Svën Höek (The Ren & Stimpy Show episode)

Plot

Ren and Stimpy spend the whole night at home waiting for Ren's European cousin Svën to show up. Ren gets more and more fed up with Stimpy's dimwitted behavior and talks up how much he's looking forward to seeing Svën, who he remembers as sharp and clever from their childhood. Come morning, Stimpy goes to some bizarre "appointment" where he drops a quarter into a hidden spot in the house to visit Mr. Horse, who instantly boots him out. That pushes Ren over the edge, and he grabs a baseball bat to beat Stimpy, but just then Svën arrives.

Ren is horrified to find that Svën has turned into a total idiot, just as clueless as Stimpy. His anger keeps building as Svën and Stimpy hit it off over their love of gross, disgusting behavior and become inseparable pals. After Ren heads off to work, the two play a game of hide-and-seek, but Stimpy gives away his hiding spot right away. Stimpy then lets Svën into a room, begs the audience not to watch, and they do things offscreen that are hinted to be pretty racy.

They also try a board game called Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence, where players have to avoid peeing on a little model fence. When Ren gets home, he sees his collection trashed and vandalized with increasingly ridiculous damage. He loses it completely, charges at the duo, and threatens to hurt and kill them in horrible ways, which scares them both into tears. He decides to take a leak before carrying out his threat, spots the board game, and urinates on it out of spite and revenge.

The game blows up, wrecking the house and sending all three to Hell, where Satan laughs at Ren for being so dumb. The season 1 farewell segment plays one last time, with Billy West voicing Ren for the first time, recorded shortly after Kricfalusi left.

Production

The production of this episode crawled along at a frustratingly slow pace. Network executive Will McRobb gave it the green light in November 1991, noting in a memo that it was great to see an episode exploring Stimpy’s fundamental stupidity and Ren’s matching exasperation. To dodge potential complaints about ethnic stereotypes, the character Svën was labeled only as a generic European, though his German accent, use of "ja," Tyrolean hat, and Lederhosen clearly point to a Bavarian origin.

The layout stage at Carbunkle Cartoons dragged on for 11 weeks. Once those layouts were finished, John Kricfalusi declared that three-quarters of them needed redoing. Journalist Thad Komorowski pinned much of the delay on Kricfalusi’s micro-management, as he kept tweaking the timing work Bob Jaques had already completed. Kricfalusi also hated the background paintings, tearing them off the wall and accusing the painters of using “candy cane” colors.

Jaques griped about the poor layout work his studio received, baffled that Kricfalusi never made any real effort to direct corrections. In Michael Fontanelli’s layout drawings for the scene where Ren urinates on an electric fence, Ren walked directly onto a game. Animator Chris Sauvé recalled the challenge: the scene required a pan, a pan walk, and a precise stop, and the game sat right in Ren’s path. Bob Jaques solved it by drawing Ren’s leg stretching, and the whole team found that hilarious.

Reception

Komorowski rated the episode as one of the best in the series, giving it five stars out of five. Martin Goodman praised Ren's stunning descent into menacing lunacy and approved of the episode for shattering taboos, noting that it implies Stimpy and Svën are engaged in a homosexual relationship and that Svën shares his bloody bandages with Stimpy at a time when the AIDS epidemic was controversial. Right from the pilot episode Big House Blues in 1990, there were strong hints that Ren and Stimpy were a gay couple.

In the scene when Ren comes home, graffiti reading Svën+Stimpy in a heart is visible on the wall. Despite frequent hints about the duo's sexuality, producer Jim Ballantine complained that many artists at Spümcø were angry cynical young men who probably hate fags, and that the homosexuality was portrayed as sick, depraved, perverse, degenerate, and unnatural. Ren was shown as attracted to human women, presented as more normal than his relationship with Stimpy.

Goodman was more positive, noting the relationship was a breakthrough in representation given the near absence of gay subjects in American animation in 1992.