It should be noted that John K is from the lazy hack school of creative talent. The kind who thinks schedules and deadlines are for faggots and losers and that artistes! like him should be allowed all of the time in the world to make their episodes and networks should shut the fuck up and just wait until the artistes! finishes and air it, as they are delivered to the network.
THIS by the way, was the actual reason WHY John K actually was fired from Ren and Stimpy. Not for content issues, but because John K was a prima donna who refused to turn in episodes on time as contractually obligated.
Like he said to an executive at Cartoon Network regarding his Yogi shorts: "It'll be a few months late, but you'll have a whole extra minute of animation!"
Actually that WAS the reason. John K spent most of the 90s saying he was fired for content issues, and presented himself as someone who was censored by the big bad network. And since there very little professional media covering animation in the 90s, let alone the internet being in it's infancy, no one bothered whatsoever to interview anyone else to fact check claims that John K was spewing. Claims that everyone who heard them, repeated and spread like it was the gospel of Jesus. Even Billy West pretty much refused to talk about it for years, due to a combination of those years being when he was suffering from severe depression and having kicked a longstanding drug addiction problem, made worse by the fact that John K severed all ties with West when John K demanded West quit the show when John K got fired, to force Nickelodeon to rehire him (a move West refused, as he was on super shakey ground at the time personally and didn't want to get blackballed).
Once the revival was announced and John K started shitting on West (who refused to return to the show), West found his courage and started shattering John K's carefully crafted web of lies about how he was forced off of the show. And from there, the damn broke and once the revival came out and destroyed the myth of John K being a creative genius stifled by hack censors and network executives, and the Games Animation episodes overnight had their reputation restored.
I want to expand on some of this:
There were a few articles in those days trying to give the Games perspective, but the fact is they were few and far between. Nickelodeon, as well, really dropped the ball and didn't really give any defense as to why they fired John except that he couldn't meet deadlines.
Animation fandom had already kind of been regarding John K. as an auteur, the guy who was going to make cartoons great again. The show was a cult hit nearly out of the gate. But when he was fired, he became a martyr. Though he had already been expecting he'd get fired - relations between him and the network were really, really bad when it happened - he still used it to serve himself. He told Bob Camp and Bill Wray they could continue the show without him and gave him his blessing, then called them sell-outs and traitors.
The Wild Cartoon Kingdom article on the whole thing - one largely written by John himself and published under Chris Gore's name - was the other reason why John K. was made a martyr. It provided an incredibly biased depiction of the whole thing - with an incredibly nasty depiction of Bob Camp as well. I needn't mention the picture of Eddie Fitzgerald and his "clean hand" - the hand that refused to shake Bob Camp's.
As for Billy, John made insane calls to him and Gary Owens when he was fired. He had kicked his drug addiction long before he was even on Stern, but it is true that he didn't want to kill his career by walking off the show. Considering that his work on R&S consisted of flying out to L.A. every weekend and having John K. wear him out with a hundred fucking takes of the same scream, it's no wonder he didn't want more of the same.
The destruction of the John K. myth began with the failure of APC, but the stuff Billy wrote about John back then didn't really have much to do with it. It was about a decade before the myth really died out - there was the blog, which cemented his image as a dirty old crank; people who had grown up watching the show and didn't know about the behind-the-scenes stuff, who often liked the Games episodes; and the publication of
Sick Little Monkeys, which really laid into the myth... and then the pedophilia finished it all off.
