Spümcø (Johnsonverse)

Spumco, Inc. (stylized as SPüMCø) is an American animation studio which has been active since 1989 and based in Los Angeles, California. The studio is best known for working on The Ren & Stimpy Show for Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and for various commercials and films. The studio has won several awards, including an Annie Award for Best Animated Short Subject for the music video of the song "I Miss You" by Björk.
Spümcø was founded by animators John Kricfalusi, Bob Camp, Jim Smith and Lynne Naylor. Kricfalusi named the company after the fictional person "Raymond Spum", whom he jokingly described as the inventor of animation. The golden age of American animation (exemplified by the 1940s cartoons by Bob Clampett and Tex Avery) served as inspiration for the surreal and highly expressive house style of which Spümcø became well-known.
==History==
===Origins===
In the 1980s, animators John Kricfalusi and Lynne Naylor attempted to sell original cartoon ideas while working for various animation studios. including Filmation. Spümcø was officially founded in Hollywood in 1989 by cartoonists Kricfalusi, Naylor, Bob Camp and Jim Smith, who were all disappointed at the state of animation and had either been laid off or quit from other animation companies. Soon thereafter, Nickelodeon announced that they were looking for new cartoons created by cartoonists.
Kricfalusi explains the name Spümcø: "Well, it's a weird coincidence. The word spüm is the word for 'quality' in Danish. But it's actually named after Raymond Spüm, the guy who invented animation in 1856." Despite Kricfalusi's claims, Spüm is actually not a Danish word and Raymond Spüm is a fictional figure.
Originally, the Spümcø headquarters were located in Los Angeles, west of Paramount Studios at 5625 Melrose Avenue in a bland concrete industrial building. Amy Harmon of The New York Times described the "not-quite-underground headquarters" as "a nondescript building". In 2000, it relocated to a new studio complex at 12892 Sheldon Street.
===The Ren & Stimpy Show===
Main article: The Ren & Stimpy Show (Johnsonverse)
A few months after founding Spümcø, Kricfalusi pitched five cartoon ideas to Nickelodeon. Geraldine Laybourne, the president of Nickelodeon at the time, picked two of these: Ren & Stimpy and Jimmy the Idiot Boy, the former being initially rejected by three other major American television networks. Ultimately, Kricfalusi decided to sell Ren & Stimpy to Nickelodeon, which led to Spümcø's first animated series production, The Ren & Stimpy Show.
Because Nickelodeon had no original cartoon material prior to the hiring of Kricfalusi, the network was unaware of the basic process of producing an animated cartoon. Kricfalusi volunteered to give Nickelodeon executives an informative background of cartoonists using storyboards for storytelling in animated cartoons, rather than a script. Vanessa Coffey, who became the executive for The Ren & Stimpy Show, listened to Kricfalusi's lessons and background briefing of the animation industry, and was pleased to learn about how the process works. Coffey agreed with Kricfalusi that, "If storyboards were good enough for Bugs Bunny, they were good enough for her."
Spümcø finished the pilot "Big House Blues" in October 1990 and it aired on August 11, 1991, premiering alongside Doug and Rugrats. Spümcø continued to produce the show for the next thirteen years, while encountering issues with Nickelodeon's standards and practices. Over the next couple of years, a number of episodes were censored.
Kricfalusi described Nickelodeon in the earliest period as being "simple" as there was one executive, Coffey, whom he said that he got along with. Kricfalusi said that another executive, who came during a later period in the show, tried to prevent some of the Ren & Stimpy episodes from being produced. According to Kricfalusi, the episodes continued production since he had established a "trade" with Coffey of balancing "really crazy" episodes with "heart-warming" episodes. Ren & Stimpy ended in October 2004 after ten seasons; during its original run, Spümcø produced two feature films: The Ren & Stimpy Movie (1999) and Ren & Stimpy Get Lost (2003), both of which received positive reviews from critics and audiences.
===Other works and after Nickelodeon===
Kevin Kolde became a key figure of the company, working as a vice president and general manager, enabling Spümcø to continue producing content for over a decade after the original run of Ren & Stimpy.
In 1997, Björk, a long-time fan of Kricfalusi's work, insisted for him to do an animated music video for her when they met at one of her concerts. Kricfalusi subsequently directed the music video for "I Miss You", a single that was released the same year. It premiered on MTV as well as Canada's MuchMusic channel and Asia's Channel V. "I Miss You" won an Annie Award for Best Animated Short Subject in 1997, from the International Animated Film Association, ASIFA-Hollywood.
A variety of techniques were used for the production of the video: traditional 2-D cel animation by Spümcø and Colorkey Productions; 3-D computer animation supervised by Charlie Gibson at Rhythm & Hues; real-time motion capture animation by House of Moves; and blue screen mattes brought live-action into the mix. The live-action sequences with Björk were shot in a Los Angeles studio in one day. The entire music video took nine months to complete.
In 1997, Spümcø launched their very own website to distribute cartoons without television network censorship. Kricfalusi decided to use George Liquor, a cartoon character he created, to star in the Flash Internet cartoon series The Goddamn George Liquor Program. The series premiered on October 15, 1997. The Goddamn George Liquor Program was the first cartoon series to be produced exclusively for the Internet. George appeared on the series with: his nephew, Jimmy The Idiot Boy; Jimmy's cousins, Slab and Ernie; Jimmy's love interest, Sody Pop; and George and Jimmy's pet dog, Dirty Dog. Spümcø produced eight one-minute shorts. In 1999, The Goddamn George Liquor Program won an Annie Award for "Outstanding Achievement in an Animated Interactive Production".
In 1999, Spümcø created its second Internet-only cartoon series, Weekend Pussy Hunt. The series had 16 episodes and starred Dirty Dog and Cigarettes the Cat. When asked about the style of the cartoon series, creator Kricfalusi stated:Its style was a 1940s live action film-noir movie and we based one of the characters "Dirty Dog", on one of my favourite movie actors Robert Ryan. "WPH (Weekend Pussy Hunt)" was basically a chase movie; a really dark hardboiled thriller.In 1999, Spümcø produced and animated a Yogi Bear television special parody titled Boo Boo Runs Wild, which premiered on September 24, 1999, on Cartoon Network. The animated short focuses on Yogi Bear's sidekick, Boo Boo Bear, who becomes fed up with the rules of man and decides to return to his natural bear roots. Though it focused primarily on Yogi and Boo Boo, it was titled as a "Ranger Smith cartoon". A second Ranger Smith cartoon aired alongside it, titled A Day in the Life of Ranger Smith, as well as two Jetsons cartoons titled Father & Son Day and The Best Son.
===The Ripping Friends and later years===
While The Ren & Stimpy Show was in production, Kricfalusi had plans to make a feature film starring the world's "manliest men". The feature film plan was scrapped, but the characters were then used in the 2001 animated series, The Ripping Friends. As early as a 1987 story session for the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Kricfalusi had proposed using a wad of gum as a character, an idea which was used to create the first villain for the new series, Indigestible Wad. The Ripping Friends premiered on WBC Kids on September 22, 2001, and ran for eight seasons until ending on December 20, 2008.
In the 2000s, Spümcø co-produced four video games for which they provided character designs and animations. The first two games were Yoake no Mariko and Yoake no Mariko 2nd Act, two voice acting simulation games in which the goal is for the player to deliver fitting performances of lines from movie scenes of different genres that are playing on-screen. The games were developed in collaboration with Japan Studio under the name "Lindwurm", published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and released for the PlayStation 2 on December 6, 2001, and January 24, 2002, respectively. The third game was Space Fishermen, another collaboration with Japan Studio under the name "Land Ho!", published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and released for the PlayStation 2 on October 24, 2002. The game centers around Diver, Masabo, and Swallow, 3 cel-shaded "space fishermen" whose task is to find undiscovered fish across space and reel them in to document and use as bait to catch other fish. The game was later re-released as a PlayStation 2 Classic on the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Store on August 21, 2013. The fourth and final game was Go! Go! Hypergrind, a skateboarding game released on the Nintendo GameCube by Atlus in North America on November 18, 2003. It features a crew of 11 animated characters who compete to become the next star of an upcoming Spümcø animated show on extreme skateboarding. The game's story states that Toon World is helping Spümcø "to renew interest in the medium and revive the struggling economy [of traditional cel animation]".
Spümcø produced commercials for Comcast and voice over IP company Raketu in 2007. It developed a series of cartoon commercials in 2008 for Pontiac Vibe starring George Liquor and Jimmy the Idiot Boy, but the series remained unreleased after General Motors discontinued the Pontiac Vibe auto line in 2009. Spümcø produced a series of bumpers for Adult Swim in 2011 and again in 2015. It produced the opening couch gags of two episodes of The Simpsons, "Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts", which aired in October 2011 and "Treehouse of Horror XXVI", which aired in October 2015. Spümcø collaborated with streetwear brand Stüssy to create a short series of apparel based on Kricfalusi's designs in 2012, which they promoted with a commercial featuring some of their characters.
In 2012, Kricfalusi and Spümcø started a Kickstarter campaign for a short film called Cans Without Labels, which raised $219,850 from backers. It was released on February 1, 2013 to great success; it was followed by Jimmy's Big Date (2014) and Cigarettes A-Blowin' (2015).
The advertising agency Muhtayzik-Hoffer hired Spümcø in 2013 for an ad campaign for F'real milkshakes. In 2014, a Ren & Stimpy short titled It's Our House Now! was produced to accompany The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. It was released the same day as the film. Spümcø also partnered with animator Mike Judge to produce a series of shorts for UFC that aired on Adult Swim throughout 2016, and produced a series of non-canon, comedic Detective Jenny short bumpers that aired on WBC in 2017 to promote the then-upcoming ninth season.
===Revival of Ren & Stimpy, George Liquor, American and other projects===
On August 24, 2015, Cartoon Network announced that it had acquired the Ren & Stimpy franchise and announced that it had greenlit a revival with Spümcø's involvement, set to begin airing in late 2017. Kricfalusi also stated that a spin-off series with George Liquor for Adult Swim was being discussed as well. In 2019, a revival of The Ripping Friends began airing on Netflix.
A third Ren & Stimpy film titled On the Loose! was released to Netflix in 2020; its theatrical release was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A fourth film is set for a 2024 release.
==Documentary==
In 2013, a website was created to promote a documentary about the Spümcø animation studio titled Danish for "Quality", which released in December 2014. It includes brief interviews with Kricfalusi, other Spümcø staffers including Bob Camp, Lynne Naylor, Jim Smith, and Eddie Fitzgerald and self-proclaimed Spümcø fans such as singer-songwriter "Weird Al" Yankovic, and clips from Ren & Stimpy and other former Spümcø series.
== Books ==
In 2010, a coffee table book titled The Art of Spümcø and John K. was published by Johnson Publishing, consisting of various artworks by Kricfalusi and other Spümcø artists.
On February 1, 2013, Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story was published by animation historian Thad Komorowski. The book contains the detailed history of Spümcø and the Ren & Stimpy cartoons.
Category:Johnsonverse