and nevertheless have managed to avoid committing statutory rape.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:14 PM on March 29, 2018 [199 favorites]

I just finished reading this and oh my god.
posted by Kitteh at 3:15 PM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

For a brief time, 25 years ago, he had a 16-year-old girlfriend.

So... he’s a life-long pedophile, then?
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:22 PM on March 29, 2018 [12 favorites]

When will men stop using the bodies of young girls to hold all their supposed hate, pain, and dysfunction until they one day, long past 40yrs old, decide to "mature"?
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 3:24 PM on March 29, 2018 [47 favorites]

I don't think I've ever heard it stated better: “I became a better artist by working for him,” she said. “I’m not grateful for it. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I were a worse artist now and I didn’t have all this bullshit to deal with.”
posted by muddgirl at 3:27 PM on March 29, 2018 [82 favorites]

Jesus, just what the hell's been going on over at Nickelodeon for the last 20 years?
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:27 PM on March 29, 2018 [13 favorites]

And, over the course of more than 600 blog posts reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Kricfalusi portrays himself as a uniquely qualified molder of young minds.

Molder, yes, I am sure that is the word.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:29 PM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Goddammit. Why the hell do so many men get a whiff of success and just immediately start raping? I'm a guy. Fairly successful in my field. Not raping. Actually trying real hard to ensure women get a fair shake. No sex involved. Not what we do at work. Goddammit.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:30 PM on March 29, 2018 [34 favorites]

That was about all I could say too, Kitteh. I was extremely into cartoons when I was the age of these women, at that very time. I was so interested in animation, and John K was a hero to me. In '92 or so, I read an article in an animation magazine explaining the history of TV animation and calling John K its savior. Now I remember that article as a bizarre Knowles-esque droolfest, but at the time it was the word from on high to me. I adored R&S, collected bootlegs, and wrote to the R&S comic book -- I even had a letter published. Not long afterward, I wrote fan letters to the guys behind Space Ghost and Brak. What if I hadn't written to them, or to the comic, but to the R&S show instead -- to John K?

(My mom would have put a stop to it, that's what. Once, when I was twelve, I met a cool college guy at a school band event, and we traded addresses. Mom, who got the mail in, saw his carefully written, hand-painted letter and put a stop to it instanter. I've always thought she was probably wrong about him, but I have always and equally been grateful for her for looking out for me.)
posted by Countess Elena at 3:34 PM on March 29, 2018 [30 favorites]

Oh believe me, men who don't have a whiff of success are also raping. A casual acquaintance of mine in high school was "dating" a 40 year old man for a number of years. And when I say high school I mean freshman year - she was 14. It sounds to me like she had a very similar background to Byrd. She also conceptualized of their relationship as rebelling against stuffy traditional norms.

But yes, predators charm themselves into positions where their behavior is sanctioned. It shouldn't be surprising that the same manipulation that works on teen girls and their parents also works on coworkers and bosses.
posted by muddgirl at 3:36 PM on March 29, 2018 [24 favorites]

For. fucks. Sake.
posted by Faintdreams at 3:40 PM on March 29, 2018

I'd never been a fan of Ren & Stimpy, but I remember reading something in Wired, I think, about this George Liquor show that he was doing, and when I read the bit about Sody Pop in the fPP article, I wondered, was that character the one that I remember being grotesquely fan-servicey? So I looked the character up and... worse than I remembered. Fifteen. Christ.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:41 PM on March 29, 2018

Yeah, the grown men grooming and raping me weren't famous or particularly talented. They were depraved and willing to ruin young girls fir their ejaculation and ego.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 3:41 PM on March 29, 2018 [15 favorites]

Is "to milkshake" a verb yet?
posted by rhizome at 3:41 PM on March 29, 2018 [6 favorites]

Groom. Abusers groom.

This is what he was doing.

She could hardly believe he’d responded. “I had built up these characters and this mythos of Ren & Stimpy in my head,” Byrd, now 37, told BuzzFeed News. “It was exciting.”

Soon, she said, she began receiving boxes of toys and art supplies from 39-year-old Kricfalusi, better known as John K.

Someone who wanted to be an encouraging figure would have sent along the supplies to an admiring fan, saying "Keep it up! You're so talented!"

And left it at that.

This was a long game, aimed at grooming. Fucking piece of shit.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:42 PM on March 29, 2018 [20 favorites]

I don't think John K. qualifies as a "milkshake duck" situation because his reputation has been ruined for almost twenty years now.
posted by Small Dollar at 3:44 PM on March 29, 2018 [8 favorites]

I wonder - do lawyers have a listserve where they work out the latest, trendy response to assault accusations? Kricfalusi struggled with mental illness, Spacey was a closeted alcoholic, Louie C.K. had crippling low self-esteem. The next one will say they suffered from a terrible recurring athletes food infection.
posted by muddgirl at 3:45 PM on March 29, 2018 [28 favorites]

PR reps absolutely have things like this already workshopped, or someone who has dealt with it is brought in to write the statement.

Also, I googled Sody Pop images and I can't get him saying to Stern "She's underage too!" out of my head.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 3:48 PM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Jesus, just what the hell's been going on over at Nickelodeon for the last 20 years?

I just realized that the creepy producer ousted at Nickelodeon also played Dennis on Head of the Class. That's going to leave me with some nightmare fuel.
posted by jonp72 at 3:50 PM on March 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

I'm kind of amazed this hadn't already come out. I'd always loved Ren and Stimpy, but when I started reading John K's blog, it gave off all the wrong vibes--including lots and lots and lots of training of promising young female artists. The creep factor was SO STRONG. This doesn't surprise me in the least.
posted by mittens at 3:52 PM on March 29, 2018 [9 favorites]

It's not the success. It's just that success often gives them greater access to girls.

But it was heartbreaking to remember that when I was younger, these relationships were shrugged as weird but generally acceptable. If you wanted to get into anime, it was a pretty open secret which voice-over company would basically give out parts to young looking girls willing to do more. (I don't really mean to be coy, I just don't remember which one after 18 years)

And I realize that language sounds so opportunistic on the side of the girls, rather than predatory on the side of men. But that was the only language I really knew. I know that social change is hard and it feels like we're losing most of the time. But it's moments like this that I like to take as evidence that right now is made up of better people than the golden Clinton years.
posted by politikitty at 3:54 PM on March 29, 2018 [12 favorites]

I just realized that the creepy producer ousted at Nickelodeon also played Dennis on Head of the Class.

And Ricky in Better Off Dead.
posted by the return of the thin white sock at 3:56 PM on March 29, 2018 [11 favorites]

Elena Pritchard, the young animator who did a cartoon blog about her jail stint (previously on Metafilter,) was locked up due to violating a restraining order Kricfalusi had taken out against her. Apparently she was leaving endless comments on his blog, but I don't know what else she was supposed to have done. It sounds like she may have been somewhat delusional (at one point she was apparently kind of stalking Radiohead too) but now I can't help but wonder if Kricfalusi really did screw her over somehow and her rambling, aggrieved posts about him weren't purely delusional after all. It sounds like he has a history of glomming onto these underage girls and leaving them with all sorts of damage, and now I wonder if Pritchard may have been one of them too. I really don't know what happened there and I realize this is straying into gossip territory. I'm just looking back at Pritchard's story and kind of going, "Huh."

Over the years I've read an occasional blog post by Kricfalusi, mostly drawing tutorials, and I was always struck by this seething nastiness that would boil over out of nowhere. He was really into this very specific, mid-century, kind of Yogi Bear aesthetic, and he would go after modern cartoon stuff that wasn't that (like Samurai Jack or Adventure Time) with this disgust that was really off-putting. He made it seem like those cartoons were made by bad people, and you were just stupid if you liked them. I didn't have cable when Ren & Stimpy was on so I had no fandom to lose, but I always came away from those tutorials impressed by the guy's talent but kind of shaken and creeped out. He managed to make freaking drawing tutorials upsetting and creepy.

Seeing Kricfalusi with the girls in those pictures is nauseating. He's an adult and they look like the sweet-faced kids outside the supermarket selling Thin Mints.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:08 PM on March 29, 2018 [43 favorites]

It’s funny you should mention “seething nastiness”, “upsetting” and “creepy”, it’s absolutely no surprise to me that this is the creator of Ren and Stimpy.
posted by bleep at 4:13 PM on March 29, 2018 [10 favorites]

“Shaken and creeped out” is exactly how that show made me feel.
posted by bleep at 4:14 PM on March 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

I wonder - do lawyers have a listserve where they work out the latest, trendy response to assault accusations? 

naw, it's conventions and lunches and it's written off as business expenses so they don't have to pay for it and their employers can deduct it from their taxes.
posted by lkc at 4:21 PM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by snortasprocket at 4:37 PM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

I used to read Kricfalusi's blog a lot because he'd post interesting old cartooning instructional materials. He often pitched himself as the guy relentlessly fighting for artistic principle against the "animation industry" and that seeming sincerity may have diluted the ick factor of his angry/creepy posts. He had this kind of "bitter but soldiering on" vibe.
posted by lagomorphius at 4:39 PM on March 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Lange's 2015 article reads as even more disgusting given what we've learned about John Lasseter since then.
posted by zombieflanders at 4:46 PM on March 29, 2018

*sigh*

I can't say that, looking at his output, there weren't signs. Even as a casual observer, he was a missing stair.

To the people who knew him better, he must've been six consecutive missing stairs with a rope bridge over them.
posted by delfin at 4:48 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

As a child, Ren & Stimpy had this incredible sudden rage and distorted chaos that always scared me, that I now recognize it as part of toxic masculinity and entitlement in the men that I have had to recover from. I immediately stopped watching Nickelodeon out of fear of coming in contact with it, skipping as fast as I can to Cartoon Network with my remote so I wouldn't have to see even a single frame. I didn't watch the channel again until Avatar: The Last Air Bender aired, and even then, Nickolodeon totally emotionally abused the Korra creator team. This is really heartbreaking to read.
posted by yueliang at 4:49 PM on March 29, 2018 [22 favorites]

This kind of man, man. The dangerous kind. The vulnerable kind of girl, gifted and alone and, in one way or another, impoverished, and our society won't look at her the way they would a boy and that leaves girls like this so, so vulnerable.

I was a girl like this too. It's awful to read things like these and feel so much recognition.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 4:59 PM on March 29, 2018 [37 favorites]

Oh. So THAT’S why Katie changed her name on Facebook last week.

I’m pretty sure there were other girls after Katie and Robyn, too. We all just kinda,,, stayed away from it. Spumco was a very strange place.

(I worked there around the same time Katie and Gabe did.)
posted by egypturnash at 5:04 PM on March 29, 2018 [25 favorites]

This interview he did with Tasha Robinson of the AV Club back in the day is notable fo two reasons: first he outs himself as a piece of shit right in the first paragraph, and second, it’s the only interview I’ve read where I can literally hear the interviewer’s eyes roll.
posted by edheil at 6:18 PM on March 29, 2018 [18 favorites]

Sounds like someone ahould have called the poleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeece a long time ago.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:15 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

PhoBWanKenobi - this is exactly what i've been trying to express all over the internet and IRL today. I see them so clearly, and oh but for the grace of god go I, but also, i certainly did go sometimes. It's super personal and hitting close to home.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 7:25 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

Not happy. No joy.

I absolutely loved Ren & Stimpy as a teenager looking for ways to rebel against my staid suburban town, but its transgressiveness became less amusing as I grew older. I held onto my favorite catch-phrases, but distanced myself from from John K as each successive project proved more and more off-putting. It's disappointing to learn that the skeevy feeling was justified, and deeply upsetting to learn how even in the early days he was abusive scum.
posted by me3dia at 7:45 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

But seriously, my high school band's two obsessions were R&S and Domino's sausage and green pepper pizza, so if it turns out the Noid was a predator I don't know what I will do.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:00 PM on March 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

[Ren & Stimpy FOGGG-HORRRN over a disgusting, lingering gross-out image of Kricfalusi's face, pocked with hairy acne, mucus trails, and strange cracks as if the surface of some hostile moon]

This was my favorite show as a child without compare. I cannot say how disgusted I am after reading this.
posted by panhopticon at 8:03 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

This one has been a lot like Louis CK for me - if you think they're generally good guys you can see their artistic output as saterizing toxic masculinity, but literally the second you hear that it's not an act the whole sandcastle falls down. Already on tumblr and twitter there are discussions about separating the art and the artist - but like, once you see the man behind the curtain how can you pretend there's separation there?
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 8:06 PM on March 29, 2018 [28 favorites]

Seeing Kricfalusi with the girls in those pictures is nauseating. He's an adult and they look like the sweet-faced kids outside the supermarket selling Thin Mints.

Looking at the photos and reading as much of the article as I could was nauseating. The grossness in the photos is just so palpable.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:27 PM on March 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

I am so so so glad Dan Schneider is gone. I could very easily make a lengthy FPP about his history of awfulness, but that creep doesn't even deserve his own post. They're both monsters, but at least John K has actual talent. (That's a justification of this post, not his behavior, obviously.)
posted by Ruki at 8:27 PM on March 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

For me, this is probably the highest combination of "his work has influenced my creative process" and "in retrospect, I should have seen this coming."
posted by RobotHero at 9:16 PM on March 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

but now I can't help but wonder if Kricfalusi really did screw her over somehow and her rambling, aggrieved posts about him weren't purely delusional after all.

I read some of her posts. I believe her (not all victims who have experienced trauma are able to be coherent), and I have a strong feeling a great injustice (or many, many injustices) was done to her. If she is still in trouble or needing therapy/resources to deal with the trauma caused to her by Kricfalusi, I hope she gets that help. It is not fair that Kricfalusi has left these women with lifelong problems - mental, emotional, financial. He's profited by exploiting them, and the sad thing is that due to the nature of his work and fame, he will continue to profit from a career and body of work built off these women - while they continue to suffer now.
posted by aielen at 9:42 PM on March 29, 2018 [16 favorites]

I absolutely loved Ren & Stimpy as a teenager looking for ways to rebel against my staid suburban town, but its transgressiveness became less amusing as I grew older. I held onto my favorite catch-phrases, but distanced myself from from John K as each successive project proved more and more off-putting.

I had exactly the same experience: loved Ren & Stimpy in university, but the early-Internet George Liquor stuff gave me a sense of "...this doesn't seem right" and the further R&S got in the rear view mirror, the more off it seemed.

Kitteh told me about this yesterday and my immediate reaction was "this is not really surprising to me." When I think back to Ren & Stimpy, my first thoughts weren't Log or Happy Happy Joy Joy, but that funny-at-the-time, deeply-freaky-now scene of the walrus saying "call the police", Ren's freakout and subsequent whizzing on the electric fence, Space Madness...

...there's a lot of rage in there. A lot of what I kind of feel is pent-up fedora-guy frustration.

I don't know... as I get older I'm beginning to realize the value of distinguishing "laugh with" from "laugh at" and the value of the former over the latter, and Ren & Stimpy gives me a "laugh at" feeling, not a "laugh with" feeling.
posted by Shepherd at 3:04 AM on March 30, 2018 [10 favorites]

I immediately stopped watching Nickelodeon out of fear of coming in contact with it, skipping as fast as I can to Cartoon Network with my remote so I wouldn't have to see even a single frame.

Me too; it made me sick and I've seen a LOT of people say the same thing since this news broke. And I always thought it was just me. Even as children in our own homes we had to be terrorised by these angry, evil men and their ugly imaginations. What feels fucked up to me now is the way I tried to tell myself that my instinct, that there had to be a problem with whoever had come up with a show like that, that there was malice behind it, was wrong.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 4:07 AM on March 30, 2018 [8 favorites]

Years ago, I went down a Spumco/Kricfalusi rabbit hole, and I saw one interview with Kricfalusi and an animator, a woman, that just had the most uncomfortable vibe. There was a moment, perhaps about her pregnancy during a project, where she said something that I interpreted as “you were pretty horrible to me about that but here we are.”

I wish I could find it. It was the one time I saw K interacting with a female employee, and it felt really weird.
posted by zippy at 5:00 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

I can't stop thinking about this.

Ren and Stimpy were so stupidly important to me back in college. Like, a major, major part of my self-understanding. I was this confused queer person, trying to make sense of how to live once I'd escaped a strict religious upbringing that said people like me go straight to hell, and here was this cartoon that--for whatever reason--seemed to speak to me. Ren in a fez with a Peter Lorre voice? He had to be gay, right? The Sven Hoek episode? "I'm hiding in the closssset, like an iiiiidiot." So much gay. Gay gay gay. Gay to the point that I used the show for one of my final papers in a queer studies course. (My professor was like show me this strange show and I brought her a tape and...well, she thought I was missing the point, but was nice about it.)

I read an interview somewhere with John K. where he talked about how the show would do "anything for the gag." Whatever it took to get a joke across. So if the characters had to be gay for a minute for a joke, then so they would be. I took that to heart. It was like gospel to me. Anything for the gag. It became a major force when I was trying to learn to write.

I am looking back on that time, and I don't know how to feel. When I read the things I wrote back then, they were so full of rage, so angry, so convinced of the injustice of the world and all its ugliness. And I understand that--I mean, here I was, stuck halfway out of the closet, popping antidepressants and antipsychotics and tranquilizers, with a religious family I couldn't talk to, and the few friends who could accept me rapidly falling away--yeah, of course I was mad. I feel like I see that time with clearer eyes now. But I go back and look at what I was writing then, and the hatred is so ugly.

And now I think, there I was worshiping a show that was laughing at me, because I didn't realize what it was doing. Thinking that rage and ugliness were saying something important about the world, instead of paying more attention to why I felt the need to embrace that anger in the first place.

I don't know, it's all confusing, a little disheartening, the kind of thing where I want to go back in time and shake myself and tell myself to go watch something else, go get better influences, stop spending that vulnerable time with something that can't build you up.
posted by mittens at 5:08 AM on March 30, 2018 [32 favorites]

Don't mourn the loss of Ren and Stimpy.

Mourn the countless other works that never got made because their potential creators were destroyed by predators like Kricfalusi, or because they never got to where they needed to be to make them because they weren't part of a clique of white males.

We've been fed on an impoverished cultural diet, and this is just an extreme case of this.
posted by acb at 5:17 AM on March 30, 2018 [49 favorites]

Raise your hand if you have dealt with times of mental and emotional fragility or with mental illness and nevertheless have managed to avoid committing statutory rape.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:14 PM on March 29 [130 favorites +] [!]

Next up: raise your hand if you are are or have been a girl or woman dealing with times of mental and emotional fragility or with mental illness which has been exacerbated by the behavior of predatory men.

Like many people, I have more than one example of this but something that stands out is when I was a bipolar, mismedicated, mentally ill freshman in high school and I became intimately involved with a guy a few years older (also in high school) who said, after we first hooked up, that I couldn't tell anyone because he didn't want his girlfriend to find out (I do not know if he committed statutory rape because I don't know his exact age or the statues in Rhode Island at the time). I kept fooling around with him, and later at least one of his friends who I think was actually a really good guy, for the next few years after that. It is possible that he was dealing with mental and emotional fragility or with mental illness but it sure would have been nice if it hadn't been at the expense of mine.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 5:19 AM on March 30, 2018 [22 favorites]

I wonder about this. We've known for years and years that there's something wrong with John K, it was obvious in his output and his process that the guy was a worry, and every time he's tried to make something to rekindle that old Ren and Stimpy magic it's been horrifying. I don't understand the people who are looking at him and saying 'well, his work helped me improve'. Isn't his incredible lack of judgement in, like, the merits of any other style of animation a warning sign that the same might apply to his work? The hate boils over so often in John K's stuff that it gets into everything - his style is literally a reaction to the style of every other working animator - that the people who saw them as being somehow separate aren't high-mindedly separating the art from the artist, they're missing that they're indelibly linked. It's like admiring the project management of the Holocaust.

What does it take to not separate the artist from the art?
posted by Merus at 5:36 AM on March 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

The men who gave quotes for this article talking about being at John's place and being shown explicit polaroids, talking about seeing this "little girl" walking around the studio, etc. sure do make themselves sound like horrified bystanders but sure as shit aren't to me.

Complicit.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:07 AM on March 30, 2018 [21 favorites]

So, I was an adult (A young adult but still an adult) when we watched Ren & Stimpy as a new show. Even at the time, I remember thinking how terrifying the show would be for children and just assuming that kids were not watching it. Like, that it came on when kids were in bed or at school or something or that someone had said hard no, you can't watch. To learn, as an even older adult, that kids were--in fact--watching it is hard to process. It was so full of unbridled inexplicable rage, even when it was full of nonsense, even when it could be suddenly funny, too. And I knew young women--probably savvier young women that I was--who had the show on their list of red flags. "Do you want to trust that guy? What's his opinion of Ren & Stimpy? How nuanced is he in his liking of it?"

It's also interesting to hear people--who were children when encountering it as a new show just absolutely nail its ethos.
posted by crush at 6:28 AM on March 30, 2018 [7 favorites]

So the other thing like this I heard recently is with MidBoss CEO Matt Conn which made a video game I really like. I guess the difference is Read Only Memories isn't as obviously imbued with Matt Conn's artistic style or whatever.

The common thread is they hire people who are so excited to get a chance to work in The Industry, who don't really know any other way Get Into The Industry, and take advantage of the power that dynamic grants them.

So one way to rob them of that power, is more non-creepy paths available to enter The Industry.
posted by RobotHero at 7:21 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Matt Conn is out at MidBoss, replaced by Toni Rocca, so that's nice.

Less nice is that Toni Rocca also has a history of abusive behaviour
posted by Merus at 7:29 AM on March 30, 2018

Here's a link to the webcomic series Katie Rice has been doing for a few years, Camp Weedonwantcha.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 7:37 AM on March 30, 2018 [12 favorites]

Until yesterday, I was firmly on Team JohnK. Today: John who? Everything JohnK-related is gone from my website. If I could find the phone doodle he sent me and the (now I think on it, frankly fucking disgusting) Adult Party DVD, they'd be in the trash. As a former avid reader of his blog, of course I believed his side of the story, that he was the lone creative genius cast! out! by the philistine beancounters at Nickelodeon, his shining creation sullied into mere commercial entertainment. There's no way he could have been an out-of-control liability … could he?

As acb said: Mourn the countless other works that never got made …
posted by scruss at 8:47 AM on March 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

chris person [via Twitter]: Like 40% of the time that a famous dude turns out to be a creep there’s an interview of him on Howard Stern in 1998 being like “yes I am a creep”
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:51 AM on March 30, 2018 [43 favorites]

But when we point that out *prior* to the big revelations of abuse, we're oversensitive feminazis who can't take a joke.
posted by muddgirl at 9:01 AM on March 30, 2018 [38 favorites]

That article made we want to throw up. Time to go offline for a while.
posted by tommasz at 10:22 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm a guy. I like animated things as much, nay more, than the next person. I never groked Ren and Stimpy. Now I'm glad.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:25 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Half-formed thought after reading the A.V. Club article posted by edheil and a few of the articles about Schneider: I hope that, as a society, we're moving away from the idolatry of dickish lone creative geniuses. When a talented person is demanding and strident and demeaning and abusive and prone to temper tantrums, it probably isn't because they have exceptionally high standards or are onto some next level shit that our meagre minds can barely comprehend.

Chances are they're just a toxic asshole.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:31 AM on March 30, 2018 [14 favorites]

As a comics/cartoons fan, I followed the drama when Nick "fired" John K. from his own creation, and watched it frequently enough to understand why. His combination of 'pushing the envelope', stretching out jokes (R&S was one of the slowest paced toons I ever saw, as it paused for long close-ups of every gross gag) and his reputation for 'perfectionism' (in the pursuit of his personal vision) led to constant trouble with the network censors and missed deadlines to air. And, amazingly to me, the later John K-less episodes were no less funny; milder but faster-paced.

He had been an 'apprentice' to the legendary Ralph Bakshi and was there when Bakshi's Mighty Mouse revival was killed over a controversy where a scene of 'sniffing flowers' looked too much like 'snorting coke'. John K's first big break, a year before R&S, was another revival, Beany & Cecil, that fell flat (creatively and ratings wise) but left him available exactly when Nick was looking for "fresh talent" for the new Nicktoons.

When he started blogging, he came across as somewhere between a 'troubled genius' and 'evil genius' and he wrote about Katie Rice glowingly but more than a little creepily. To him, she was the animator who could make 'sexy' girls 'funny' and vice-versa, and the music video they made for Weird Al was the creepiest thing ever associated with His Weirdness. But when Katie joined the webcomics collective DummComics, I was glad, and her weekly contribution, the Barbarian Fantasy satire "Skadi", ran for 8 years, longer than any other 'Dumm' series. She entered AND WON the Penny Arcade "Strip Search" competition, the prize for which was support and a webspace for a new concept of her devising, and that concept was the deeply odd - and dark - "Camp Weedonwantcha", which she creates with and gives credit to her partner, Adam Wallander. The Camp Comic has been 'on hiatus' for several months after a story arc that felt like an ending. Katie now has a day job on another Nick show and it looks like she's doing better, even if we fans aren't getting new comics from her.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:02 AM on March 30, 2018 [9 favorites]

As a former avid reader of his blog, of course I believed his side of the story, that he was the lone creative genius cast! out! by the philistine beancounters at Nickelodeon

Not to dispute anyone's personal taste in art, but I would have found that whole narrative much more believable if anything John K. had created in the past 25 years had even vaguely lived up to the promise of those first half-dozen Ren & Stimpy episodes that aired in a continuous loop on Nick in 1991-92. (on preview, see oneswellfoop's comment immediately above.)

I was in 7th grade when that first season debuted, and it could not have been more in my wheelhouse. The anarchic strangeness, lowbrow humor and knowing campiness hit me in the exact place that Monty Python and They Might Be Giants and Twin Peaks all did around that same time frame, and I was totally on board for it.

And then a year later, I eagerly tuned in for the long-awaited second batch of episodes, and they suuuuuuuuucked so hard. Absolutely pale, uninspired imitations of the original six episodes. At the time, I had only heard about John K.'s firing in vague terms and was largely ignorant about the realities of TV animation production, so I assumed that these new ones were the inferior work of the scabs brought in by Nick. BUT NO! They were all John K originals, the things that he had perfectionistically worked on and worked on until he got canned.

It was around then that I developed a nagging skepticism about John K as a creative artist, and always kind of marveled at how he had maintained his reputation as an animation icon when most of his post-1992 output was barely even watchable in anything but the most masochistic sense.

It's weird that I find myself both horrified and unsurprised by these new revelations. I guess I always sensed that there was something unseemly behind his work (I mean, it's all right there on screen) but never thought that it was anything beyond a taste for puerile adolescent humor. And now that I know, it's like having the missing piece to a puzzle that I'd never realized was incomplete before. I hope this knowledge helps to change things for the better.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:26 PM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

Also, every mention of Ralph Bakshi in the linked articles makes me want to scream.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 3:15 PM on March 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

I was never able to put my finger on why R&S unsettled me so much as a child. I thought it was the gross-out humor; I have always been a pretty sensitive person. I did like some parts of the show: Powdered Toast Man, the Christmas special where Stimpy lost a fart, the Log song, Happy Happy Joy Joy . . .

But to be completely honest, even Happy Happy Joy Joy kinda freaked me out, and I have finally figured out why. It's the rage. The song starts goofy and ends absolutely out-of-control ragey, and I think that was what was underpinning every R&S bit, and what terrified me.
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:10 PM on March 30, 2018 [10 favorites]

A 2016 interview with Bob Camp and Jim Wray of R&S shows that it wasn't ALL John K. on he screen.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:58 PM on March 30, 2018

I don't know Ren & Stimpy much, but oh my do I recognize the grooming process described by these women. It's all there: the older man's initial interest in you as a fellow, the heady feeling of being chosen, the slow insistence of his physical needs, the guilt at not being woman enough for his needs, the aspiration to be woman enough for his needs, the intoxicating sense of being outside rules and laws with your man - and he swears he is your man - until you reject even your own friends. The family that doesn't give a shit - or if it does, it reiterates exactly the same line that your groomer does: "You're mine! You owe me your allegiance, look at everything I've done for you!" And then the letting-go, when you know you've fucked up because he (and his friends, who are the only friends you have left because you abandoned your own) keeps telling you you've fucked up, when in fact what you've done is start to think for yourself. And still you worry about him. He counted on you so much. His needs were so great. He's so great. He's misunderstood - it's almost okay that he's misunderstood you. Who are you? You're sixteen, or fourteen, or seventeen, or twenty. You're nothing.
posted by goofyfoot at 9:57 PM on March 30, 2018 [24 favorites]

Holy ugh. I got a bad feeling from Sody Pop right away and stopped watching his stuff afterwards, but ... yikes, what a horrorshow.
posted by benzenedream at 11:54 PM on March 30, 2018

The documentary An Open Secret, about pedophilia in Hollywood, which got dumped into no-distribution purgatory when it originally came out, has some material in it about how Nickelodeon has hired people with records of sex offenses against minors. There may be some more systemic problems at Nickelodeon that don't begin and end with John K.
posted by jonp72 at 7:48 AM on March 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

Already on tumblr and twitter there are discussions about separating the art and the artist - but like, once you see the man behind the curtain how can you pretend there's separation there?

Yeah this is the classic vacillation. Happened with Allen, CK, Spacey, everybody. "Oh, they are terrible human beings, but look at their art." Well, when you go and see a Woody Allen movie (something I honestly can't believe anybody ever did, for any reason), you're not putting money into the movie's pockets: you are putting it into his. So it's not only a vacillation but a cowardly one, because you are tut tutting at a behaviour while still directly rewarding it. Fuck all those guys.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:06 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I mean, it seems that keeping the art and the artist separate is what everybody's been doing for 30 years, unwittingly. Is the idea is that no information should change the meaning of the work, that critical re-evaluation is illegitimate?
posted by rhizome at 7:21 PM on April 2, 2018

That's certainly the impression I get from a lot of sources. Thankfully I am cynical and detached enough that as soon as I hear "So-and-so is accused of..." I can quickly scan my shelves, media library and other collections, spot whatever I have that is done by or featuring or somehow related to the aforementioned so-and-so, and purge it instantly to free up space. What then goes into that space? Delightful emptiness.

Sometimes I wish there could be some bad news about James Murray - the Shorter Oxford is taking up a lot of space.
posted by turbid dahlia at 7:31 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

The family that doesn't give a shit - or if it does, it reiterates exactly the same line that your groomer does: "You're mine! You owe me your allegiance, look at everything I've done for you!"

Holy shit, yeah.

When I was dealing with some similar awful stuff when I was 13 my mother absolutely told me the guy was a creep for taking an interest in me--and he was, twenty years later I learned that he was someone jailed for multiple counts of child molestation, including his own child, who later took his life in foster care--but of course that's also what my mother said about every healthy, age-appropriate friend I had, too.

Made it kind of hard to develop good instincts about these things.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:41 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sometimes I wish there could be some bad news about James Murray - the Shorter Oxford is taking up a lot of space.

Does this count?
posted by drezdn at 7:24 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Robyn Byrd receiving threatening messages from John K. (Trigger warning).
posted by rewil at 12:06 AM on April 7, 2018

I Googled "Eggslut" and it's a fast-food place in LA. But I have no idea why he would tell her to go there and show her calves.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:09 AM on April 7, 2018

Jesus pants, that's disgusting. Her replies note that it's possible that this is a troll message, but she seems to recognize the style, and it has the kind of individual weirdness that a troll would probably not know to create.

She's not in the business anymore, and she hadn't been drawing at all. It looks like she's enjoying the work that she's doing, and that's great, but it is impossible to know if she would have continued in animation if she had not been treated this way. So many women's careers we lose, and it's just considered a sign of weakness, the price of doing business with a certified genius.

I loved animation. I made a stop-motion film as a final project once in high school. But by the time I was deciding on a career, I had the idea that Hollywood belonged to narcissistic men who either ignored or chewed up and spat out most every woman there. It no more occurred to me to move out west and train for animation than it occurred to me to join the army. What if we did not build entire industries on the basis of who can be the craziest bastard? Maybe our granddaughters will know.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:16 AM on April 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

holy crap those screencaps.

I am very ready to believe that's John, he's used some variant on "spumko" as a name across multiple services over the years. And it... it sounds like him. In a lot of subtle ways.

also this list, fuck, I knew there were at least two or three after Robyn and Katie but NINETEEN total? All the way up to 2017? holy fuck
posted by egypturnash at 9:41 AM on April 15, 2018 [2 favorites]