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Presenting... "Ultimate" Sven Hoek
(Ren & Stimpy are © Viacom International).
I want to point something out: this is the work of me *as well as* Evan Oliver. He helped out tons doing a lot of the airbrushing and it wouldn't look anything like it does now without him staying up 'til crazy hours, going insane drawing little lines back over that damn time code. So if you see this man on the street, buy him a pie. If you want to read my ramblings about this whole thing and how it came about, read on.
When the first DVD set of the Ren & Stimpy Show came out, the idea was to make it as uncut as possible. You probably know by now that versions with some edits for TV running time reasons made it onto the set by accident, but luckily it also included some must-haves that R&S fans had never had access to before (except on horrible quality bootlegs).
The DVD of course included the episode "Sven Hoek", a true classic from the second season in which Ren's long-lost cousin, who turns out to be a complete dimwit, appears and bonds with Stimpy, driving Ren insane in the process. The cartoon has a great scene near the end where Ren returns home and finds all the mess they've created, and goes on one of the greatest fits of rage ever seen in a cartoon.
Nickelodeon didn't like this very much though and cut bits out here and there. There were various versions of this scene, some more complete than others (a version shown on TV in America was apparently quite cut down), but all of them missed out one of the most violent sounding threats: Ren telling the two that he'd gouge their eyes out. On the DVD, this scene was added back in, but over a decades' worth of censorship had taken its toll, as the source for the restored scene was a VHS tape that had an electronic time counter covering part of the picture. I'm guessing it was the only copy left.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I decided that something should be done about this and started to think about how the time-code could be removed. I considered the possibility of using computer video processing filters originally designed to remove network bug logos from TV recordings, but in the end, it had to be done manually, frame by frame. (Well, OK, that's not quite true - "pose by pose" would be more accurate). What started out as something just to fulfill my curiosity (I wanted to see if it was actually possible) turned into a two-man job between me and my friend Evan Oliver. When we heard that John Kricfalusi - the creator of R&S and saviour of TV animation, if you happen to just be browsing through this site (although I'm guessing you'll know that already if you're in to animation) - wanted to have this version of the scene included in the upcoming "Ultimate Ren & Stimpy" DVD box set, we were astonished and went back and re-did most of it.
Anyway, since John's posting a clip about Dialogue in cartoons - and using this part of Sven Hoek as an example - he's asked me to post info about the restored clip here, and I could hardly disagree to that.
So, here it is, a low quality version of the scene. Just click the image below to view it. You'll notice that I've also made the join between the high-quality episode and the VHS previously cut footage less noticeable. And for the fellow video geeks, you might be interested to know that I've done some contrast and colour correction, used some trickery to make the end of the cut scene lead back into the rest of the episode more seamlessly, and also noise-reduced the sequence (don't worry - not the kind of DVNR I complain about so much - I was very careful) to cover its VHS roots, while still maintaining the very slight amount of noise that the rest of the episode has, so the scene doesn't stick out. Enjoy!
(Whilst this restoration is the work of me and Evan Oliver, Ren & Stimpy are © Viacom International).
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