Sven Höek (The Ren & Stimpy Show)

"Sven Höek"
The Ren & Stimpy Show episode
Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 6
Directed by	John Kricfalusi
Story by	John Kricfalusi Bob Camp
Production code	RS4-3A
Original air date	November 7, 1992 (1992-11-07)

Sven Höek is the sixth episode of the second season of The Ren & Stimpy Show. It originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on November 7, 1992.

Plot

Ren and Stimpy sit at home through the night, waiting for Ren's European cousin Sven to arrive. Ren is growing increasingly annoyed of Stimpy's stupidity and expresses his excitement to see Sven, with whom he had spent his childhood and believed to be intelligent. In the morning, Stimpy attends to a nonsensical "appointment", during which he pays a quarter to visit Mr. Horse hidden in a hidden compartment of the house, who immediately kicks him away. This angers Ren enough to prepare beating up Stimpy, only for Sven to arrive. Much to Ren's horror, he discovers that Sven had become an idiotic and bumbling fool akin to Stimpy. Ren's ire continues to grow while Sven and Stimpy bond over their shared love of disgusting antics, becoming the best of friends.

After Ren leaves to work, Stimpy and Sven engage in a round of "seek-and-hide", only for Stimpy to be found at his litter box, with the duo conversing in it and Stimpy pleading with the audience for privacy. The duo also play a board game called Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence, which requires them to urinate over its eponymous electric fence. When Ren arrives home, he is infuriated by the destruction and vandalism of increasingly absurd items in his collection. Having reached his breaking point, he storms towards the duo and threatens to harm and torture them, traumatizing both Stimpy and Sven and making them cry. However, he decides to urinate before torturing the duo, only to notice the board game and urinates on it as a gesture of contempt. The game explodes, resulting in the house being destroyed and sending the trio to Hell, where Satan mocks Ren for his foolish action.

Cast

• Ren Höek - John Kricfalusi
• Mr. Horse - John Kricfalusi
• Stimpy - Billy West
• Sven Höek - Billy West
• Satan - Michael Pataki

Production

The episode had a troubled production, moving forward at a sluggish pace. The episode was approved of in November 1991 with the network executive Will McRobb writing in a memo: "It's great to see an episode that explores the essential stupidity of Stimpy and Ren's equally essential exasperation". To avoid complaints of ethnic stereotypes, Sven was described as only as a generic "European" in the episode. However, everything about Sven suggests he is German and more specifically Bavarian as he speaks with a German accent, uses words such as ja (German for yes), wears a Tyrolean hat and is dressed in a Lederhosen. The episode spent 11 weeks in the lay-out stage, and when the lay-outs were completed, the showrunner, John Kricfalusi, promptly announced that three-quarters of the work would have to be redone. The American journalist Thad Komorowski blamed much of the slow pace of production due to "micromanagement" by Kricfalsui, who altered the timing work that had already done by Bob Jaques on the episode, which further delayed the episode. Kricfalsui was notably unhappy with the background painting done on the episode, causing him to rip the paintings done by the background painters off the wall as he accused the painters of using "candy cane" colors..

Jaques, the chief of the Carbunkle studio in Vancouver, that served as the main subcontractor for the Spümcø studio in Los Angeles complained about the poor lay-out work that his studio received as he expressed surprise that Kricfalusi "never took any sort of directional effort" to correct the mistakes. In the lay-out drawings of the scene done by Michael Fontanelli of the Spümcø studio of the scene where Ren urinates on the game, Ren walked onto the game. Chris Sauvé of the Carbunkle studio said of the scene as presented to him when it was sent north to Vancouver: "That was a difficult scene to figure out because it had a pan, a pan walk, and it had to stop at an exact certain point to allow him to turn around and point at the game. There's a lot to figure out there. I remember saying to Bob, 'well when I plan this whole thing out, he's supposed to walk by this game, he steps on the game! The game is standing right in his way of walking, what am I supposed to do?' And Bob did this drawing of Ren's leg stretching and we thought 'fuck, that's hilarious'".

Kricfalusi who regarded Sven Höek as his masterpiece spent a disproportionate amount of the summer of 1992 working on the episode with the intention of having extended to half an hour, much to the vexation of the Nickelodeon network who had expected the episode to be finished for a premiere in the early fall of 1992. Fitting the German theme of the episode, it was intended to have Sven Höek première at about the same time as the annual Oktoberfest beer festival which occurs in Munich every September. At the time that the Spümcø studio lost the contract for The Ren & Stimpy Show on 21 September 1992, Sven Höek was in post-production. The episode was finished by the Games Animation studio.

The episode was heavily censored by Nickelodeon which banned the "sword swallowing" scene where it is strongly implied that Stimpy and Sven are lovers who are engaged in fellatio, which they refer to by the euphemism "sword shallowing". Much of Ren's soliloquy was censored, especially the line where he declares his intention to gorge out the eyes of Stimpy and Sven. Kricfalsui has expressed much displeasure over the censorship along with the post-production work done by Games Animation.

Reception

Komorowski rated Sven Höek as one of the stronger episodes of the second season, giving it four stars out of five. The American critic Martin Goodman praised Sven Höek for Ren's "stunning descent into menacing lunacy". Goodman expressed his approval for the episode for its shattering of taboos as it is clearly suggested that Stimpy and Sven are engaged in a homosexual relationship and the way that Sven shares his bloody bandages with Stimpy at a time when the AIDs epidemic was raging and controversial. Right from the pilot episode Big House Blues in 1990, there were strong hints in the show that Ren and Stimpy were a gay couple. Significantly when Ren comes homes in Sven Höek, he is enraged by the graffiti written on the walls of his house reading "Sven+Stimpy" placed inside of a drawing of a heart. However despite the frequent hints about the sexuality of the eponymous duo, Jim Ballatine, a producer on the show, complained that many artists at Spümcø were "angry cynical young men who probably hate fags". Ballantine noted that the homosexuality of Ren and Stimpy was portrayed as sick, depraved, perverse, degenerate and unnatural. Further reinforcing the heteronormative message was that time to time, Ren was shown as attracted to human women-which notwithstanding the connotations of bestiality-is presented as more normal and natural than his relationship with Stimpy. Goodman was more positive in his assessment of the Sven-Stimpy relationship, which he felt was a bold move in the context of 1992 where gay subjects were almost completely non-existent in American animation.

Books

• Klickstein, Matthew; Summers, Marc (2013). Slimed! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age. London: Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN 9781101614099.
• Komorowski, Thad (2017). Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media. ISBN 978-1629331836.