The Ren and Stimpy Show/Headscratchers


 * OK, here's something I'll never be able to tolerate: why in the world does Stimpy have fingernails over his gloves!? It just looks so weird, even by R&S standards. And they obviously went the extra mile to have the fingernails there, because common cartoon form is excluding them.
 * The artistic style of the show was to include human characteristics that could get dirty, look yellow and pain unsightly. Fingernails added a lot of this where a smooth finger wouldn't have had as much detail nor as many places for the grime and mucus to build up.
 * Obviously the gloves were made from human hands.
 * It's similar to the mammalian Disney characters, whose hands are nearly always portrayed in white gloves. I'm wondering if the "glove" is really the white skin, complete with lines and cuffs, of their palms and fingers. Stimpy just goes one better by growing nails.
 * Maybe it's John K's joking homage to the absurd trend of cartoon characters wearing gloves? Maybe after too long, they actually graft to one's hands and become part of them.
 * What did Ren mean in the episode "Insomniac Ren" when he thought, "Sleep. Maybe I'm too smart to sleep. Yes, that's it. Stimpy's asleep, and he's an idiot."
 * Smart people think too much to sleep, but stupid people don't think at all.
 * He was probably questioning the concept of sleeping.
 * Another interpretation is that Ren wasn't thinking clearly at that point, due to lack of sleep.
 * In "Big Baby Scam", Ren and Stimpy are starving, and decide to pay two babies $50 bucks to assume their lives as pampered human children. Why, pray tell, couldn't they use the $50 bucks to buy something to eat instead?
 * Rule of Funny. There'd be no need for the episode plot if they did just that.
 * Besides, they could get more than fifty bucks worth of food if it all went well.
 * For that matter, what were two naked human infants, (granted they could walk and speak intelligently) supposed to go off and do?
 * Which board game does "Purecheesy" in "Sven Hoek" reference? This troper does not live in an English-speaking country, so perhaps it's called something different in my language...
 * It references Parcheesi.
 * Going back to this, what game is "Gamey" supposed to be? Scribble is obviously Scrabble, Monotony is Monopoly, Purecheesy is Parcheesi, and Misery Date is Mystery Date, but Gamey is lost on me.
 * "Gamey" is probably just a generic, open-ended joke that's really more a play on the word "game" than has a specific origin in one particular board game.
 * When Ren and Stimpy pressed the History Eraser Button, they get erased from history. In that case, why is "Ren and Stimpy" written down afterwards, when there never was a Ren and Stimpy?
 * Because it was moving to a logo on a wall and you got to see that get erased.
 * We all know that Ren can be a complete bastard at times, but at others, he's portrayed as a genuine loving, caring companion to Stimpy. (We can't say that about innocent animals he has no emotional attachment to, but we can clearly say that about Stimpy.) He's shown to, usually, only flip out and hit Stimpy when something major happens, (such as Stimpy giving away eighty-seven million dollars.) Even when Ren was at his worst- such as Stimpy's Fanclub, or Sven Hoek, he never laid a finger on Stimpy, as much as he wanted to. So what did he do to Stimpy in "Ren Seeks Help" that was SO TERRIBLE, it resulted in Stimpy sobbing hysterically and kicking Ren out of the house? Did Ren actually RAPE Stimpy or something? As effed-up as his character is, Ren doesn't seem like the type of person who would do something THAT terrible to his one true, genuine friend.