Here's an interesting interview with Bob Camp from 1992...
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From: l...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Lazlo Nibble)
Subject: SPUMCO: interview with BOB CAMP
Message-ID: <m6gkzxd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Date: Fri, 08 May 92 15:22:35 GMT
Organization: WeasElectro Productions (television - movies - comics)
References: <34813@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> <10824@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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<1992May8.133611.19743@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
() writes:
> In other exciting news, two major domo interviews with Spumco folk
> should be appearing on the net any second now. Hey, I'm excited.
D-uhhhh . . . that would be ME!
This is from issue #10 of X MAGAZINE, available Any Second Now for a
mere $2.50 from
X Magazine
P.O. Box 1077
Royal Oak, MI 48068-1077
Order MANY copies!
----
In today's market for children's animation, shows that aren't
created by some worthless suit as part of his multinational
marketing plan are harder to find than hot dogs without rat hair
in them. So when you come across a cartoon that's obviously
created by someone with an attitude and and a gleam in his eye,
it's cause for some serious public celebration. Nickelodeon's
/Ren & Stimpy/ is definitely that show.
WE'RE ALIVE! ALIVE, I TELL YOU, ALIVE!
The program makes its permanent home as part of Nickelodeon's
"Nicktoons" lineup -- a collection of original, non-licensed
animated kid's shows that the cable channel started running on
Sunday mornings late last year. The other shows in the lineup,
such as the cartoon babies' world of /Rugrats/ and the
junior-high angst festival of /Doug/, are nice, quiet little
shows . . . good quality, decent writing, and not much to offer
anyone over the age of ten or so.
/Ren & Stimpy/ breaks the mold. The show is one of the most
twisted pieces of animated chaos ever to grace the television
screens of North America, and therefore qualifies as fine
viewing fodder for psychos and screwups of all ages, shapes,
sizes and belief systems. The man behind the show is animation
bad-boy John Kricfalusi (kris-fa-LOO-see), who you might
remember -- by visual style if not necessarily by name -- as the
driving creative force behind Ralph Bak****'s Saturday-morning
revival of /Mighty Mouse/ of a few seasons back. /Ren &
Stimpy/, like /The New Adventures Of Mighty Mouse/ before it, is
a nonstop barriage of homages to popular culture and disrespect
for its conventions . . . with the most disrespect reserved for
the Prime Directives of Children's Animation: Dumb It Down, Don't
Offend Anybody, And Sell The Damn Toys.
The Setup: Ren Hoek (frayed-at-the-edges chihuahua) and Stimpson
J. Cat (reddish blue-nosed feline pillow) experience assorted
buddy-buddy style adventures, with plenty of graphically-
depicted bodily functions thrown in for good measure. Bizarre
situations and gratuitous grotesqueries are the name of the
game. Ren has to be eaten by Stimpy to avoid blowing their
covers as mouse and professional mouse-catcher. Stimpy takes
pity on his bad-tempered buddy and creates a helmet that will
make Ren happy -- whether he wants to be or not. A trip to an
alternate universe causes the pair to break out in a neverending
stream of mutations that include chicken feet, detached floating
eyeballs, and eventual transdimensional implosion. A bedridden
Ren sticks to the sheets and has flakes of skin peeling from his
nose. A bored Stimpy passes time by collecting Magic Nose
Goblins. Horses plummet to earth and suffer severe spinal-cord
injury. Unshaven yaks paddle across the sky in enchanted
canoes. It ain't Disney, folks . . . not by a long shot.
WE'RE NOT HITCHHIKING ANYMORE . . . WE'RE RIDING!
Spumco, the studio responsible for /Ren & Stimpy/, is housed in
a sprawling second-floor walk-up on Melrose Avenue in L.A.,
about a block from the Paramount studios. We arrive there on a
bright Tuesday morning and get the Grand Tour. John K. is
extra-busy that day, so the man we talk to his his right-hand
fella, Spumco Big-Shot Bob Camp -- an upbeat, energetic human
cartoon, with lots of enthusiasm for the world he and Kricfalusi
have worked together to create, and not much patience for
anything or anyone that might get in their way. His path to
/Ren & Stimpy/ is convoluted, twisting from Marvel Comics to a
stint on the /Ghostbusters/ cartoon, and then to the job at
kiddie-mation factory DIC (/Inspector Gadget/, /Heathcliff/)
where he met up with Kricfalusi to work on the
extremely-short-lived revival of Bob Clampett's classic /Beany
And Cecil/.
"We did, like, four of five episodes of that and then they came
in one day and just fired us all," Camp explains. "We really
pissed 'em off -- we put /jokes/ in it. That really made 'em
mad. Then we did some freelance stuff here and there, bounced
around, and ended up starting this studio.
"I was working over at Warner Bros. on TINY TOONS, and John was
hanging out at home, being unemployed 'cause everybody was
scared of him. I got a call from a guy who wanted me to design
a board game for him, and I said "well, what kind of board game
is it?" Cause I thought, "oh, it's gonna be good money" . . .
and he said, "well, It's to teach kids /not to do drugs/."
Camp laughs. "I went, "you know...that sounds a little
dry...tell you what: I know a guy who draws better'n anybody
alive and he's not doing anything right now, he'll do some great
stuff. So I gave him John's number, sort of as a joke, and so
John calls me up, says "hey, I got some work, you need some
work?" I said "yeah, I'll do a little freelance, what is it?"
he goes "eh, I just got a job doing this board game", I go
"yeah, I gave the guy your number." I said "what're you
getting?" he goes "twenty-five grand", I go "WHAAT?" So, we did
the board game, and that's how we started Spumco."
Anybody who visits Spumco expecting to see the sweatshop-meets-
a-viking-longboat layout of most animation studios is likely to
be sorely disappointed. The studio has a labyrinthine feel to
it, the feel of a place that's grown to fill all the space it
has available without much time for a master plan to take hold.
Corridors twist this way and that; artists and office staff dash
hither and yon; frenzied laughter from nowhere and everywhere
pops up to punctuate the morning. The painters' studio has jars
of colors with names like SCAB and OLD SOCK, with old Little
Golden Books scattered on the tables for inspiration and color
reference. The halls are lined with cel setups and background
painting from /Ren & Stimpy/ and other, unsold Spumco creations:
The World's Most Manly Men, lost in thought ("Trying to think of
what a woman might look like," Camp informs us). Hee Hog, The
Atomic Pig ("bitten by a radioactive man"), using his
Super-Tastosity to determine the guilt or innocence of a lineup
of suspects by sucking their heads. The sultry Dr. Jean Pool,
about to perform chromosome experiments on a vial of sperm
collected from Spumco's club-footed closing-titles mascot, Jimmy
The Retarded Boy.
"The first time we got together with Nickelodeon, we pitched 'em
a show about Jimmy," Camp tells us, "but they wanted us to sell
out the character and own it. For a new studio, that's
acceptable -- sorta what we did on /Ren & Stimpy/; Nickelodeon
owns the characters. But John didn't want to sell out Jimmy, and
he had some presentations from six or eight years ago laying
around with these Ren & Stimpy characters, and they loved 'em.
So we did the show."
FORTY-SIX MILLION BUCKS?
/IIIIIIII'M/ THE CAT!
The first /Ren & Stimpy/ short ever made was /Big House Blues/,
which toured the art-house circuit as part of one of Expanded
Entertainment's ANIMATION CELEBRATIONS a couple of years back.
The cartoon, from which /Ren & Stimpy/ gets all the clips in its
opening credits, finds Ren and Stimpy locked up in the local
animal shelter. It's a pristine masterwork of the animation
form, but some parts of the storyline went a little too far for
Nickelodeon. After a single, heavily-edited airing early in the
show's run, Nick decided not to air /Big House Blues/ as part of
the usual sequence of episodes . . . despite the fact that they
only have a handful of episodes to air in the first place.
"I think the reason they're not showing it is because there's a
death-message to it," explains Camp. "[The character] Phil the
dog dies -- they don't like that, and I think some parents wrote
in about it. Something we've got to keep in mind is that we're
making cartoons for kids, even though we make what we like . . .
it's the old rule that I'm not gonna go see a film that I made
that I can't enjoy."
The show started on Nick with a relatively small audience that
probably consisted mostly of eight-year-olds. But eight-year-
olds have parents and older brothers and sisters, and word
quickly spread about the singlemost bizarre program on
television and its hiding-place on Sunday morning cable TV. The
dam broke wide open when the show was picked up for a
Saturday-night air slot by Nickelodeon's sister channel, MTV.
"Yeah, with their stupid logo in the corner," says Camp, "that's
the most annoying thing in the world. But MTV brought us out.
Nobody watched Nickelodeon. It was out there, the /kids/ saw
it, but as soon as it started running on MTV we got lots of
calls from people who didn't even know it existed. I get calls
from people out there in America who just call information:
"Hollywood, Spumco", and they ask to talk to me. I'll talk to
'em for ten or fifteen minutes and tell 'em all /kinds/ of crap."
When we visited Spumco, the word had just come down from
Nickelodeon ordering another twenty half-hour episodes of /Ren &
Stimpy/ . . . forty new eleven-minute cartoons in all. The
second season episodes will be a little more streamlined -- no
more commercials for "High-Fa****on Log for Girls" or "Powdered
Toast"; no more bumpers like "Yak-Shaving Day" or "Ask Dr.
Stupid". The extra clips took almost as much time to put
together as the regular-length cartoons did, and with over seven
hours of new animation due to start airing sometime this summer,
time isn't a commodity that Spumco has a lot of lately.
"I didn't see any way we could do forty shows," Camp explains,
"but the budget that we got for forty shows allowed us to all
keep working through the dry time between seasons, and we used
that time to set up a layout school for all the layout artists
to hone their abilities . . . to watch cartoons and make notes
and get paid for it. It's like an animation school /and/ a
studio.
"When we first started Spumco, John would make me watch cartoons
and write thesis papers on 'em. For /real/. I mean, if you can
imagine watching a Tex Avery cartoon ... a Deputy Droopy cartoon
or something and writing a paper on it... but it taught me a lot
about writing and cartoon form as a film form and stuff. It's
tough because John is a perfectionist. Like all good filmmakers
he's a dictator...what he says goes, and we do it. He's really
intolerant of ****ed-up looking work, but he's always /right/
too. He can be infuriating when you do your best and then he
sits down in one second and does it better, and you think
[whispers] "oh, ****...I suck!" But then, you know, you end up
doing a better job in the long run.
As in most skilled professions, every Tom, Dick, and Harry
thinks that /he/ could work on /Ren & Stimpy/ if he just had the
chance. Last February, Spumco gave the world of Dicks that
chance by opening their doors to anybody with a pen who thought
they could work in the show's frenetic avant-kitsch animation
style. As production on the second season ramped up, the studio
ran ads in magazines like /Comics Buyers Guide/ asking would-be
artists for the show to send in samples of their work.
"The first season there were like, eight or ten people here,"
Camp explains. "We have no idea where we're gonna get the
people from. Every now and then somebody straggles in here and
we get somebody, but it's real tough . . . there's a lot of
people that want to do this stuff, but there's very few people
that can actually /draw/ it. Most people are young and lazy and
they want to come right out of Cal Arts and get a $1,000 a week
job sitting on their ass ****ing off, and that's like: "No...go
to Tiny Toons, they pay /lots/ of money for people ****ing off
over there."
"You look at the cartoons and you think, well, we're all running
around stoned with hats made out of dildos and stuff, but it's a
like a complete work environment. What we're trying to do is
systemize it. It's funny: people that there's no method to the
way we're doing this. We get artwork from people wanting jobs,
and it's just /chaos/ . . . it doesn't make any sense. They
think "Hey, these people are like me! They're anarchists!"
We're not. We wanna make cartoons that anybody can understand."
YEP, THAT'S A CAT ALRIGHT . . .
It's hard to believe, especially in the current stifling
environment for childrens' animation, that Nickelodeon lets
Spumco do half the things that they eventually get away with --
retched hairballs, bathtub farts and all. But Nickelodeon
really is involved with the creative process every step of the
way. When each phase of preproduction is completed, from the
initial premise through the final storyboards, the result is
sent off to Nickelodeon for approval. Bob Camp explains that
the show's amazing popularity gives Spumco a lot more breathing
room than one might expect.
"They're beginning to realize that the stuff that people really
love is the gross stuff," he says. "But the people we deal with
[at Nick] are mostly women, and they tend to like the stuff that
has a lot of heart in it, so we try to put a lot of heart in the
stories . . . "
And nose hair.
"Nose hair, yeah. Nickelodeon's been really cool, they let
us do pretty much what we want. They're very strict about form
and consistency and stuff, which we're not that much...we're
getting more that way, it's been sorta good in a way because
it's sort of taught us the discipline that we didn't have
before."
FLESH AND BLOOD, NOT WAX!
"This **** is *murder* to do," says Camp. "Each cartoon takes
like eight or nine months to do. And the only way we can get
'em done is assembly-line style."
PREMISE: That's simple enough: "Ren and Stimpy get sucked
through a black hole" or "Stimpy goes in search of his first
fart".
OUTLINE: The writer pulls together a rough idea of everything
that happens in the story.
STORYBOARDS: If a cartoon is a moving comic book, the
storyboards are the cartoon equivalent of the comic book's
script. The board shows the full cartoon in comic-strip form,
one 8-1/2x11" page per panel, with all the dialogue and camera
moves indicated. Camp pitched the board for an upcoming episode
where Ren and Stimpy go into the Army for us -- meaning, simply,
that he acted the whole thing out. (Watching a full-grown human
being act out an entire episode of /Ren And Stimpy/ is an
experience best left to those with robust brain stems.)
TIMING: Once everybody's happy with the writing of the episode,
it's timed out to make sure that it flows quick'n'snappy.
Anytime you watch an episode and are waiting for something
interesting to happen (say, for example, /Marooned/), that's bad
timing.
LAYOUT: Now the script's farmed out to a crew of Spumco staff
people who draw all the most im****tant poses for all the
characters in the episode, to give the actual animators a more
precise version of the storyboard to work from.
ANIMATION: The most im****tant step of all takes the show
completely out of Spumco's hands -- after layout, the artwork
for the short is ****pped out to any of a half-dozen animation
houses all around the world.
The reason for doing the animation overseas? "Everybody in the
United States wants a lot of money for doing no work," says
Camp. "And over there they're tireless -- they work seven days
a week, and we don't even pay 'em. /They/ pay /us/. [laughter]
So it's sort of a necessary evil. No way around it."
The first set of shows was animated in the Phillippines, Korea,
and by a couple of studios in Canada, most notably Carbunkle
Cartoons, the studio that handled the three best shorts of the
first season: /Fire Dogs/, /Stimpy's Invention/, and /Space
Madness/. But ****pping the work to Korea or the Phillippines
introduces a brand new set of problems to the process. Most of
your neighbors probably don't understand REN AND STIMPY . . .
how likely is it that someone in Korea is going to do any
better?
"We get scenes back with /millions/ of errors," Camp explains.
"And we send it back to 'em to fix it, and it's like ****ed-up
different when it comes back. They're millions of miles away
and they don't speak the language, they don't understand our
sense of humor, they don't /get/ anything. We're lucky to get
the stuff back at all.
"I /wish/ we could get it all done in Canada, 'cause, you know,
Canadians are barely discernable from Americans. [laughter] In
fact, we have a lot of Canadians here. But it'd be great if
Carbunkle could do it all, 'cause they're the best. All the
ones with the great lip-sync and the great weird Ren & Stimpy
animation, that's them. They're the best ones."
EXPLORE STRANGE, AAAALIEN WORLDS!
Camp doesn't hesitate to share with us his vision of Spumco's
position on the animation dogpile.
"Everything else blows big chunks, as far as I'm concerned.
I've worked at a lot of studios, and they're all run by dip****s
that don't know what they're doing, and they're more interested
in toy sales than they are in product. I call it The Dogfood
Theory, because most of the people who work in animation are
people who would rather be working in live-action . . . it's
sort of a transitory job to them, and they don't give a ****
about it. You feed your dog dogfood -- you're not gonna taste
it, you don't care what it tastes like as long as the dog eats
it. It's the same thing with childrens' programming.
"Look at Disney . . . they did "Roller Coaster Rabbit", remember
that short they did? They spent /seven million/ on that. For
an eight-minute cartoon. It's because they don't know what
they're doing, so they do **** over and over and over and they
nit-pick and they have committee decisions on everything.
That's the way most stuff is done -- a lot of people who don't
know what they're doing making decisions instead of one person
who /does/ know what they're doing.
"I hope that shows like [/Ren And Stimpy/] will put those
guys out to pasture, because they're /weak/. They're doing
/crap/. The only people that are entertained by that
are five-year-olds. They're like, "pretty colors...". They
don't know, they're kids . . .
"I know that Tiny Toons is doing a rip-off of us now . . . I'm
not sure what it is, but I've heard from people I know that are
working over there that they're trying to do "our type" of
stuff. It's funny -- places that we used to get fired from for
doing the kind of stuff we do are now trying to copy us. It's
like that MC Hammer thing that DIC did [ABC's /Hammerman/].
They were trying to hire some of our designers because they
wanted that "Kricfalusi look". What did they end up with? A
lot of coathangers and stuff. [laughter] Pretty weak
stuff."
DON'T TOUCH IT! IT'S THE HISTORY-ERASER BUTTON, YOU FOOL!
Spumco can't go on with /Ren & Stimpy/ forever. Time and comedy
don't make for good bedfellows . . . after awhile the concept
gets old, the humor gets forced, and eventually you're watching
the eleventh season of /M*A*S*H/. Nickelodeon wants enough
episodes of the show for them to be able to put it into
syndication, and the twenty new half-hours currently in the
works will make that possible. There's talk of releasing the
best episodes on videotape, and the show's merchandising machine
is barely getting started. But what'll come after that?
Fortunately there's no shortage of bright ideas flitting around
Camp and Kricfalusi's heads, and if all goes according to plan,
/Ren & Stimpy/ will be a perfect springboard for them to get to
do what they want to do next.
"What I wanna do with Spumco," Camp exudes, "is branch out and
do live-action. I wanna do comedy shorts . . . I've got /piles/
of ideas for skit-type comedy. Monty Python-type stuff. And I
wanna do some features, I've got scripts lying around.
"In Hollywood you might as well just write a script, wipe your
ass with it and flush it . . . more people will read it that way
than if you actually send it to people. But I figure we'll be a
real studio here, we'll have some clout: "here's a script"
"who's it by?" "it's by one of the writers from the REN & STIMPY
SHOW", you know, "oh yeah, that's funny stuff". So I wanna do
all kinds of stuff.
"I wanna do a bunch of publicity stunts; I bought a Nash
Metropolitan and I'm gonna radically alter it, make a SpumMobile
out of it, and we wanna build a 14-15-foot statue of Jimmy The
Retarded Boy and put it on the building. I wanna have it sort
of like a clock, where every hour the top of his head opens up
and his brain comes out and rattles around, and on every half
hour he just wets himself. [laughter] You know, do stuff that
gets peoples' attention."
With ideas like that, getting peoples' attentions isn't likely
to be a problem. "
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