REN & STIMPY
THOMAS R. THOMAS
======
I used to work with Ren & Stimpy.
Those were the days when
Apple and Adobe were exclusive,
and Steve Jobs was having
his fling with UNIX.
I would take the animation cells
and backgrounds scanned by the Macs
and import them into the Annies
(yes, the animation computers
were called Annies), watching
each animation cell dance across
the wires empty lines waiting
to be filled.
Ren & Stimpy would sit
in those little office chairs
and watch the painters
apply the digital ink
pixel by pixel.
They were not like their
characters - exact opposites.
Stimpy would sit on the edge
of his chair fidgety and jittery,
always ready to explode.
If he didn’t like what
a painter was doing, he
would jump off his seat
and pinch them on the rear.
Ren was always sweet and
polite, always watching
and asking questions.
I never liked it when
celebrities were in the
office, so I would
retreat to my desk
in the back,
with the Macs.
Ren would come with me
hiding from Stimpy and
his abuse. He would
stare out the 5th
floor window into
the night sky.
Ren would pull up a
chair and watch as I
filled in my spreadsheet
and run the backup tapes,
archiving the scenes from
the old cartoons.
Ren would tell me stories
of filming the cartoons.
He told me about the time
in “Man’s Best Friend”
when he beat George Liquor
with the bat. The bat was
really a wiffle bat and
after each of the
six or seven takes, Ren
would apologize to
George Liquor, and he
could hear Stimpy laughing
in the background.
======
Thomas R Thomas has had a variety of jobs over the years. This has included working on Ren & Stimpy, Beavis & Butthead, Math Blaster and The Douglas Adams’ game, “Starship Titanic” (the clue to turning off the bomb is “Nobody likes a smartass”). He has written poems since High School, and has been published in Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug & Creepy Gnome, and soon Volume 1 of Carnival Magazine.
Web site: www.thomasrthomas.com
