YMMV / John K. Stuff

• Anvilicious:
  • The blog is not at all subtle about its condemnation of sloppy artistry, formulaic art and stories and the dangers of political correctness.
  • It is also adamant that animation is just a tool on its own and that it absolutely needs a large variety of outside influences (e.g. live-action movies and actors, comic book artists, caricaturists, fine artists and average everyday folk) and skilled artists with a strong point of view in order to be interesting.
  • One of the major points the blog brings up with the force of a hammer is that just imitating others' work without discretion or analysis and having Disney as your only influence is a bad thing, providing evidence in "Do All Bland Movies Make Profits?" that copying their works in features only brought short-term success to their imitators at best, while resulting in a lot of films that either flopped at the box office or were critically disparaged. It is one of the few arguments John brings up on his blog that people can find themselves agreeing with, even if they don't agree with his opinions on the films themselves.
• Broken Base: The unapologetically tactless and mean-spirited humor, shamelessly lurid, crass content, holier-than-thou elitism and frequent snipes at contemporary works and artists for not living up to John's extremely rigid standards has gotten the blog a sharply divisive reception that often overshadows the rest of its content. Readers either love it for that, come for the instructional posts while staying at an arm's length from John's opinions, or just avoid the blog altogether.
• Crosses the Line Twice: John is more than willing to step on people's toes and spit in the face of political correctness and general tact to get a laugh and/or get his points across. Just one of many examples is the post where he applauds Betty Boop cartoons for having very racy humor, up to including rape jokes.^note This, unfortunately, may have been why it was difficult to believe rumors about his statutory rape before they were confirmed by his victims: everything he said was so extreme that nobody took his perverted remarks at face value. If committing statutory rape was going up to eleven, everything else about him was at 10-and-a-half.
• Discredited Meme: Using "CalArts style" as a derogatory term for Thin-Line Animation? That started here and originally referred to the art style used during the Disney Renaissance rather than shows from The New '10s. Even before it was traced back to John K. (who, while not the inventor of the term, was unquestionably a major proprietor of it), the term was, much like the blog itself, being dismissed by artists as blind anger towards something popular rather than good-faith criticism, which is why it completely lost its merit once its source was discovered.
• Don't Shoot the Message:
  • Most readers of his blog do agree with his ideas about pushing for more cartoony animation, but feel the tasteless and extreme way said ideas are presented ends up making it hard to actually agree with him.
  • Most people agree completely with his hatred of Horrible Hollywood and executives calling the shots in cartoons. The problem comes from his fairly obnoxious and incredibly jaded way of presenting it, as well as his complete disloyalty to the rest of the animation industry, resulting in him lumping popular and well-liked studios, cartoons, and creators in with less popular ones.
  • Even after any goodwill towards Kricfalusi was killed with the statutory rape scandal in 2018 and the nuclear disaster that was Cans Without Labels in 2019, it's believed that the blog is legitimately a good resource for aspiring artists to find instruction and inspiration, but that John's own opinions and self-congratulating merits should be taken with a heaping pile of salt.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Many posts centered on sexual content (like his commentary on a rape joke in a Betty Boop cartoon in "Don't Take Betty's Boop") and on artist Katie Rice (such as him referring to her as a "cute thing" in "Animation School Lesson 2" while she is making some... interesting facial expressions), became incredibly squicky in light of Rice and many other ex-Spumco employees calling John out on his sexually predatory behavior towards them.
  • The whole blog gets even harder to read in light of Robyn Byrd (one of John's victims) revealing that the blog is basically a watered down version of how John actually treats people in real life, likening him to a Terence Fletcher-type predator who burns through other artists like a disposable commodity for his own gain.
  If you thought some of his writing there was off-putting, imagine him yelling those things at you! He wasn't just musing in his own head on the blog. He actually talked to people at the studio like that, insulting and degrading them if they drew flat or "uninteresting" drawings. His anger isn't just reserved for imaginary Filmation animators. It is real, it is ugly, and it is devastating. The "nice" John who you read on the blog, who just happens to have a curmudgeonly streak, is an anomaly we rarely saw. The whole thing is the streak. Some of his online fans got the Dr. Jekyll version of him. Others had a whole crew's worth of Mr. Hyde unleashed on them."
  • John's remarks on how most cartoon studios invest in hard work for the sake of hard work or showing off were already hard to take seriously as is, but they became painfully ironic when it was revealed that John was notorious for blowing through budgets on his shows and doing countless, countless retakes on scenes in his cartoons because of trivial "errors" (like the color of a present that Stimpy hands Ren, or Stimpy's butt not shaking the exact way he wanted it to). Additionally, he outright refused to pay Carbunkle Cartoons for their hard work on Adult Party Cartoon (which prompted a lawsuit that destroyed Spumco) for the incredibly petty reason that their work didn't turn out as satisfactory as he wanted. In short, John K did the very thing that he criticized others of doing.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: One of the most notorious elements of the blog back in its heyday was John's unrepentant scorn towards well-liked movies and shows from The Renaissance Age of Animation and the years surrounding it, and even dropping in some live-action material to boot. The targets of John's ire include but are by no means limited to: Animaniacs, The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas, Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove, Tangled, Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Iron Giant, The Road to El Dorado, Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, The Fairly OddParents!, Samurai Jack, and even Neon Genesis Evangelion at one point. Even going insofar as to bash his own creations, Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, The Ren & Stimpy Show and to a lesser extent its adult-oriented spin-off, and The Ripping Friends. It's telling that his review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ended with him giving it a zero and saying that it was still higher than he would rank other movies of the time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the early nineties, John wrote an infamously inflammatory review of Animaniacs before watching a single episode (largely to spite Tom Ruegger and Steven Spielberg; he later revealed a personal dislike for Spielberg in regards to films such as We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), which reads very similarly to most of his blog posts, which were rants against popular cartoons that he didn't like. A year after Katie Rice publicly accused Kricfalusi of grooming her, it was announced that she would be overseeing the Animaniacs (2020) reboot.
• Memetic Mutation: While he didn't invent the term (which had existed as far back as the early 90's), the blog (specifically, this post) is considered one of the biggest proprietors of the now infamous animation term "Cal Arts Style", which eventually evolved into describing what This Very Wiki refers to as Thin-Line Animation.^note John's blog specifically used the term to describe what he considered a very inbred drawing and animation style that uses works like 60's Disney as its biggest influence, while adding in bits and pieces of other influences like 80's Saturday morning cartoons, with the supposed focus being on slick and cutesy as opposed to being funny. It also bears noting that he issued an apology post to Cal Arts students later on. Ironically enough, the blog petered out before John could give his opinion on the controversial thin-line art style that the term is used for now.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The blog is far more known for the controversial opinions on contemporary animation and vulgar humor than its (surprisingly good) instructional posts. And those opinions were then overshadowed by the revelations of how he sexually groomed and assaulted underage girls as well as abused the Spumco staff.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: Not unlike the reviews of RedLetterMedia, John K's blog does offer a lot of insight into what goes into making a cartoon and how the films he loves were made, between all the sophomoric humor and tasteless jokes. The main difference however is that Mike Stoklasa's Mr. Plinkett is clearly just a character, while John K's online persona... isn't.

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