The Ripping Friends

The Ripping Friends: The World's Most Manly Men! (also known as The Ripping Friends) is a Canadian animated television series, created by John Kricfalusi, creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show on Nickelodeon.[3] The show premiered September 22, 2001 on Fox Kids, but was cancelled in September 2002. Adult Swim later picked up the show. The series occasionally airs in Canada on Teletoon. The series also aired briefly in the UK on the CNX channel and on ABC in Australia.

The Ripping Friends: The World's Most Manly Men!
GenreComedy[1]
Action
Adventure
Slapstick
Created byJohn Kricfalusi
StarringHarvey Atkin
Mark Dailey
Michael Kerr
Mike MacDonald
Merwin Mondesir
John Kricfalusi
Country of originCanada[2]
No. of seasons1
No. of episodes13
Production
Running timeapprox. 30 minutes
Production companiesSpümcø
Cambium
Animagic
DistributorCinéGroupe
Release
Original networkFox Kids
Teletoon
Original releaseSeptember 15, 2001 (2001-09-15) –
January 26, 2002 (2002-01-26)

History

Kricfalusi and his long-time partner Jim Smith created the Ripping Friends before they created the similar superhero Powdered Toast Man for The Ren & Stimpy Show. After Nickelodeon fired Kricfalusi from The Ren & Stimpy Show in September 1992, he had plans to make a feature film starring the world's "manliest men".[4] The feature film plan was scrapped, but the characters were used in The Ripping Friends. Also, as early as a 1987 story session for the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Kricfalusi, who would go on to develop the concept for The Ripping Friends for around a decade, had proposed using a wad of gum as a character, an idea which was employed to create the first villain for the new series, the Indigestible Wad.[5][6] The Ripping Friends was slated to premiere in September 2000 alongside another Spümcø show on Fox Family, The Heart Aches, which follows the adventures surrounding a girl band.[7] The latter one never made it to television, and The Ripping Friends first aired a year later, after missing another premiere slated for May 2001,[8] lasting for thirteen episodes. The budget was set to US$400,000 per episode.[7] Because of production costs, the show was cancelled after one season and thirteen episodes.

Kricfalusi felt the show's supervisors were doing away with the Spümcø style and was displeased with the direction.[9] He was not fully involved until halfway through production[10] and considers the episodes with his involvement to be experimental.[11] One of his contributions to the show was directing the voice actors, whom he "really worked out" so much that he was afraid he'd give one of them a heart attack, which resulted in re-casting the original voice of Crag, Harvey Atkin, with Mark Dailey.[12] Although Kricfalusi directed the actors, he recorded for his characters separately at his home.[13]

Description

The show centred on a group of four superhuman brothers who attempt to fight crime from their base, RIPCOT (the Really Impressive Prototype City Of (Next) Tuesday): Crag, Rip, Slab, and Chunk Nuggett, Crag being the leader.[7] Friends of the four include Jimmy The Idiot Boy, a mentally-challenged drooling child, and their foster mother He-Mom (the name speaks for itself). The villains range from the Indigestible Wad (a wad of gum who sucks moisture out of people), to the evil Euroslavian dictator Citrocett, to Flathead (an invertebrate in search of a spine), to their own underpants.

Each episode was usually tagged with a short episode which Kricfalusi says was composed of "left overs".[14] These segments were called "Rip Along with the Ripping Friends" and usually portrayed the Ripping Friends solving the problems of fans. These included: addressing the fact that hot dogs come in packs of 12 and the buns in packs of 8; "ripping" the man who creates insane video game controllers and the man who writes the instructions for them; and finding out why toys no longer come in cereal boxes, among others. In each segment viewers (referred to as "kids") are asked to "rip along" with the action by ripping pieces of paper up in front of the television when coaxed to.

Characters
  • Crag (voiced by Harvey Atkin in the earlier appearances, Mark Dailey in later appearances) – The leader of the Ripping Friends.
  • Slab (voiced by Merwin Mondesir) – Crag's right-hand man.
  • Chunk Nuggett (voiced by Michael Kerr) – The childlike member of the Ripping Friends.
  • Rip (voiced by Mike MacDonald) – The hothead of the Ripping Friends.
  • Jimmy The Idiot Boy (voiced by John Kricfalusi) – A mentally-challenged drooling child.
  • He-Mom – The Ripping Friends' foster mother.
  • Citracett (voiced by John Kricfalusi) – The evil dictator of Euroslavia who is the recurring antagonist of the series.

Episodes
Episodes of The Ripping Friends
Episode Title Air Date Summary
1 The Indisgestable Wad September 15, 2001 (2001-09-15) A young girl's wad of chewing gum that she has been chewing since before she was born – the one her mother swallowed – is granted sentience/sapience from a dentist's x-ray machine that is powered by cosmic rays. The wad wanders the streets at night, sucking up people's moisture to sustain himself, turning them into "flavourless" zombies.
2 The Infernal Wedding September 22, 2001 (2001-09-22) Citracett, a villainous dictator from the fictional country of Euroslavia, decides to seduce He-Mom in an effort to get close to, and rid himself of, the Ripping Brothers, eventually asking He-Mom to marry him. The Ripping Brothers must now follow his orders "as if they were [Citracett's] own". [Never aired on Fox Kids due to scenes that would be considering in bad taste following the September 11th attacks; aired on Adult Swim].
3 Flathead's Revenge September 29, 2001 (2001-09-29) When the boys go swimming in the local water hole Chunk finds that he has a flatworm attached to his armpit. After being removed, the flatworm decides to take one of the brothers' back bones and then wreaks havoc on the town with some of his invertebrate brethren.
4 Frictor October 6, 2001 (2001-10-06) When Jimmy is unable to fully sew the uniforms of the Ripping friends (due to a lack of friction from his smooth fingers) Crag decides to give Jimmy some friction but Frictor, the master of friction, is created when the brothers' calluses are exposed to radiation. The Ripping Friends eventually track him to the moon.
5 Rip's Shorts October 13, 2001 (2001-10-13) Rip's shorts alter at the molecular level after being thrown into space. The shorts become evil and take control of Jimmy and then Pooperman, causing them to do "evil" things. The other three brothers mobilize to stop the shorts.
6 The Ovulator October 27, 2001 (2001-10-27) The boys discover that there is a shortage of beef and they send Slab out to rectify the situation, as he is the only one not affected by the lack of beef in his system. He soon discovers that a mad chicken, calling himself the Ovulator, is holding cows hostage.
7 ManMan and BoyBoy November 10, 2001 (2001-11-10) A duo of supposed crime fighters called ManMan and BoyBoy are wandering around "solving crimes" with flesh coloured accessories. Their brand of crime fighting is soon revealed to be simply putting BoyBoy in peril for no good reason. Crag sets out, because he has not had his own episode yet, to foil the duo and save BoyBoy by dressing himself up as Man Friend and Jimmy as Boy Pal to save BoyBoy.
8 Stinky Butt November 17, 2001 (2001-11-17) Citracett is banished to the nether regions of the Earth by the Ripping Friends after attempting to destroy it. There, due to some mystical energy, Citracett gains the ability to control his flatulence with destructive results.
9 The Muscle Magician November 24, 2001 (2001-11-24) Chunk is being made fun of by the other, 36-year-old brothers for only being 35 and a half, and therefore a "kid", so he runs away and attends a circus performance where he finds a magician who controls people's muscles. The magician, realizing the potential that Chunk poses, possesses his muscles and has him commit robbery of the many national banks in town.
10 Jimmy's Kidnapped December 15, 2001 (2001-12-15) Citracett and a gorilla (named "Gorilla Friend" in an organ grinder monkey outfit, later "Anaxamander - the Noble Primate" in a "Pericles helmet") kidnap Jimmy the Hapless Idiot Boy after Rip harasses him into running away. The Ripping Friends track him down to find that they are torturing Jimmy so Rip knocks out the gorilla, steals his fur, and infiltrates Citracett's basement to rescue Jimmy. [Never aired on Fox Kids]
11 Dr. Jean Poole January 12, 2002 (2002-01-12) The four boys get a lesson on "girls" from He-Mom and, as a final lesson, sets them up on a date with a Dr. Jean Poole. All five of them go out on the date together to the drive-in.
12 The Man from Next Thursday, Part One January 19, 2002 (2002-01-19) Someone breaks into RIPCOT's secret vault and steals the Ripping Friends' "perfect" DNA, which he turns into "Riptonite" in order to kill the Ripping brothers. The intruder is revealed to be a man with an enormous thumb protruding from his chest, who claims to be a time traveler from "next Thursday".
13 The Man from Next Thursday, Part Two January 26, 2002 (2002-01-26) The man from next Thursday relates his plan to his intelligent cat, revealing that his attempts to kill the Ripping Friends is based on revenge; the Ripping Friends ripped the nail off his giant chest-thumb and then re-attached it on the wrong side, making him a freak in the world of next Thursday.

Censorship
  • In a segment where Rip is asked by a fan to find out why hot dogs come in packs of twelve and hot dog buns come in packs of eight, Rip beats up a male hot dog and a female bun and asks them to "hug". The hot dog begins to slip inside the bun, and the segment immediately fades to black.[15] The scene was restored when the episode ran on Adult Swim.
  • The episodes "The Infernal Wedding" and "Jimmy's Kidnapped" never aired on Fox Kids at all, with the former being skipped due to scenes considered to be offensive following the September 11 attack. Both episodes would subsequently air on Adult Swim during reruns.

Merchandise

Hearst Entertainment and Spümcø licensed Playmates Toys to create toys based on the show.[16] A video game based on the show, was released by THQ for the Game Boy Advance and consulted by John Kricfalusi.[17]

Home video

Two VHS tapes with two episodes each were initially available with the two volumes later combined into a single DVD release with four episodes.[18]

In Australia, the complete series was released on Region 4 DVD by Madman Entertainment.

References
  1. "The Ripping Friends [Animated TV Series]". Allmovie. Retrieved November 23, 2012.
  2. "Ripping Friends". British Film Institute. London. Archived from the original on December 25, 2012. Retrieved November 24, 2012.
  3. Erickson, Hal (2005). Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949 Through 2003 (2nd ed.). McFarland & Co. pp. 668–669. ISBN 978-1476665993.
  4. "Ripping Friends Archived 2011-08-04 at the Wayback Machine", ABC
  5. "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures Story meeting", YouTube clip of an episode of The MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour
  6. "WebVoyage Record View 1". cocatalog.loc.gov.
  7. Robertson, Virginia (1999-12-01). "Spumco toons into Web & Fox". Retrieved 2019-07-05.
  8. "Alien, pranster, secret agents and Olsen twins for Fox". Kidscreen. 2001-03-01. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  9. John Kricfalusi (October 3, 2007). "Maintaining Guts from Department to department". John K Stuff. Archived from the original on February 13, 2010. Retrieved December 27, 2009.
  10. Jason Anders (June 23, 2008). "Conversation with Nick Cross". Full Circle Productions. Archived from the original on February 26, 2014. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  11. Scott Goodins (2001). "The Strange World of John K". Archived from the original on January 21, 2013. Retrieved January 2, 2013.
  12. Kricfalusi, John (2003). "An Interview with John K". WGN Radio (Interview). Interviewed by Nick Digilio. Chicago, Illinois. Archived from the original on March 12, 2016. Retrieved December 25, 2015.
  13. https://twitter.com/TopographicFish/status/1226335745608122369
  14. "Ripping Friends Satire", All Kinds of Stuff at Blogspot
  15. "hotdogs and buns should get along", All Kinds of Stuff
  16. Ashdown, Simon (2001-07-01). "Jakks tinkers with junk, Playmates gets manly, and Manley gets funky". Kidscreen. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  17. "Cyberbites". Kidscreen. 2001-05-01. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  18. "DVD Calendar Feature Articles - Metacritic". www.metacritic.com. Archived from the original on October 16, 2012.
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