And I even got a laugh out of watching it, too. Now I learn that the creator, John Kricfalusi, was a sick, manipulative pedophile. He actually groomed a couple of young fans, encouraging them to be animators, then brought them out to work with him, and at least one of them, he had live with him. He seemed to regard young girls and women as his trophies.
Sometime between 1998 and 2000, Mora went to a party at Kricfalusi’s house that has bothered him for years. He remembered Byrd, who was no older than 20, was drunk and seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness when Kricfalusi called Mora over to him. “And then he pulled out these Polaroids of Robyn basically — how can you say it? — going down on him. … He’s like, ‘What do you think of that?’”
Byrd doesn’t remember Kricfalusi taking explicit photos of her; she also wasn’t aware, she said, that he showed explicit photos of her to other people. But Wyatt recounted an interaction with his then-boss that was similar to Mora’s. He said that at a party at Kricfalusi’s house between 1999 and 2002, Kricfalusi showed him “a stack of Polaroids” of Kricfalusi and Byrd having sex. He never mentioned the photographs to Byrd, nor did he confront Kricfalusi about the interaction. During another party at Kricfalusi’s house, Swarr said the artist pulled out a binder of photos that showed Byrd naked in his pool. “It was gross,” Swarr said. Affecting a gruff voice when he spoke as Kricfalusi, Swarr recalled, “He was like, ‘Oh, you like that?’ I was like, ‘No!’”
He encouraged this relationship when he was in his late 30s and 40s, when when the girl was 13 or 14.
It’s distressing that he was surrounded in his working relationship with this team of animators, and they knew he was carrying on with these teenage girls, and he was bragging about the sexual nature of the relationship (which would not be OK, even if they were his age), and no one spoke out. No one brought this to the attention of authorities. He was making cartoons for a children’s network, and no one thought this was important enough to mention anywhere.
His lawyer has made a statement now, though.
The 1990s were a time of mental and emotional fragility for Mr. Kricfalusi, especially after losing Ren and Stimpy, his most prized creation. For a brief time, 25 years ago, he had a 16-year-old girlfriend. Over the years John struggled with what were eventually diagnosed mental illnesses in 2008. To that point, for nearly three decades he had relied primarily on alcohol to self-medicate. Since that time he has worked feverishly on his mental health issues, and has been successful in stabilizing his life over the last decade. This achievement has allowed John the opportunity to grow and mature in ways he’d never had a chance at before.
I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for him.
Actually, I feel sorry for him AND find his actions reprehensible AND reject his lawyer’s argument for mitigation.
This whole metoo movement has had me thinking about a former boss quite a bit lately. He eventually got fired for sexual harassment, and he deserved it but at the time (almost 10 years ago), I was complacent. I heard the words coming out of his mouth and heard how he talked about the women he worked with when they weren’t around and I kept quiet, because he was my boss and I didn’t want to get fired. He was vile and disgusting towards our female servers, and I didn’t say anything. It was just the way things were and I didn’t want to rock the boat.
So these days he’s making 6-figures and running an entire chain of restaurants. I fantasize about seeing the little prick go down, but there’s nothing I can do. The corporate environment there is just as toxic as he is and I can’t risk my career calling it out. So, yeah still painfully complacent and not happy about it.
However, if I ever do run into this shitheal again, I will probably sock him straight in the face. Might get me an assault charge, but totally worth it.
None of which excuses flirting with minors, let alone having sex with them.
“Now I learn that the creator, John Kricfalusi, was a sick, manipulative pedophile.” You may have watched Ren and Stimpy, but you obviously never *saw* it, because that was pretty obvious from the beginning.
PZ:
Sometimes (rather often, in fact) I find myself bitterly regretting that for one reason and another I missed experiencing an enormous number of the esthetic/intellectual formative experiences both of my own generation (born in 1948) and of the succeeding generations. In particular, I’ve never seen a movie by Roman Polanski, nor any episodes of Ren and Stimpy, nor heard any music directed or performed by James Levine. (Name your favorite entirely uncompromised movie director or animator or concert musician, and the odds are very high I’ve never experienced their works, either: the “reasons” that I’ve missed all that have had nothing to do with my morality or my esthetic sensibility or my intellectuality; they’re peculiar to me and my upbringing, and they seem to be irremediable by now.)
An advantage of having this stunted side of my esthetic/intellectual life (I have plenty of other parts that are not at all stunted!) is that when things like Kricfalusi’s history become public I don’t feel put in the position of (publicly or privately) having to disown a part of my self. No doubt eventually I will be in that position, even given my smaller number of potential targets. I don’t know how I’ll handle that if/when it happens. It must be hard. The people I feel sorry for now are the people (starting with his personal victims) Kricfalusi has put in that position. I don’t feel sorry one bit for him.
I haven’t seen Ren or Stimpy, so I don’t know if Susan Montgomery is correct in her assessment. But if a work of ‘art’ (however that is defined) is not in itself reprehensible I have difficulty rejecting it simply because its creator was (or might have been).
I understand why one might want to avoid giving more money or opportunity to a proven perp, but if, say, this Kricfalusi has nothing to gain from anyone enjoying his cartoons (I did say if) why shouldn’t they?
To approach this from a less controversial reductio I love Gesualdo’s crazy motets; should I reject them because he murdered and mutilated his wife?
Or…
There have been persistent rumours (even back to hisfloruit, though there has never been any real proof) that Vivaldi might have abused his pupils. Is that enough to reject him? Or do we say nil nisi bonum de mortuis?
At what point (if any) do we say ‘Enough, who cares?’
I’m not trying to troll or be funny. I genuinely wonder what the moral thing to do.
I dearly like a lot of stuff created by some right bastards whom I’m certain I wouldn’t like as people!
And some of it’s by people who are still alive.
@6 – I dearly like a lot of stuff created by some right bastards whom I’m certain I wouldn’t like as people!
I’m certainly in the same boat. Some of my favorite stuff was created by people who probably shouldn’t have been allowed out in public.
I don’t have an answer, but I think from a moral perspective, a few things seem clear enough: if the person in question is still alive, then we should demand that they atone, make amends, and reform (assuming these things are possible) and until those conditions are met, then the ethical thing to do is not to support them financially or otherwise. If dead, or otherwise no longer profiting from their own work, then there’s nothing immoral about enjoying that work — but we should also be honest and upfront about what kind of a person they were.
Beyond that, I don’t think there’s one right answer. For one thing, I have to assume at this point that besides the stuff I enjoy created by people I *know* are reprehensible, there’s probably a lot of stuff I enjoy by people who are as bad or worse, I just haven’t heard about it. And if/when I do hear, I would have to ask myself, to what degree does learning some unsavory fact about the artist affect my interpretation of his/her work, my ability to enjoy it? The conclusions I wind up coming to aren’t ones I think I could defend on any moral basis. Orson Card’s retrograde socio-political views permanently ruined Ender’s Game for me, but I love damned near every song Rick James ever wrote — and I don’t think I would even try to make the case that Card is a fundamentally worse person than James was. It’s just easier for me to mentally separate the artist and his work in the latter case.
@6
I think that we have this weird idea about art that it can be separated from the artist. And I also think we have this weird belief that we are not influenced by art, that we are aware that it’s fiction.
But neither of them is wholly true. The artist’s beliefs are going to be reflected in the story- the parts s/he needs to explain, and the parts s/he doesn’t. We absorb all sort of information as to how the world is by consuming media. Things that are not the explicit theme of the story.
So to answer your questions: Enjoy what you want to enjoy. But be advised about what you are absorbing. If you know that this person was a murder and mutilator, be sensitive to background stuff about violence that he has in his work, and actively notice it. You don’t have to reject it, but you need to be aware of it. This gets more complicated with people who are still profiting off of a work, of course.
You never go “enough, who cares?” You should care. You should care about what you hear and engage with it, instead of ignoring it.
For me, I can’t enjoy work or I can’t enjoy it or enjoy it as much when I find out that the creator did terrible things. I’ll be enjoying it, and a one off joke or comment that would have otherwise gone unnoticed suddenly is very noticeable, and it takes me out of it. On rare occasions, knowing that the person was a terrible person does help me enjoy something a little more because things that were terrible and I noticed it before now have a place to come from. But neither of them sucks me into a work- they always distance me from them. YMMV.
To add an additional complication to the moral question…
I don’t want to support a shitheel like Kricfalusi but at the same time, his cartoons were not his alone. By not financially engaging with his show, he is not the only one effected. Voice actors and production staff would also be hit. So, is a boycott of an artist’s work (that has been created with the assistance of ostensibly non-horrible people) due to *the artist* being a horrible person moral even if the boycott will harm others?
antigone10@8:
It also gets more complicated (for me, anyway) the more abstract (to me) the medium is. Thus, for instance, richardelguru@6 has reason to believe that Gesualdo and Vivaldi were very bad people; is there “background stuff about violence” in their musical works? If there were, I’m sure I couldn’t perceive it (maybe because no one could, but in any case because of some of my irremediable deficits around music). And I know I can’t (and really can’t believe that anyone can!) get “background stuff about violence” (etc.) out of any person’s mathematics! So I know that Lev Pontrjagin was a horrible man (I’ve heard more and worse than just what Wikipedia documents); and I’m sure I can’t pick that up from thinking about “Pontryagin classes” (in cohomology of manifolds); but I still would have to deal with knowing the former if I ever wanted to do the latter (which I haven’t wanted or needed to).
For Vivaldi and Gesualdo, you might consider who we’re not hearing because we hear them instead, though I do admit that we are know getting into terrible zen puzzle territory. But it’s true that at the stage of “causal listening” you’re probably not going to get much philosophy out of instrumental music.
Is there a push to consider mathematics an art-form? I haven’t heard anything about that, though considering the best solution is described as “most elegant” I guess it makes a certain sort of sense. As for Lev Pontrjagin, I think that what you should take from his antisemitism is that don’t trust his assessment of Jewish mathematicians.
YOB@9,
Consider this: you may have reason to boycott some large corporation (say, Walmart). But in denying them their business, you are also affecting all the cashiers and warehouse workers and drivers and so on there, most of whom are probably struggling to make ends meet. Given that, is it moral to boycott a large corporation?
And if it is, why would your answer be different for a work of art or entertainment?
In mathematics, using Lev Pontrjagin as a concrete example, perhaps the problem isn’t his work or discoveries — a proved theorem is true no matter who proved it — but the names by which various things are known (e.g., “Pontryagin classes”, “Pontryagin spaces”, …) ?
(This, of course, would get a bit tricky if, say, John Fields (who the Fields Medal is named after), or Paul Erdős, were highly objectionable arseholes. (There is no suggestion here that either was.))
The animators of Ren and Stimpy weren’t exactly fans of Kricfalusi, see the episode “reverend jack” where they mock him (and catholicism) pretty harshly. Nickelodeon fired him after the first season so you can watch the show guilt free.
Citation needed. According to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge:
The 1990s were a time of mental and emotional fragility for Mr. Kricfalusi
Fuck you lawyer scum.
From the Wikipedia article about the show, omitting the footnote numbers: “Nickelodeon terminated Kricfalusi’s contract in late September 1992” — after as much of the second season as Nickelodeon was going to get had been produced — “and offered him the position of consultant for Ren & Stimpy, but he refused to ‘sell out’. The network moved production from Spümcø to its newly founded animation studio, Games Animation, which later became Nickelodeon Animation Studios. Bob Camp replaced Kricfalusi as director, while West, having refused Kricfalusi’s request to leave along with him, voiced Ren in addition to Stimpy.”
What a maroon @12
Indeed, that is a good question. I have been pondering on it off/on all day. I have no good answer.
I think I can only conclude that it is tricky and complicated. Is the boycott meant to punish or rehabilitate? Will boycotting prompt a change of behavior that will benefit others or is it simply a way to exact some sort of retribution? I don’t feel like the second case is moral whereas the first might be.
Another factor is will the boycott actually achieve anything? Boycotting an artist’s work after they have already been paid, so to speak, achieves nothing.
I dont know. I have retyped this comment so many times now and I keep coming up with more questions to try to answer.
I will say though, that Kricfalusi is a horrible person and my heart goes out to those he hurt. I don’t want to go down a moral rabbit hole without acknowledging that people got hurt and no amount of navel gazing will fix that.
I haven’t seen Ren & Stimpy since its original airings. I think the last time I watched an episode was around 1991, but it may have been as late as 1993. I can’t know for sure, but I don’t think I watched more than 2 full episodes. Because some friends liked it, I saw bits and pieces at other times in addition to those 2 episodes.
My general reaction at the time was that there were some funny jokes and funny situations in the show, but that it relied for some of its humor on jerks being unapologetic jerks.
If your humor requires omitting an otherwise expected apology to have its shock-humorous effect, then you probably aren’t a nice person. I thought that then and I still believe it today. I avoided the show because I thought that jerks (or at least one very influential jerk) worked on the show and the shows humor was designed to be more enjoyable to folks who can find joy in denying someone a deserved apology.
I considered myself not to be the audience of the show, and avoided it. Still, living embodiments of the callous frat-boy stereotype don’t all rape. So, yeah, I would expect the creator to be a jerk, but this is much more loathsome behavior than I ever felt I had evidence for.
But if you’re a network who is going to employ living embodiments of the callous frat-boy stereotype, some of those jerkfaces are going to turn out to be even more evil than you expect. If whatever television network commissioned Ren & Stimpy is reputationally and economically harmed by this news, I’m perfectly fine with that.
Just read an early April Fools Joke. CNN.com just reported that Trump has declared April to be National Sexual Assault Awareness month. Much too funny to be true.
YOB@9 — have you ever thought that by boycotting, it may be that the perpetrator gets sacked, thus protecting all those poor co-workers from further predation. Indeed, in this very story we find out that Kricfalusi was sacked and everybody else kept their jobs…now this is not a perfect example because K was not sacked for his predatory behaviour or to appease boycotters, he was sacked for making the show too violent for Nickelodeon and for missing production deadlines.
A better example would be the sacking of Bill O’Reilly, the result of an advertiser boycott following O’Reilly’s personal behaviour becoming public knowledge, which is the kind of boycott you seem to find so objectionable. And yet…nobody but O’Reilly was sacked. They replaced him with another horrifying right-wing shill, but at least his replacement doesn’t have a track record of abusing his staff. (That we know of.)
@chrislawson:
That Bill O’Reilly story isn’t quite accurate, but it does lead us to a productive line of conversation.
O’Reilly had his own production company that contracted with Fox to produce the show for airing on Fox’s network. When O’Reilly was fired, it’s unlikely that the employees of his production company were all immediately hired to equivalent positions by either Fox itself or the separate company that produces Tucker Carlson’s show (if there is one).
However, it’s definitely true that economic activity stayed the same, the change was merely that certain dollars that used to go to O’Reilly’s company now went elsewhere.
The closer someone was to O’Reilly and the less general the position they held, the more likely they would be to fail to soon get an equivalent position. But, frankly, even those very tightly integrated into O’Reilly’s company probably found other jobs at a similar pay scale in a similar field within a year.
I’m not saying that being out of work for months is easy. I’m not saying looking for work is a picnic. Just that the kind of semi-permanent downgrade in professional status and opportunity did only attach to O’Reilly even if others lost status, income, or opportunity on a temporary basis.
While it would be nice if no one other than O’Reilly lost income for O’Reilly’s actions, choosing to align yourself with someone known publicly to be someone who sexually harasses employees is still your own choice. Maybe you got offered better money from O’Reilly than from someone without his known penchant for sexual harassment. Maybe no one else would give you the same job and thus the same opportunity for eventual advancement in your particular preferred field. Nonetheless, you still choose to work with someone (or continue to work with someone) who was reported many years ago to be engaged in sexual harassment, with audio proof of the fact that is really undeniable.
That’s a choice that should also come with consequences, and if the consequence is a certain amount of job insecurity, that’s probably perfectly fine and proportionate.
I’m more worried about things like a receptionist at Arthur Anderson’s Portland, Oregon office losing a job after AA was found to have broken various laws to assist Enron’s frauds. That receptionist couldn’t possibly have known about the fraud, and isn’t even 100% certain to be able to understand it, as the fraud required professional accountants to commit. That wasn’t the result of boycott, but rather the result of our public, government watchdogs acting for the national interest by enforcing generally applicable laws. It was still done in our name. Was that just?
Frankly, I think that corporations have to occasionally face the death penalty. And I do think that’s generally in the public interest. But what’s in the interest of the population as a whole isn’t necessarily good or just for every individual.
There’s tough ethical work to be done there.
Crip Dyke — I didn’t know about O’Reilly’s production company. But, yeah, it’s always hard when people who had no control over the bad decisions get caught out.
Actually, this raises an interesting question for me. If O’Reilly had his own production company, why was it Fox that kept paying out his abuse settlements?
@ChrisLawson:
It was something about the combination of the exact provisions of the contract and the fact that (at least some of) the abused employees worked for Fox, even though O’Reilly worked for his own production company. I’d have to look at the contract to give you a better answer, and we don’t have access to the contract (as far as I know).
Ren and stimpy is one of my favorite cartoons. I have the set, I know the history, and I think the Happy Helmet was an inspired criticism of that era where “happy is all that matters, chase happy, be happy, not being happy is a moral failing”.
Well, I can’t really recommend it any more to people, except if they really want a history lesson in good animation. Is it as bad as “Birth of a Nation” (utterly reprehensible racist trash that also pioneered and revolutionized movie making to this very day, in fact literally every modern movie is pulling directly from Birth of a Nation). Thanks a lot you asshole. Of course, I already knew he was an asshole. In fact, the reason he “lost” his show was due to his inability to deliver episodes on time, and constantly fighting with Nickelodeon’s censors (though the latter is a fight I certainly appreciate, the decision to force him to come up with creative insults instead of cursing actually improved the end product, as I’ll take “bloated sack of protoplasm” over “you fucking idiot” any day).
Well, Ren & Stimpy is never coming back now. I expect Nickelodeon is going to do everything they can to distance themselves from it now. It’s a shame, it’s a historically important cartoon, and it is good (first few seasons before he left especially). Buut, he’s garbage. I’m finding that out more and more about stuff I like. I’m going to keep it all, and still enjoy it, because I think we all already decided that people aren’t “good or bad”, they’re people that do good and bad things to be judged independently of each other. Or maybe not? Because all those good and bad things are in a single bag of meat, and as a matter of practical reality, we kind of HAVE to judge the entire person, because we can’t just arrest the “bad” acts of a person, or distance ourselves from their “evil” side.
The contempt for other people and any kind of hold they might have over John K doing exactly as he pleases was a critical part of his process and creative output. He’s been very open about his contempt for every other working animator, and that hatred fuels his own work. The misogyny was always pretty close to the surface, especially after Ren and Stimpy where he had more ability to draw naked underage girls. Trying to high-mindedly separate the art from the artist is, in this case more than most, denying the very clear link between the two. It’s like admiring the project management of the Holocaust.
The same impulse that lets people allow a man to abuse a woman without doing anything, is the same impulse that let the boiling rage and hate in Ren and Stimpy stand as an artistic achievement.
I guess I’m one of the few people that watched an episode or two and absolutely hated Ren & Stimpy. I never liked the art style, and I knew people who treated me like Ren treated Stimpy, or at least tried to. So I guess that was part of it as well. I thought the message in every single skit in the show was horrible, and that was as a 10-year-old. To be honest, I wasn’t allowed to watch it, but when I sneaked and watched it without my parents at home, I didn’t like it anyway. So being banned from watching it wasn’t a bad thing to me.
I have to admit, learning something despicable about the creator of “Ren and Stimpy” doesn’t really surprise me. Then again, I was never really a fan of the show in the first place (the humour was always far too “American” for my liking – far too centred around interpersonal humiliation and discomfort, rather than the more intellectual absurdism of things like “the Goodies”, “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “Yes Minister”, “Yes Prime Minister” and even “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”).
But then, as a long term bullying survivor, I tend to be rather cautious about any kind of “humorous” performance where the “humour”, such as it is, relies almost entirely on the humiliation, degradation and depersonalisation of a target the audience is not permitted to empathise with. To explain what I mean here: in “Roadrunner” cartoons, the protagonist of the cartoon is Wile. E. Coyote, and the audience are intended to empathise with him, rather than with the roadrunner. By contrast, in Pepe Le Pew cartoons, Pepe Le Pew is the protagonist, and the cartoon is centred around the harassment, assault and stalking of the cat by Pepe – the audience aren’t meant to empathise with the cat, they’re meant to empathise with Pepe Le Pew. (All of this is largely complicated because both sets of cartoons were created by the same team – and my take there is fortunately times have altered and attitudes have changed. If you played a Pepe Le Pew cartoon in front of an audience of kids today, they probably wouldn’t laugh, just the same as these days, people don’t laugh at Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”). The thing about the sort of humour which requires the depersonalisation of another person is this: it points to a pre-existing ability to do this in the mind of the creator. They’re able to designate certain groups of people as “not really people”, and thus deserving of anything which happens to them.
Now, this isn’t necessarily a clear marker for being abusive or similar. But it is a good marker for the sorts of tendencies which can make it easier to justify your abusive behaviours in your own head.
All I want is that once there will be revelations about some artist being a fuckibg sexual predator abd we discuss the harm done to the victims without people wringing their hands over how they may now be expected to shun the cultural products.
You’re not the victims here.
This is sad and frustrating and infuriating to know, but 0% surprising.
Having grown up loving Ren and Stimpy, I thought John K was some sort of cartooning genius, and after discovering he had a cartooning blog, I jumped at the chance of joining it and seeking out his tutelage. His commentary on cartoons and cartooning were pretty quality, and he taught me a lot, but it got really uncomfortable when he ventured beyond artwork and talked about people.
Seeing the “real” John K was both illuminating and really disappointing, because unfettered on the blog he was an asshole in the typical old white entitled man way, and he wasn’t shy about it at all. And then there’d be drawings of naked female characters, presented in a way that gave it a shiny veneer of skeeze, male characters doing the Gaze at caricatures of real people, and the gross commentary he’d make, and the way he treated some of the women he worked with, and it got pretty uncomfortable, enough that I eventually stopped going back. I think Katie Rice was a frequent commentor at the time and they were still working on stuff together. There’s a couple cartoons on DVDs that he and his buds did audio commentary on, Looney Tunes and stuff along with Ren and Stimpy, and I saw two that I think Katie was involved with. The one from Sven Hoek in particular reeked of gross with some of the shit he’d say to her, while Eddie Fitzgerald went “Oh my god!” and guffawed.
Seeing clips from Adult Party Cartoon kinda cemented it. He really knows his cartoons, but he’s a disgusting human being, and probably always will be. I’m actually a little surprised to learn that he sought treatment as early as 2008, because I joined his blog in 2010 and he was still up to shit then. I’d never seen him show any kind of remorse for any of the shit he ever did or ever said, and I saw no evidence that he seemed to think he’s ever done anything wrong. Go figure that he was even worse than I suspected.
I’m really glad that Byrd and Katie are speaking out. I didn’t know about Byrd, but I’ve been worried about Katie for a while and secretly hoped that she’d be able to get out from under him. At the time I couldn’t understand why she kept on putting up with his bullshit, because even at his best he was obnoxious. It’s terrible that she had to endure him at his worst. Her last remark in the article is heartbreaking.
Watching Ren and Stimpy after getting to know the guy behind it has put the show in a whole new light. It’s not quirky and eccentric like it was when I was a wee. Some of the gags are still genuinely funny and the art is great, but it’s like growing up with happy memories of a childhood friend and then one day realizing in hindsight that there were signs that Something Bad was going on, but you were too naive at the time to recognize it.
As of this morning, Nickelodeon’s still playing Ren and Stimpy on one of their side channels. Wonder if they’re going to quietly make it go away, or if they’ll keep playing it.
(Re: watching R&S after K left, the quality of the show got pretty poor after it was moved to Games, and even as a nine-year-old I recognized it and stopped watching, though I didn’t know why at the time. You aren’t missing much.)
Aw shit, wait… I’m getting Katie mixed with Kali Fontecchio in some places. I think she might actually be the one who I saw commenting on his blog them years ago. Katie was absolutely in the ultra creepy Sven Hoek commentary, though.
Fact of the matter is Kricfalusi needs to be exiled for the safety of women and children everywhere, and I hope everyone involved is in a better place.