The Ren & Stimpy Show creator John Kricfalusi is resurrecting tight-fisted patriot George Liquor in a new cartoon called Cans Without Labels.
Kricfalusi based the throwback character he created for the '90s animated hit on his own father. "My Dad's Canadian," said Kricfalusi, aka John K, in an e-mail to Wired about the new project. "We don't have Republicans here, but he shares some traits with them."
The animator is going the crowd-funding route for the new animated short, hoping to raise $110,000 to get Cans Without Labels in the can. The Kickstarter campaign has already pulled down more than a third of its goal, with three weeks to go.
Not bad for a 10-minute cartoon about John K's riotously conservative father, who claims that brand names are commie scams as he serves up grub in blank cans. The obnoxious, ultrapatriotic character also appeared in early web video spinoff The Goddamn George Liquor Program.
"We still need to animate, clean up, inbetween and color the cartoon," says the Cans Without Labels Kickstarter page. "We will paint the backgrounds and build a CG set and some props. Then we need to pay for music, sound effects and final editing. The whole process will take about 7 months. It will be 8-10 minutes long, which is about the same length as a Ren & Stimpy episode, but for half the price!"
It's the first tangle with Kickstarter for John K, who got introduced to the toon industry's sausage factory when he co-created Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures with animation auteur Ralph Bakshi, Bat-animation mogul Bruce Timm and Wall-E director Andrew Stanton in the late '80s.
Kricfalusi breaks down his pop and George Liquor – voiced by Michael Pataki, a veteran character actor who died in 2010 – with hilarious detail in the Kickstarter video below. Backers of the Kickstarter campaign land everything from toys, sketches and animation cels to personalized caricatures and cameos in the toon itself.
One can only hope John K, who recently custom-designed T-shirts for beach hipster brand Stussy, returns to Kickstarter when he's done with George Liquor to finish off The Ripping Friends movie. Don't you want to know what really happened to The Indigestible Wad?
