Ren's Toothache and Tone of Voice

Our team have thought about tone of voice when making this. It's mainly come natural to us, though. Grace wrote the song and I feel like the lyrics are simple and entertaining enough for a young audience to understand. I also think they are  One thing I wanted to keep in mind though, was the mentality of children. Something John Kricfalusi wanted to do when making The Ren & Stimpy Show was to make a series that kids can enjoy without being educated. I kind of agree with him on that. I freaking hated being told what to do when I was a kid, and normally just cared about entertainment. That's not to say every show that focuses on morals are inherently bad. I still enjoy shows like My Little Pony, Adventure Time, and Spongebob Squarepants, that manage to have lessons while still being entertaining.

What's interesting about The Ren & Stimpy Show was that despite being very anti-moral, there was one episode called "Ren's Toothache" was actually pretty educational. It was all about how Ren hadn't brushed his teeth so now his teeth got really sore, and of course his situation only got worse from there. The story is even structured in a manner typical of a documentary animation for kids. The intro shows Ren not listening to Stimpy warning him that if he doesn't brush, his teeth will fall out, then Ren begins to suffer the consequences of that, which leads to him still being stubborn, causing the situation to get even worse for him, and eventually the problem becomes unfix-able and Ren only has himself to blame for it. This is very unlike the show to do something like this, and may have even been something the staff was forced to make by executives. Strangely enough, this episode still doesn't feel out-of-place for the series. I think the reason for this is that while it does have a moral at the end, it still manages to balance that quite well with the typical humour of the show. It's all about the tone of voice. The episode is still very zany and slapstick-driven, and it doesn't use 100% true facts either (for example, it says the toothache was caused by a tooth beaver that gnaws away at people's nerve-endings, which I don't think is based on fact), but the message is put across quite well.

It really shows that you can educate kids without being too in their face about it. It's the kind of tone of voice that John K usually tells stories with in this show, the kind that teaches morals without making kids feel like they're in school again. This is the kind of tone of voice I wanted us to go for with our music video. It was written to feel like the kind of video kids are shown in school though, but really that's even more reason to make the video with this kind of tone. So that children are both educated and genuinely entertained.