Onward and Upward (Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon")
Warning! Mature Content!
This following work contains material and themes that may include coarse language (albeit censored due to New Qualitipedia rules), sexual references, and/or graphic violent images that may be disturbing to some viewers. |
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 More like "Homeward and Downward".
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"Onward and Upward" was the first episode of Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon".
Plot
Ren and Stimpy are sick and tired of living in a homeless man's mouth and decide to move to new digs.
Why It Doesn't Go Anyward
- Ren feels out of character in the episode and the show as a whole. For example, he tricks Stimpy into kissing the anus of a rat. He doesn't get any karma for his actions.
- Extremely immature jokes where Ren and Stimpy eat the saliva, boogers, and vomit from people after they dropped inside the spit jar.
- That one cruel scene where Ren is whipping two living potatoes as he forces them to become mashed potatoes is very disturbing to look at.
- Animation error: During the climax, Stimpy's baseball uniform is miscolored to be the same color as his skin.
- The "Ask Dr. Stupid" segment feels rather tasteless and shoehorned in order to get a cheap laugh and make viewers think that they're watching the original Ren & Stimpy.
- The bartender talks in a stereotypical Jamaican accent, which is very offensive to people of Jamaican descent.
- Ren & Stimpy engage in anal sex during the climax. Yes, really!
Redeeming Qualities
- The "Who's the pitcher, who's the catcher!?" joke was funny.
- The animation itself in the episode is really well done.
- The scene of Stimpy carrying Ren to their new house is very cute.
- Despite the faults of the episode, if you remove the anal sex scene and all the dragged-out filler, it could feel like a finest & normal Ren & Stimpy episode considering the humor and nature of the original show.
Reception
Well-known cartoon devotee Thad Komorowski gave this episode a "Bomb" rating on his Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story book. He wrote in regards to it: "Onward and Upward inflates an eleven-minute story idea into a nearly twenty-minute academic exercise. It crosses the line from humorous scatology to unforgivable abhorrence, journeying to the point of no return". The episode was universally panned.
Trivia
- This episode was a discarded episode plot for the original show.
- This episode was made because fans asked John K. to make an entire episode with many gross-out jokes according to John Kricfalusi.
- The title card of the episode, drawn by the episode's writer Vincent Waller, was going to be different than the final one that ended up in the episode.
