John K. loves cartoons and they love him.

On September 7 and 8, 2004, the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles. will be hosting a special two-night presentation by director/animator John Kricfalusi. The first night includes a retrospective of his recent and past work, while the second night showcases John's favorite cartoons, directors, and animators. John was kind enough to provide this in-depth sneak peek to AWN readers. Here's what we'll see… and why!

Dr. Toon: Let's start with the cartoons you chose for the retrospective and why you chose them.

John Kricfalusi: Well, there are two nights. The first night I'll show my cartoons and on the second night I show my favorite classic cartoons. I wanted to show an assortment of stuff; it's a retrospective and you don't want to show everything that's the same, so it's not back-to-back Ren & Stimpys — although I am running some of the Spike TV Ren & Stimpys that no one has ever seen before. These will be premieres, I guess. The first cartoon I'm going to show is "Naked Beach Frenzy", because every time I've run that one in the theater, it's brought the house down. Hopefully that will put everyone in a good mood so that they'll like my crappy cartoons that follow!

That episode is just like its title — it's got lots of naked girls running around bouncing all over the place. If you ever want to see an animated naked girl, it's in this one. This it what you wish "Red Hot Riding Hood" would have done. Basically, Ren & Stimpy go to the beach, Stimpy thinks that Ren is there for the fresh air and sunshine and he's proud of him, but it turns out that Ren's really there to see the half-naked girls in their string bikinis. And they don't even stay on for very long. Then they get jobs as shower attendants in the women's shower room — it's like a luxury shower room for girls. Ren & Stimpy attend to their every imaginable need.

Fans will soon be able to witness the uncut original series on DVD.

After "Naked Beach Frenzy" I go into a history of Spumco. I'm going to start with an episode of the Ralph Bakshi Mighty Mouse. It's my favorite episode, one that Bob Jaques and I came up with. Jim Reardon and I wrote the script. It's called "Mighty's Benefit Plan," but I always refer to it as "Elvy and the Tree Weasels," because that's really what it's about. It's a takeoff on Alvin and the Chipmunks. This is a restored film in terms of content. There were a couple of scenes that we wrote and actually animated that were too much for even Ralph, and he cut them out for fear that the network would come after us and kill us - this was 1987. I put them back in for retrospectives.

Then we'll have a commercial reel where we're going to show the Old Navy commercials and a Nike commercial and maybe some station IDs for NBC, some stuff like that. Cuter than some of the stuff people know me for.

DT: Were you contacted by agencies to make those commercials or were you just hiring yourself out as a free agent?

JK: Some of the commercials Ron Diamond got for us, like the Nike commercial. I don't remember how we got the Old Navy commercials; it might have been through Ron. We didn't work with an ad agency on those; we worked directly with the Old Navy guys.

"Man's Best Friend" comes after that. That's the banned episode of Ren & Stimpy that has aired on Spike but not everyone has seen it and that's a pretty good crowd pleaser. That's the famous "George Liquor episode" that got all of us at Spumco fired from The Ren & Stimpy Show. My favorite character to animate, that's George Liquor — American.