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An original 12-field production drawing from The Ren and Stimpy Show, Spumcø for Nickelodeon, early 1990s, depicting Ren and Stimpy in full anarchic flight, the pair caught mid-sprint in a blur of limbs and momentum, red pencil speed spirals blazing beneath their feet.
When The Ren and Stimpy Show arrived on Nickelodeon in August 1991, it detonated a charge under American television animation that is still reverberating. John Kricfalusi's series was a deliberate and gleeful rejection of everything Saturday morning television had settled into: limited animation, safe storytelling, sanitised character design.
Kricfalusi brought back rubber-hose energy, close-up grotesquery, genuine comic timing and a visual language that owed as much to Bob Clampett and Tex Avery as it did to anything contemporary. The industry took notice immediately, and a generation of animators who grew up watching it went on to reshape the medium entirely.
What makes this drawing particularly special is the combination of character animation and effects work on a single sheet. The red pencil spiral forms beneath both characters are effects animation overlays, drawn in red to distinguish them from the graphite character work and guide the effects animator through the scene. It is a vivid, energetic drawing that captures something essential about what made the show so alive.
Production drawings from the original Spumcø Nickelodeon run surface infrequently, and the embossed Nickelodeon studio watermark on the sheet places this unambiguously within that first, electric chapter of the series.
Graphite and red pencil on animation bond, three-hole peg registration intact. Drawing number 3, production annotations DSEP, FX-13 and RS-13 present. Great condition.
Estimate: $200 - 400