 How did you come up with the the idea for Ren? Like what was your background for it? I didn't come up with Ren. Actually Ren and Stippy were characters that John K created for an animated show he created called Your Gang and he pitched it around and pitched it to Nickelodeon and they liked the dog and the cat. They were kind of minor characters in the show. They said let's do a show about those guys. So we created the Ren and Stippy show based on those characters but at that point they were more or less just character designs with sort of personalities but not much of that. See the thing about the Ren and Stippy show that stands out to me was it was so different than everything else that was on Nickelodeon. It was definitely an adult cartoon that was kind of under the guise for kids. That's one way to describe it but really we were making a kids cartoon. It just depends on what your idea of what kids should or shouldn't see is. I think the kids are smarter than people think. I think the kids know more than people think and they have good sense of humor. They're funny. They get you know, racy humor and I you know we designed the show to be funny for kids and funny to watch and to look at because it's just funny animation and funny characters doing funny stuff and then under that we put layer upon layer upon layer of the innuendo and suggestive stuff not in a creepy underhanded way. It was just the kind it's sophisticated humor. It's sophisticated because it's got pathos. It's got satire. It's got a million different kinds of humor. It's deep stuff you know and there's jokes in the drawings or jokes in attitudes and deliveries and stuff. People have always put stuff in cartoons. You watch Warner Brothers cartoons in the 40s. There's tons of suggested stuff in there that when I grew up I like aha now I get that joke. Well that's what we wanted to do with Greenwich TV. We wanted it to be funny for kids and then we wanted them to grow up and really get the joke so that the show has legs and it has some depth. I think a lot of cartoons that are pitch and hold for an audience of six to eleven years old which is this weird graph that they created for programming and what happens is you talk down to kids and you have some preconceived notions about well we better decide what's right for six or eleven years old. I think that's all BS. I mean I think it ended too soon personally but how did you feel about when they revamped it in the 2000s when they put it on Spike when they did that. You know I had nothing to do with that. That was way you know beyond a new window. Well I don't really have anything to say about it because I actually haven't watched the cartoons. I was a little annoyed when I wasn't asked to do them because I was the one who finished the show. I was the one who delivered the show when someone else didn't. So when that person was asked to do the new shows and I had no idea they were even thinking about doing shows. I didn't know they were being made. No one told me. I never got copies of the DVDs when they came out and somebody else did the commentary on my cartoons. And so I wasn't even given free copies of those cartoons and yet I was the creative director of the show. Yet I was the one who delivered the shows. I'm the one who directed more of them than anyone. And so you have a favorite episode that you've ever worked on. Stimpy's Invention. It's my favorite because there's a lot of me in it. I wrote it. It was my idea. I wrote it. I storyboarded it. And when we showed it at a party with the third big party there was lots of Hollywood types there. And people were laughing out loud with tears running down their face. And I looked around and I'd never seen anyone really do more than a chuckle even at the funniest cartoons. It's like people are just belly laughing at me. I thought this is like a high point in my life. This is one of those moments that you got to remember and appreciate the rest of your life because you did something right. And when John and I worked closely together on a project like that we've made some pretty great cartoons. That's kind of my favorite.