Aloha Höek

"Aloha Höek"
The Ren & Stimpy Show episode
Episode no.	Season 4 Episode 17
Directed by	Bill Wray
Written by	Jim Gomez Bill Wray Bob Camp
Original air date	January 14, 1995 (1995-01-14)
Guest appearance
Dom DeLuise as The Big Kahuna

"Aloha Höek" is the seventeenth episode of the fourth season of The Ren & Stimpy Show. It originally aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on January 14, 1995. It is considered to be one of the series' worst episodes.

Plot

Ren and Stimpy wash up on a tropical island, with their personalities respectively being more aggressive and rational than usual. They immediately start to build shelter, a literal house with functioning equipment out of sand. The house is eroded by the water as they sleep, so Ren angrily seeks a house, only to stumble upon one inside a whale's carcass. Stimpy finds sand laced with dead sea shells and coral, which they both consider to be bountiful. On a hot day, the duo finally suffer from the rotting of the whale's carcass, but Ren refuses to give up this residence and evicts a rational Stimpy, who finds residence in the jungle. He meets the Big Kahuna, who agrees to take him in.

Ren roasts a fish gallstone over the fire when the Big Kahuna visits, but he confuses him with a cannibal, hiding in fear that Stimpy had been tortured, Meanwhile, Stimpy relaxes with two Hawaiian women while the Big Kahuna offers him food, including a dead Mr. Horse partway eaten by a fish and a human. He eats a slug and a hermit crab but refuses a Portuguese man o' war, which the Big Kahuna eats.

Twelve years later, the carcass' owner, a crab family, returns and tortures Ren, who agrees to do anything to be freed; he is sentenced to "walk the fly", literally walking a housefly he is chained to who aimlessly walks forward. Ren goes insane from days of walking, but finally realizes flies can indeed fly; he pilots the fly at a cliff. Ren orders the fly to fly to the Sun, which he does not heed, but collapses out of exhaustion; while Ren sinks he recovers his body. He brings it to Stimpy, who believes Ren is dead from drowning. Suddenly, Stimpy's watch alarm rings, leading to them revealing their true identities as Soviet secret agents Conrad and Yuri impersonating the duo. The episode ends with the Big Kahuna waving goodbye while he roasts the crab family at a fire.

Cast

• Ren – Voice of Billy West
• Stimpy – Voice of Billy West
• Big Kahuna – Voice of Dom DeLuise

Production

The episode was directed by Bill Wray, who was known for his preference of art over writing; this episode suffered from a lack of in-house layout, causing its quality to decline substantially compared to other episodes directed by Wray. Wray storyboarded the episode with Chris Mitchell, his only episode as storyboarder as Mitchell was usually a character modeler in the Games Animation seasons of the series. Dom DeLuise was cast as a guest star in multiple attempts by showrunner Bob Camp to invigorate attention to the series after series creator John Kricfalusi was fired; the most infamous of those, Jack Carter's Wilbur Cobb appears in the episode as a cameo but was not voiced. The music used in the episode is similar in style to that of SpongeBob SquarePants, a series also produced by Games Animation's successor Nickelodeon Animation Studio.

Reception

American journalist Thad Komorowski gave the episode zero out of five stars, considering it to be one of the worst episodes in the series due to its off-kilter ending and emphasis on grossness for humor.

Books and articles

• Dobbs, G. Michael (2015). Escape – How Animation Broke into the Mainstream in the 1990s. Orlando: BearManor Media. ISBN 978-1593931100.
• Komorowski, Thad (2017). Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media. ISBN 978-1629331836.