Ripping Friends

just three of the ripping friends The Ripping Friends follows a group of super heroes billed as The World's Most Manly Men. The four friends Craig, Rip, Slab and Chunk, (a strange combination of the Super Friends, professional wrestlers, Kirk Douglas and Buck Rogers) keep the town of Haplessville safe from their headquarters in Ripcot Centre.

A typical scenario is the plot in the episode "The Indigestible Wad". An evil blob of chewing gum is bent on sucking all the moisture out of the world by jumping from one mouth to another, leaving the victim a dehydrated zombie. The Ripping Friends, seek to draw out The Wad by wearing costumes to lure it; Rip with a toilet on his head, Crash wearing a bathtub.

The Ripping Friends are all aged 36, except Chuck, the baby 35-and-a-half, and are complimented by their drooling sidekick Jimmy, and a foster mum, He-Mom.

"They hated Ripping Friends, it was too manly. I'm always at least 10 years ahead of everyone else. It's my curse." - John K

John K on coming up with the idea of Ripping Friends-

"In 1988, before I sold "Ren and Stimpy", I pitched a whole lot of cartoon shows like "HeHog the Atomic Pig", and the guy laughed through all the pitches, but at the end he said 'this is great stuff, but I can't buy any of it'. He knew it was funny, but said he had to be honest, and the only kinds of things he could sell were those that could be financed by the toy companies. And the only kind of cartons they were interested in were the big action characters. You had to have characters that are really violent and go out there and rip up the world.

the four ripping friendsSo I went back and told the other cartoonists I was working with and said 'You know what, let's give them what they want! Lets give them something that rips up the world even more than any of the cartoons that are out there - and we came up with "The Ripping Friends".

And the funny thing is we couldn't sell it - and a couple of years later we sold "Ren and Stimpy", then for years after everyone wrote about "The Ripping Friends", but we couldn't make a sale. I don't know why. I guess it was too extreme or something."

TV Freak -
You once joked about doing a live-action "Ren And Stimpy" movie with Al Pacino as Ren, John Goodman as Stimpy - no, Oprah Winfrey as Stimpy. Did you ever think of trying live-action with "The Ripping Friends"?

John K on mucking with mediums-
"It was going to be a film at one point with James Cameron but it didn't work out. We would have had to give up the rights and it wasn't a very good deal for us - plus we wouldn't have very much creative input into it. We would have just been selling the characters, and I'd just end up a consultant and I didn't want to do that.

In the end, my partner Kevin Kolde put "The Ripping Friends" deal together. I was busy doing web cartoons. I didn't totally get into it until half way through the season.


Near the end of the series the audio gets a lot better. We do a lot of experimental stuff in the last three or four episodes, especially "Thursday Man" and "Thursday Man 2".

We work with a studio here (in Ottowa) called "The Sound of One Hand", and they pretty much let us do anything. We used stereo, had strange things going on in the left channel that weren't happening in the right channel.

I just love to experiment with every part of the medium. A lot of the companies you work with won't let you do it. Most post-productions don't want you to do anything but the way they've done it for the last fifteen years; that's not really much fun.

So luckily I moved to Ottawa and work with a smaller studio that hadn't done a million cartoons - hadn't done any cartoons - and done very little television. Just a bunch of cool guys who are into doing sound. We hit it off, and like we did in the original "Ren and Stimpy", we tried things. We invented new ways that you use sound and stuff."

TV Freak -
US broadcast regulations wouldn't allow a scene involving He-Mom smacking her foster kids, The Ripping Friends. Are their constraints making a cartoon aimed at a younger audience?

John K on ratings-
"We had to tone it down considerably for the first season; it's not anywhere near as violent as it should be, although near the end of the first series it gets more sick and crazy - but it needs to be a lot sicker and way more violent. So we're going for an adult slot for the second season.

I guess my preference would be prime-time."

John K. 2 - 'Ren and Stimpy' »