Ren and stimpy will always be part of mine
My parents were so afraid of bad influences, but for some reason they never stopped me from watching this show which definitely warped my attitude towards the world forever, made ma sarcastic cuss who didn’t trust anyone I met
And we will probably go to hell, and that is our great reward…..
I mean this ran in the afternoon on children’s programming, I have no idea how they got away with it
Then there was the thinly disquised episode about anti depressants, where Stimpy put a machine on Ren that forced him to be happy, and Ren hated it, resulting in the most famous song in the entire show. I tell you this show was written by suicidal people, or for them.
and I’m rewatching Ishtar, it’s a movie that bombed majorly mostly because of Warren Beaty, but it’s also a part of my origin story, my folks went to see it when they were pregnant with me. It’s been a movie that we watched as a family quite a bit growing up, even into adulthood….. and it’s a movie about failure and depression
These two men, they’re bad musicians. Both of them are left by their significant others, they end up in Northern Africa being shot at by everybody they meet. They’re just, clueless, and they keep pushing on trying to make it. And that’s been my career. I keep trying to make it, but I feel like such a failure.
Today I got an email back from a company, but what they wanted was for me to use my truck to be a tech for them. My truck is too old, my family decided, it was too much risk…. and I just feel like these men again, singing bad songs to a lounge in a third rate hotel in a third world country. That’s my career at this point, if I even get any attention, that’s what I’ve got.
“A lot of acts would kill for a booking in North Africa,” Would they? That’s depressing as hell.
All they want to do is write songs, and it kind of works out for them but only because of some insane deus ex machina. If it weren’t for meeting that random stranger in the airport they would have been dead.
Honestly, they wanted to be dead, most of the movie, they wanted to be dead. So do I, most of the time lately. Not doing anything about it, it’s just the preference I have. If you gave me a desert to wander around with a blind camel to be shot at, sounds like an interesting time, I’ll bite.
They wanted to drag me down to Texas, and I really thought about talking myself into it, because what else do I have going? Not much, not much at all. They’re defunding our local mental health services, that’s how it’s going right now.
2 comments
I still haven’t seen Ishtar, a used blu-ray will cost me 27 bucks on ebay which is over my pain threshhold, but it’s still on my watchlist.
Ren & Stimpy I have seen though. Super cynical stuff for a kid to grow up on, I agree. Would it warp your personality? I dunno, I guess if you chose to watch it then it could be argued that your personality was already hungry for warpage.
I think some of the edgier stuff like drug references were so esoteric that nobody would get it unless you’d already been exposed to drugs. For example there’s a scene where Stimpy is mailing a letter, he licks a stamp and puts it on the letter… then he gets a dazed look on his face as his tongue slowly rolls out and we see there are 4 “stamps” (tabs of acid) on there. No kid would understand that, but wow… Stimpy’s doing acid on prime time childrens tv!
It’s def crazy what was on tv back then.
I think that there was a lot more going around restrictions and pushing the envelope back then.
Went from simpler, pumped out, 80s cartoons being glorified commercials, to 90s and early- mid 00s being counterculture-esque and edgy, to late 00s mid 2010s being a bit more experimental and story focused, to now where things are a lot more sanitized.
Expections are everywhere but man, stuff like 03 Ninja Turtles, Batman the animated series, static shock, rocko’s modern life, early spongebob…. really shaped us early on.
Shows really were different back then. They weren’t afraid to mention death or guns or violence, but did it in a way that a kid could digest.
Stuff is way too sanitized now honestly. They play it too safe more often than not now. Also, we all had to watch what was on tv back then, now streaming give us access to basically everything all at once…
It’s just interesting to consider a lot of this.