The Boy Who Cried Rat!

"The Boy Who Cried Rat!"
The Ren & Stimpy Show episode
Episode no.	Season 1 Episode 5b
Directed by	John Kricfalusi
Story by	John Kricfalusi Vincent Waller
Production code	RS-03B
Original air date	September 8, 1991 (1991-09-08)
Episode chronology
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The Boy Who Cried Rat! is the 6th episode of the first season of The Ren & Stimpy Show . It originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on September 8, 1991.

Plot

Ren and Stimpy are homeless, broke and hungry again. After being chased away by George Liquor after attempting to eat discarded food from his garbage bin, Ren devises the scheme where he will pose as a rat while Stimpy will use his feline abilities as a cat to pose as a rat-killer. Ren sneaks into the house of the perpetually clueless couple, Mr. and Mrs. Pipe, who are upset to see an apparent rat in their house. The Pipes hire Stimpy to kill Ren, which he avoids doing as part of the scheme. Finally, Stimpy is forced by the Pipes to try to kill Ren, who is forced to reveal the scheme to save his life. Ren is unable to pay back the money that Stimpy had collected as Stimpy has eaten the money.

Cast

• Ren-voice of John Kricfalusi
• Stimpy-voice of Billy West
• Mrs. Pipe-voice of Cheryl Chase
• Mr. Pipe-voice of Billy West
• George Liquor-voice of Harris Peet

Production

The episode was ordered in October 1990 for a premiere scheduled for the fall of 1991. The showrunner, John Kricfalusi, was heavily involved in supervising the illustrations for The Boy Who Cried Rat!. ^[1] The process of making the drawings scene by scene in order to create the illusion of movement was done at the Carbunkle studio in Vancouver with much of the work being done by the husband-and-wife team of Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong. ^[2] The episode marked the second appearance of Kricfalusi's George Liquor character, an oafish opinionated lout based on Kricfalusi's own father despite the reservations by the Nickelodeon network about the character. ^[3] The producer of the show, Vanessa Coffey, strongly disliked the Liquor character whom she did not favor at all.. ^[3] Kricfalusi stated about the opposition of female network executives to the Liquor character: "It's purely that a bunch of politically correct women see George Liquor-the ultimate caricatured right wing character-and they hate him".. ^[3]

Reception

The journalist Thad Komorowski gave The Boy Who Cried Rat! three stars, writing the episode was full of "sheer joy and pure anarchy". ^[4]

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.

References

1. Komorowski 2017, p. 91.
2. Komorowski 2017, p. 101.
3. Komorowski 2017, p. 174.
4. Komorowski 2017, p. 97 & 354.