Spümcø, Inc. ( ; stylized as SPÜMCØ) was an American animation studio that was active from December 29, 1989 to July 18, 2005 and based in Los Angeles, California. The studio was best known for working on the first two seasons of The Ren & Stimpy Show for Nickelodeon and for various commercials. The studio 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 Spüm", whom he jokingly described as the inventor of animation.

History

Origins

thumb|right|200px|[[John Kricfalusi, head of Spümcø]]

In the 1980s, animators John Kricfalusi and Lynne Naylor attempted to sell original cartoon ideas while working for various animation studios, including Filmation. Despite Kricfalusi's claims, Spüm is actually not a Danish word and Raymond Spüm is a fictional figure.

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".

The Ren & Stimpy Show

thumb|right|upright=0.90|The Ren & Stimpy Show title card

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. Spümcø continued to produce the show for the next two 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.

After Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon fired Kricfalusi in 1992, and Nickelodeon moved production from Spümcø to Games Animation. Kricfalusi confirmed that the primary reason for the Nickelodeon executives' decision seemed to be due to the level of violence in Ren & Stimpy. He specifically referred to the episode "Man's Best Friend", which features Ren beating the character George Liquor with an oar, as the probable cause for his firing. Nickelodeon banned the episode from airing; the episode did not air in North America until Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" began in 2003. According to Wray, Kricfalusi believed, "[E]very step after the storyboards weakens the process", and that he "fought for the integrity of the storyboards", and lengthened production time because he wished to salvage the quality of the series. Wray stated, "On some occasions Kricfalusi completed an episode in eight months. Other occasions, he completed an episode in two or three months." Wray described Kricfalusi's ideal production period per episode as four half-hour cartoons per year, and added that the arrangement would not "jibe with our production schedule".

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. Aaron Springer was hired as an animator at the company from 1997 until 1998.

In 1997, Björk, a long-time fan of Kricfalusi's work, insisted on him doing an animated music video for her when they met at one of her concerts. Kricfalusi reused George Liquor, whom he had purchased the rights to from MTV Networks after his firing, as the titular and main character in the Flash Internet cartoon series The Goddamn George Liquor Program. 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 12 episodes, with 4 cartoons unfinished due to budget problems. The series starred Dirty Dog and Cigarettes the Cat. When asked about the style of the cartoon series, creator Kricfalusi stated:

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 as part of the Yogi Bear marathon. 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. as well as two Jetsons cartoons titled Father & Son Day and The Best Son.

Later years and closure

After Nickelodeon fired Kricfalusi from The Ren & Stimpy Show in September 1992, he 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 September 22, 2001, and ran until January 26, 2002.

During 2002, after The Ripping Friends had been cancelled, Kricfalusi was contacted by cable network TNN (later Spike TV, now Paramount Network) which was struggling for ratings and needed a new audience.

In these years, Spümcø co-produced three 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 Sony Computer Entertainment, and released exclusively in Japan for the PlayStation 2 on December 6, 2001, and January 24, 2002, respectively. The third and final game was Go! Go! Hypergrind, a skateboarding game released on the 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]".

On July 18, 2005, Kricfalusi decided to shut down Spümcø shortly thereafter, following a lawsuit by Carbunkle which was filed against Spümcø in the Canadian court system over royalties and credit for Bob Jaques's contributions to Ren and Stimpy. In the summer of 2008, Kricfalusi made a partial payment to Jaques after Jaques had ceased seeking legal action against him. The Spümcø trademark expired in 2007.

Legacy

Spümcø's influence on Nickelodeon Animation Studio was immaculate, as basically every person of note who worked at Spümcø had varying involvement in productions by the studio. Doug Lawrence, a layout assistant on the show, became a key writer on Rocko's Modern Life and SpongeBob SquarePants. Members who initially refused to join Games Animation, including Vincent Waller and Richard Pursel, co-founders Bob Camp and Lynne Naylor, Games Animation hires Chris Reccardi and Bill Wray as well as later Spümcø employees including Aaron Springer would work on SpongeBob of varying capacities; Waller serves as a showrunner on the series as of 2025. Jim Smith also joined the studio to work on The X's, with Kricfalusi apparently allowed to return for a voice cameo. Kricfalusi also pitched a Ren & Stimpy short film for the release of The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water to the studio that did not materialize.

In 2016, it was announced on Tumblr that Kricfalusi and former Cartoon Network storyboard artist Gabe Del Valle were starting a new studio based in the Los Angeles area and were seeking new employees. The name of the studio was not included in the announcement, but was inferred to be "Spümtwø" by the presence of "spumtwo" in the contact email. However, the announcement was removed from Del Valle's Tumblr account sometime afterward, most likely due to Del Valle being rehired by Cartoon Network shortly afterward.

On March 4, 2017, Kricfalusi announced a second new studio to be based in Miami, Florida, named John K. Studios. The studio's only project was an animated short for Adult Swim, which advertised the then-upcoming UFC 200 match on July 9, 2016, produced prior to the announcement of forming the company. The short was referred to as the "big project" in Del Valle's previous announcement. However, as of July 2018, the studio website is offline.

Documentary

In 2013, a website was created to promote a documentary about the Spümcø animation studio. A teaser trailer was posted on Vimeo which included brief interviews with Kricfalusi, Spümcø staffer Eddie Fitzgerald and self-proclaimed Spümcø fan and singer-songwriter "Weird Al" Yankovic, and clips from Ren & Stimpy and other former Spümcø series, giving the impression that it was authorized by Kricfalusi. However, sometime in 2014 or 2015 the website was taken down and the Vimeo account was deleted without notice or explanation. Many of Kricfalusi's fans were left wondering if the people involved in the project were unable to get further funding or a distribution agreement or that they could not obtain the proper licensing to use clips.

On February 1, 2013, Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story was published by animation historian Thad Komorowski. The book contains a detailed history of Spümcø and both Ren & Stimpy series; Kricfalusi was not happy with his depiction in the book.

See also

  • List of Spümcø works
  • Nickelodeon Animation Studio

References

  • Spümcø's Wonderful World of Cartoons! at the Internet Archive
  • Spümcø at the Internet Movie Database
  • ASIFA-Hollywood: The International Animated Film Society
  • Spümcø at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive