For years the show danced the tightrope of what was too much to put on children's television until Kricfalusi basically said, "Fuck it," and had Ren savagely beat a man half to death with a boat oar in the episode "Man's Best Friend." Here it is as part of a clip that somebody inexplicably patched together featuring Ren plucking nerve endings out of his mouth for the first 30 seconds.
What The Fuck?
Holy shit. Ren was really into beating the crap out of that dude.
It manages to be unsettling even on a medium where people getting smacked in the head with shovels is commonplace. It'd be like if Rosie the Robot decided to decorate the Jetson's home with their internal organs.
"These walls could use a new coat of blood"
The Fallout:
When Nickelodeon saw this clip in the episode, they lost their shit. They refused to air it, and then proceeded to fire Kricfalusi, citing the violence level in the show and missing deadlines (for not turning the violence in on time, we guess). That's right, they deemed this clip so brutally violent that they fired someone over it.
This episode was banned from all broadcast and not seen in any format until it showed up on Spike TV in 2003 as part of the ill-fated (read: shitty) Ren and Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon," where it only aired once and can only be found on DVD. If you feel your life is lacking brutal cartoon violence by a gay dog beating the shit out of people with wooden objects, then you might want to hunt this gem down.