Useless trivia: Danny Antonucci got his start at a Canadian division of Hanna-Barbera working on episodes of The Flintstones Comedy Hour, Scooby-Doo & Scrappy-Doo and the Smurfs.
Kricfalusi and Antonucci went to the same Canadian art school full of the same Film Boards of Canada animators. John K likes to paint himself as a Sui Generis, but he's closer to "The Cat Came Back" than Looney Tunes.
This brings me back. Definitely had seen this animator's commercials but only found out about this show based on them a few years ago. Amazed by how many of these cartoons they made, the effort that went into the animation (this is not cheap animation), and how quickly this was buried afterwards. I just imagine some MTV executives handing Antonucci a blank check after Beavis and Butthead's success, not paying any attention to what the hell he was making, and then realizing after seeing the results that they're gonna have to look for another job. It makes me nostalgic for the smaller media landscape we had in the 90s. When you made something terrible like this and got it on a network like MTV people would see it!
I'm surprised there weren't more failures like The Brothers Grunt during MTV's "we really like adult animation, it isn't just an attempt to appeal to the 'alternative' market/jump on Ren & Stimpy's coattails" period. At least BG established a.k.a. Cartoon, and got Antonucci into the rare position of having Canadian-made cartoons greenlit directly by American channels. I doubt Antonucci can complain THAT much about The Brothers Grunt.
MTV and Nickelodeon are sister networks, and after Beavis and Butthead and Ren and Stimpy took America by storm within a year of each other, I imagine the whole company was high on the belief that gross-out cartoons were the gravy train of the future.
It still amazes me that the same studio that made this show gave us the surprisingly great Ed, Edd and Eddy.