Weird, primitive drawings in the first Ren and Stimpy cartoons

It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted, and I'd like to apologize for that. Hopefully, this should make up for all the time I've been gone.

I've been watching a lot of The Ren & Stimpy Show after finishing The Hep Cat, and I came to realize that the first four or so cartoons in the series are... pretty slip-shod. A lot of the drawings are primitive and loose, and that is what I plan to showcase today.

Not that these cartoons are bad; I really like them! But I just can't look at them the same way I did before.

You can tell that this is an early Ren and Stimpy just from the color styling. It's a lot more neutral here than it came to be later in the rest of the run. The characters are also drawn very simply; there aren't as many planes and shapes holding the characters together than the end of this first season.

There were also a lot of funny-looking drawings, just for the sake of being strange. I'm glad they fixed this later (and it's too bad that Games reverted to these out-of-context weird drawings when they took over the show).

Ren really looks weird here, doesn't he? His construction isnt as nice and solid as it got a little later, and he looks really flat. Not a whole lot of appeal. Then again, he looked okay in Big House Blues, so maybe some of the overseas studios can take the blame for a lot of these bad drawings. Who knows?

Toes!

Very simple staging here too. Everything's in the center of the screen, which tends to be a thing a lot of beginners do, myself included.

I really like how this looks though. Varied composition and really cool colors!

I actually really dig this drawing. It's funny to see this early side view of Stimpy!

Weird eye wrinkles, but I actually like these too.

This expression is kind of odd, though. It just seems to float. Nothing is keeping these features in place.

John K. went on a lot about there being an "Insect Ren," but I would like to refer to this as "Bird Ren." Check out that mouth (or beak, rather)!

What do you think? I'll be posting more of these caps soon enough, so stay tuned! (On another note, I can't stand these awful "remasters" of the Ren and Stimpy cartoons. They're so disgusting!)