TOYS FOR MEN - Ripping Friends Action Figure + Accessories

Got a young son or kid brother? Have him look at this and tell me if he'd buy an action figure like this. Or would you?This is Rip in his natural street wear. He is part of the Ripping Friends Super Hero group. They are the world's most manly men. So manly, in fact that they don't actually have super powers, because super powers are cheating and are for wimps. The Ripping Friends win their battles though sheer raw manly muscle, will power and the ability to take pain. The more they hurt themselves, the more they love it.
The Ripping Friends are Time Travelers. They exist always and everywhere there is evil to be vanquished. How do they go through time? With superior scientific technology? No. Through combined rage. They are so manly, they can rip through time. They just reach out their massive angry arms and grab a chunk of space and time in their hands and rip holes in it. It hurts like the Devil to do this and they scream at the top their lungs while suffering for humanity. When Hitler, Genghis Khan or Nebuchadnezzar's armies of evil come bursting through the holes, The Ripping Friends beat the living crap out of them.
Here's Rip ready to climb Mount Olympus to kick the crap out of the Gods.
Here's Rip in his voyage to the ugliest part of the ocean gear.
Here's Rip ready to rip tomorrow.

Tell me whether the boys in your family want manly toys like this that can beat Hell out of G.I. Joe, He Man, Ken, Elmo and every WWE wimp.



The Ripping Friends build up their tolerance for hurt every morning in their pain machines. "They also practice disciplined marching exercises and sing the "Whistle While You Wince" battle song.

By the way, I drew the first Rip and the costumes and color were done by Bruce Timm, Lynne Naylor, Jim Smith and me. There are many more too.
This is Rip giving their arch-enemy a Purple Nurple for trying to destroy the earth.
These happy lads seem to be saying "We Love the Ripping Friends Toys! Yeah Yeah Yeah, Oh Baby Oh!"

If you wanna see more Spumco toy action click this sucker:

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/spumco%20toys

Rip-a-Long CEREAL PRIZES

I've always considered myself a champion of the audience. While most of the industry conspires against being nice to humans, I fight to appeal to normal human desires. I don't succeed every single time, but at least I try.

When I do kids' cartoons I aim to give kids what everyone else refuses to. Like, can you imagine a super hero cartoon where the characters actually punch anybody? Well I had to fight executives for even the very few punches that appeared in a show about a genre that is all about punching.

In the Ripping Friends-a show that had many conspiring forces against it, I purposely crafted a segment to let the kids know that Spumco cartoonists were on their side.

I came up with a concept called "Rip Along With The Ripping Friends". In each of these sequences, kids would write the Ripping Friends to tell them who was being mean to them this week: Bullies, Teachers, Networks, Cartoon writers, Parents, Homework assignments, Lumpy toymakers, etc. The Ripping Friends would read the kids' complaints, empathize and then go after the monsters who dared to be mean to them.

Cereal companies are mean now, but they used to love kids. They used to cover their cereal boxes with great cartoon art, games and cut-out-activities. They made great entertaining animated commercials, they sponsored cartoon shows on TV, they coated every single nugget of cereal with glorious sparkly sugar, but the thing they did best was...they put PRIZES in every cereal box!

http://theimaginaryworld.com/cbarch.html

In this particluar Rip-Along, The Ripping Friends try to find out who's responsible for not putting real prizes in cereal anymore and then they rectify the affront.

RipAlongCEREALprize
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

This segment pretty much illustrates my whole philosophy of entertainment-let actual entertainers do whatever they can to entertain their audience and stay out of their way, then collect the money. The irony of the animation here is that much of it is pretty blandly executed. I drew the first half of the segment and did my best to try to get everyone along the production line to trace my drawings exactly. They didn't, they felt compelled to add lumps to every drawing, but you can at least recognize my style underneath the lumps- in the first half of the cartoon.







You idiot!

Those kids...

... believe in puppets...

...you're ruining...

...the MAGIC!

Yeah! Try to use your head, willya?!

I'm sorry fellas...

I'm just...

...Rrrr...

...eally...

...MAD!


The second half of the cartoon is some combination of me and the generic Canadian style. It was storyboarded in a very funny style by Mike Kerr, but his board then went through the blandifying Canadian studio who composed eveything in the middle, designed ugly incidental characters and liberally piled the lumps all over the stuff. I did some of the drawings of Rip, trying to keep the life and wackiness that Mike did in the storyboard, but of course that had to be covered in lumps too.

It was this bland, symmetric uncomposed lumpiness that drove me to write up the manuals I have started to post on the blog.
Even though the expressions in the drawing above are extreme by modern standards, notice that the features on either side of the face are totally symmetrical. The original drawings had a lot more life, but the Canadian director "fixed" them for me and evened them all out.
After I caught him, he explained he had to do it, because Jim Smith and my drawings were "off-model". Jim and I designed the characters.



That same "director" designed this wonderfully appealing pile of lumps above.



A lot of this art makes me cringe, but I'm going to show some clips now and then of stuff that I've screened at festivals that got a lot of laughs from the audience. Luckily for me, many modern cartoons have so dulled people's eyeballs that they can laugh at satire and gags despite many nasty drawings.







See the pin-point eyeball pupils in the characters above? Dead. Robotic. Non-organic. I had to make manuals just to show Canadian studios how to make eyes look like they are coming out of living creatures. The manuals were hidden in the file cabinet of the idiot production manager. What was his name again, Mike?

Wow! A slightly non-symmetrical drawing somehow slipped through the system! The director probably got fired for this.

Ripping Friends Satire

Ripping Friends had a sequence in each episode called "Rip Along With The Ripping Friends".


It was a segment meant to serve 2 purposes:

1) TO RE-USE STOCK ANIMATION AND SAVE A FEW BUCKS-like in 60s/70s Hanna Barbera and Filmation cartoons-the show was a very low budget so I thought this would be a good way to save some money for a few minutes that could be used to put more animation in the main story.
It didn't work though because the studios we subcontracted to kept redrawing the same drawings over and over again, even though I told them it was OK not to waste their (and my) money.

2) TO DO SOME SATIRE IN DEFENSE OF KIDS' NEEDS- This need was well satisfied despite some very bland drawings that were beyond Spumco's control.
The idea of the "Rip-Alongs" was to have the stars of the show take letters from kids who the corporate world or anybody else was doing bad things to, and RIP them to shreds.



So the Ripping Friends would rip bullies, corporations that ruined fun for kids by taking the violence out of cartoons and replacing it with morals, Cereal companies that stopped putting prizes in cereal, Home video and game compainies that design retarded controls and unitelligible manuals, etc.

This particular Rip Along was designed to force Hot Dog companies to get in synch with Bun manufacturers so that we didn't have to throw out 4 weiners for every bun pack we opened.

If only they had listened!



By the way, the evil networks made us cut out the funniest scene. (As always!) Maybe that's why the hotdog companies didn't respond.

I'm going to try to restore it in time for the San Francisco show on July 28, 29.

Wish me luck!

Happy Birthday Jim Smith!

 It's time to celebrate the man who made you laugh and cry growing up!

Jim of course drew some of the funniest and most emotional scenes in the original Spumco Ren and Stimpy Show. Above is an animation drawing by David Feiss from layouts and storyboards drawn by Jim.

 Here are some more unforgettable scenes Jim drew.

 He also designed the manly rugged backgrounds in many of the cartoons.

 Here's Bill Wray's tasty painting of Jim's layout.

 Here are some of my favorite Jim drawings and presentation art that really show his unique qualities...

 the Predator Broods

I usually give Jim the most moody scenes in cartoons because being the heavy brooding type himself, he feels the depths of human torment more than anyone and is only too happy to have his audience plumb the depths with him. That's the Predator up there waiting for life to evolve. It's a long wait and thus his brooding despair.

 War is Hell

Jim really feels the Hell that our fighting men go through to protect their buddies and our freedoms because it's just like what cartoonists go through.

GEORGE LIQUOR'S DEN

Here are some moody scenes from a pitch for the George Liquor Show we made to Fox long ago, while waiting for life to evolve.

Wouldn't you love to live in this manly musty den of stuffed denizens of the forest?

the RIPPING FRIENDS

 Jim was the top Ripping Friends artist. His drawings were so manly and strong that all our cleanup artists had a hell of a time keeping the guts of his roughs.

Jim, master of serious

 Jim has many talents but the one that I find the most original and unique is his ability to make really serious drawings and moods look funny. The character Crag is a very serious leader and authority figure and you can't just draw him with normal cartoony techniques.

 I had a hell of a time trying to get our overseas studios to use drawings like these. They never believed we actually wanted anything to look this manly so they kept watering the drawings down or just throwing them out completely. They kept telling me they were "off-model" and thought they were doing us a favor!

Bonus Rendered Art

I love Jim's rendering style too. Here are a couple treats from some development we did on a movie pitch for Reel FX.

Own Jim's Sketchbooks and Drawings!

You could probably nab this genuine original Ren and Stimpy sketch or others if you pleaded with the birthday boy yourself. Or you can buy one of his thrilling sketchbooks if you contact him at his blog or maybe even on Facebook.

JIM SMITH CARTOONS: Sketchbooks for sale cheap

Send the man who gave your childhood meaning some birthday love in a comment on his blog:

JIM SMITH CARTOONS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY FAVORITE CARTOONIST AND PAL, JIM!