From...

by Carla Sinclair

(IDG) -- An asthmatic chihuahua named Ren Hoek and his oafish sidekick Stimpson J. Cat changed television. The Ren and Stimpy Show, created for Nickelodeon in 1989, was an overnight hit, becoming the most popular cable TV show by its second season.

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The cutting-edge cartoon was the first to exploit what kids love best: booger jokes, gross body humor and absurd plots. In one episode Ren and Stimpy are sent up into space on a mission. In order to calm his nerves, the psychotic canine relaxes in a hot tub, emitting gas bubbles as he closes his eyes. But his neurosis gets the better of him, and during a hallucinatory rant he deliriously chomps on a bar of soap, brandishes a toothbrush to ward off Stimpy, and ultimately has a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, dim-witted Stimpy is assigned to guard a history-eraser button. Unable to resist, he finally pushes it, and the cartoon is sucked into a hole until the entire screen turns to black.

"Inevitably, the weirdest episodes I did were the ones that became the most popular," Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi says. His "weirdness" revolutionized the content of television cartoons, helping to make crudely amusing but much less visually ambitious shows like Beavis and Butt-head and South Park household staples.

But Kricfalusi found it increasingly difficult to work within the confines of television bureaucracy. The more viewers Ren and Stimpy garnered, the less creative control Nickelodeon gave Kricfalusi. It caused tremendous tension in the animation studio.

"They started hiring the 'experts' who would say things like, 'Don't do this. Don't do that. I don't get this joke; explain it to me. Isn't that going to confuse kids?'" Kricfalusi says. "The more executives there were, the more trouble we got." Although Ren and Stimpy stayed in production for a few years, Kricfalusi left after only a season and a half.

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Meanwhile Kricfalusi had been logging on to the Internet in order to follow discussion on the Ren and Stimpy newsgroup, but it wasn't until shortly after his job at Nickelodeon ended that he discovered the Web and thought, "Holy cow, this is the future of everything!" He says that even in its infancy he knew the Web was where he had to make cartoons. "I went to the Web because there's no network. If you have an idea, you don't have to ask for someone's permission to put it on. It's between you and the audience."

And so the artists of Spumco – the Glendale, Calif., company Kricfalusi founded in 1989 – started making cartoons for the Web. At his Spumco.com site you can see seven episodes of the Goddamn George Liquor Program, starring a loudmouth Archie Bunker-like character who had originally been Ren and Stimpy's master but was axed by Nickelodeon because execs thought he was too much of a bigoted misogynist. Taking advantage of the Net's anarchistic creative freedom (and the 1997 release of Macromedia's Flash program for high-end, low-bandwidth animation), George Liquor is a raunchy, devilishly droll cartoon that includes dancing doggie doo-doo, a voluptuous exhibitionist named Sody Pop, a smitten Jimmy the Idiot Boy who can't control his lustful emotions, and Jimmy's boisterous, bacon-chompin' Uncle George.

The Web also sparked an idea that Kricfalusi had played with while working on Ren and Stimpy. On many occasions during the cartoon show's breaks, before the "real" commercials aired, an amusing animated faux advertisement would come on, which sometimes starred Stimpy himself. For example, one ad featured a box of "XOX" cereal. "Joy!" an ecstatic Stimpy screamed while pulling out an ugly plastic toy to hang on the side of his cereal bowl. "A monster caddy! Just what I've always wanted!"

In real life, using a TV character to pitch a product on a show has become taboo, but of course nothing is off limits on the Web. So in the George Liquor Web-show series, Kricfalusi packages the online cartoon with animated Web commercials for real products, whose spokesman is George himself.

Whether it was the program's unrefined, made-for-adult content, or the fact that an animated character-pitched ad on the Web was unheard of, Kricfalusi found it difficult to acquire advertisers. "I may have made a mistake by making the George Liquor show the first one that we did," he says.

Right before putting his show online, however, Tower Records and CDnow decided to join the program, which led to some of George's funnier moments. For instance, at the end of one episode, gruff George turns to the "camera" and, after mentioning Tower Records, says, "Buy a CD, will ya? You don't want to see us starve, do ya?" Desperate to woo the viewers he then makes his nephew, Jimmy the Idiot Boy, do a drool trick for the camera. "Hell, yes," he continues. "It's a crass commercial, but what the hey! It's America! You have a problem?"

Before the audience even realizes the entertainment has segued into a commercial, it is transported directly to Tower's site. "They've had a lot of people going to their site from George Liquor because you don't have to click through. We just take people there right from our cartoon," says Kricfalusi. How many is a lot? Kricfalusi doesn't have hard numbers, but estimates that it's in the hundreds of thousands to low millions range.

Both parties initially considered it more of an experiment than a conventional advertising deal. Rather than paying for the ad spot up front, Tower had offered Spumco a cut of the merchandise sold through George Liquor. Tower is now in the process of negotiating another character- sponsored commercial with Kricfalusi. "It worked out great. We got a lot of traffic, and it's definitely more unique than your typical banner ad," says Karen Schaefer, director of merchandising at TowerRecords.com.

Kricfalusi says that although he wants to do the George program more than any other, he thinks he should have launched his site with a cartoon series targeted at a younger, broader demographic. "The obvious way to go is with kids' programs that are sponsored by cereal and toy companies. I should have done a kid's program right off the bat."

Kricfalusi's next project is the Wally Whimsy Show, an online cartoon about a silly magical creature who hates being so small, cute and loveable. Kricfalusi wanted to find financial backing before producing a whole series of Web shows, so he made a demo that included Wally Whimsy starring in a three-minute Rice Patooties cereal commercial – "not so much to pitch Wally Whimsy, but to pitch how a commercial could successfully be embedded in a cartoon show."

Three minutes may seem long for a commercial, but the ad for Rice Patooties (a fictitious brand) is so entertaining it seems more like an amusing cartoon that's much too short: Two hungry tots – a girl with a yellow whale-spout of hair and her hyperactive brother – excitedly notice a new box of Rice Patooties cereal sitting near their bowls. Suddenly a smothered voice from inside the box screams, "Let me out! I'm claustrophobic! I'm going nuts in here!" The box jumps recklessly across the table until the tots grab it and rip open the cardboard top. The cereal's prize – a Playdoh-green Wally Whimsy toy – leaps out, panting for air. To show his gratitude to his young saviors, Wally grants them one wish. "Cereal with milk!" they gleefully request. Two large servings of Rice Patooties appear in front of them, and then Wally turns to the camera and says, "Hey moms! Tasty Rice Patooties will make kids grow strong. With Rice Patooties. ..." After his cereal endorsement, we return to the Wally Whimsy Show, a cheery retro-style Web cartoon that stars the spunky creature himself.

Kricfalusi's demo caught the attention of General Mills (GIS) , the cereal company that sponsored Rocky and Bullwinkle as well as other Jay Ward cartoons for at least 10 years. (Ward's animation studio was also given a contract to create animated TV ads for Cap'n Crunch and Quisp cereals.) "It was a successful relationship. General Mills paid for Ward's cartoons, and in return they got to have their commercials aired in the shows," Kricfalusi says, hoping that Spumco's relationship with General Mills will be as successful. Right now they're still in the early stages of negotiations, but it looks like General Mills wants to sponsor at least two different Spumco-produced Web shows: one aimed at girls and another at boys.

Kricfalusi is fiercely passionate about pop culture's past, from his horn-rimmed glasses and heart-warming 1950s style of illustration to his tap-dancing skills and addiction to All in the Family reruns. He reminisces about the old Hollywood system that was "geared toward creativity," saying it was a time when nobody interfered with the cartoonist. Today's TV cartoons, he says, "are better now than they were in the '80s. But look at any '40s cartoon, and, well, it's like the Barbarians looking at the Greeks. We're trying to figure out how the hell they did stuff that was so good."

In fact, the sponsorship model he's pursuing echoes back to the 1950s and 1960s – when it was common for characters to push brand names and play a role in broadcast commercials. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo puffed Philip Morris cigarettes in their program's ad spots. Laura and Rob Petrie enjoyed Kent cigarettes during their on-air breaks. Mr. Magoo was the spokesman for General Electric light bulbs. With an online advertising strategy that revives the character-spokesman model, Kricfalusi is actually transporting a slice of television's golden age onto the Internet. One could say we've come full circle.