Still, when Cyrus and her team sought him out, the animator was familiar with the singer through the tabloids. The Canada-born Kricfalusi, 58, prefers country music. Nickelodeon gave Kricfalusi the boot, turning the show over to a different team and keeping new episodes on the air for three more years. They accused him of taking too long to produce episodes, while he resisted network efforts to tone down the content.
“Ren & Stimpy” was a ratings hit, but tensions between the network and Kricfalusi quickly strained. The cartoon’s bits are etched into the memories of a generation, from the Slinky-parodying “Log” song (“It’s big! It’s heavy! It’s wood!”) to the board game, “Don’t Whiz on the Electric Fence.” His show followed the adventures of maniacal Chihuahua Ren and his hairball-spewing, bulbous cat sidekick, Stimpy. Many credit Kricfalusi’s work with paving the way for an era of animation that celebrates the weird, from “SpongeBob SquarePants” to network Adult Swim. You would think of her as a child star, and here she is getting away with all this stuff.” “That was part of the appeal of ‘Ren & Stimpy.’ It’s the same appeal with Miley. “Audiences like the idea of innocent mediums being edgy,” he says.
John Kricfalusi’s cartoons appear during Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz tour. The two are from different eras - “Ren & Stimpy” debuted in 1991, 15 years before Cyrus’ “Hannah Montana” - but Kricfalusi says they share a common ground. So when looking for background animations to play during one of the songs in her show, which will hit the Barclays Center on Saturday, she turned to another kids’ entertainer who also isn’t exactly a poster child for his network: John Kricfalusi, the creator of Nickelodeon’s “The Ren & Stimpy Show.” The pop star’s concert performances are heavy on scantily-clad dancing, tongue-wagging lasciviousness and booty-clapping twerks, which have all but erased her squeaky-clean Hannah Montanta image. Miley Cyrus probably isn’t going to be invited to a Disney Channel reunion anytime soon.