Development Kricfalusi sold the intellectual rights for Ren and Stimpy to Nickelodeon under the grounds that they were his "second-best characters". Coffey rejected
Your Gang as a TV show, but stated she was willing to fund a TV show based on Ren and Stimpy. In late 1989, Coffey agreed to fund a pilot for a TV show tentatively titled
Ren Höek and Stimpy, and told Kricfalusi that if the pilot did well, she would commission a television series from his studio. Production on the pilot, titled "Big House Blues", started in December 1989.
Storyboard The artists who worked on "Big House Blues" were Kricfalusi, Naylor, Camp and Smith. Camp described "Big House Blues" as a "nonsense story". Each of the four artists were assigned to draw what was felt to be their strongest area of expertise, with Camp drawing the comic scenes, Smith drawing the "manly" scenes with the dog catchers, Naylor drawing the "cute" scenes, and Kricfalusi drawing the "wild" scenes where Ren loses his mind at the prospect of his death. The storyboard for the episode was finished in January 1990. Half of the scenes were drawn at Spümcø in
Los Angeles and the other half at Carbunkle Cartoons in
Vancouver. Carbunkle had been founded in 1989 by husband-and-wife team of
Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong. Kricfalusi and Naylor had known Jaques since they were students at
Sheridan College in the 1970s.
Animation It was expensive to pay cartoonists in American dollars and the lower value of the Canadian dollar make it profitable to sub-contract the work out to a Canadian studio. Originally, "Big House Blues" was done in an animation style similar to the
Ed Benedict cartoons at Hanna-Barbera in the 1950s. Jaques persuaded Kricfalusi to switch over to a more exaggerated style. Jaques stated: "There was no way we could do that with the material on
Ren & Stimpy. You couldn't just throw a timing chart on the layouts and have them inbetweened. Extreme or expressive movement and acting require extreme action".
Billy West was recruited initially to provide the voices of both Ren and Stimpy, but Kricfalusi took the role of Ren for himself. West states that he believes that Kricfalusi always intended to provide the voice for Ren, and he misled the network executives by saying that West would play both parts as a way to gain the network funding. "Big House Blues" was in production for the entire first half of 1990 and cost $80,000 US dollars to make. The pilot only performed "moderately well" in testing, but Coffey was determined to support the show. She censored some of the scenes of sadistic cruelty being inflicted on Phil and changed the ending where Phil rises from the grave, which she felt undercut the gravity of Phil's death.
Design The design of Ren and Stimpy was far more complicated in "Big House Blues" than it was in the TV show as Naylor subsequently simplified the design of the characters under the grounds that it took too much time and cost too much money to draw the characters in frame by frame as was done in the style used in "Big House Blues". In "Big House Blues", Ren and Stimpy had an "underground" look to them that was absent by "
Stimpy's Big Day!", the first episode of the TV show. Naylor's redesign of the look of Ren and Stimpy was used for the rest of the show as a cost- and time-saving measure, through Kricfalusi has stated his preference for the design used in "Big House Blues" as truer to his vision of the characters.
Pitching The network executives were displeased when they first viewed "Big House Blues" in mid-1990 as it was stated that the material was not appropriate for a television show aimed at children. The episode was heavily censored by the Nickelodeon network, which banned the scene where Ren passionately kisses Stimpy and says he loves him, as the scene implies that the duo were homosexual, despite it being portrayed as Ren doing so unconsciously. Likewise, the scene where Ren washes his mouth in the toilet was censored, though curiously it was included in the opening credits of
The Ren & Stimpy Show. This has been cited as an example of the inconsistency of
Broadcast Standards and Practices. ==Release==