Your next box set: The Ren and Stimpy Show Unleashed

You know what there isn't enough of on kids' TV? Rubber nipples. Or mucus. Or cats hwarfing up hairballs until their intestines are raw, requiring an obese man called Bubba to climb inside them. Sigh.

When Ren and Stimpy first aired here, on BBC2 in 1994, it was confounding. It had all the trappings of a kids' show: it was a cartoon, for a start. But the lead characters – bony chihuahua Ren Höek and dopey blue-nosed feline Stimpson J Cat – farted, vomited, and inflicted/suffered appalling violence. It was unlike anything kids raised on Disney and Scooby-Doo had ever seen.

This was intentional. Appalled by the blandness of modern cartoons, Canadian John Kricfalusi set out to create something different, a show packed with intense human experience. The characters would do real acting, their expressions would never be the same twice, and there would be plenty of poo, vomit and snot for laughs.

Most episodes made the execs at Nickelodeon, the US channel that commissioned the show, squirm. In Big Baby Scam, Ren and Stimpy are forced into a bath with a naked man. In Rubber Nipple Salesmen, a horse insinuates he has murdered someone. Kricfalusi admitted that Ren and Stimpy (both have male voices) are in a relationship: they share a bed and, in one episode, a kiss. It proved too much. After two seasons Kricfalusi was fired and the show dumbed down. These two series, gathered into a box set with the subtitle Unleashed, are now cult classics.

Here are two characters involved in zany Looney Toons-style antics, except, instead of only terrorising each other, are terrorised by various other ghastly characters. Faced with a frightening, absurd world, all they have is each other. Anyone disconcerted by the poo gags should think of Ren and Stimpy as an animated Waiting For Godot. Alicia Silverstone in Clueless put it best: "That's Ren and Stimpy. They're way existential."