Fred Seibert's Blog

Convincing the Turner Broadcasting powers that be that Hanna-Barbera could lead the way in creating cartoon shorts as seeds for hit series took almost two years.

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16. Part 17. Part 18.

The question now was how do we actually make cartoons? Real cartoons, not animated sitcoms. Not shows that looked and sounded like cartoons, but were conceived and executed exactly the same way as animated sitcoms.

When I’d first started thinking about using authentic cartoon shorts as springboards for successful animated television series it was a blinding glimpse of the obvious that only the very best creative people could produce the best creative result. At the time, the late 80s, I’d only worked in live action (excepting things like the MTV network IDs) so I thought the answer was finding the best writers. I hadn’t yet heard John K’s Spumco admonition, “If you can’t draw, you can’t write.”

But, once I got into the business, it did strike me as odd that it seemed like the lowest people on the creative totem pole in animation were the artists, the animators, and the directors. Above them were network executives, studio management, development executives, writers, and producers. Jeeez, that made no sense, did it?

History and practicality had come to dictate to the cartoon biz that using writers in the same way as live action industry did. After all, there were more ‘writers’ coming to Hollywood to work than cartoonists, probably on a ratio of 100:1, and starting in the 60s it was easier to recruit trained television writers than re-train cartoonists to story. John K made it a crusade to reverse the tide, and I recalled my conversations with Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna, and Friz Freleng about making the great cartoons that defined the form I realized there was only one way for us to go if we were going to be successful.

There were a few times in the past where I’d try and institute a change in how creative productions were approached, and succeeding required what looked like a complete break with the status quo. Trying to straddle the old and the new had never worked for my groups and it didn’t look like it would work at Hanna-Barbera either. When I tried (with 2 Stupid Dogs and SWAT Kats) the old guard openly rebelled. Clearly a new approach was required.

So, for our new, unnamed, shorts program I laid down the law.

All pitches would be in storyboard form only. No pitch books, no ‘bibles’, no treatments, no episode ’springboards’. I wasn’t interested in what the show/series was going to be, I wanted to know exactly what film the creator was going to make. When we gave a green light, I wanted “development” to be over. We would start the actual production as soon as possible after “Yes.”

We would not take a pitch from a writer who hired an artist to make a storyboard. This project would be proof of (to me) a given. Cartoons were an aritst’s medium. If a writer originated a project, he/she would need to find an animation artist not as an employee but as a partner who was an integrated part of the project. From my perspective I would pay a lot more attention to the body language of the artist than the writer in making my final decision; I’d be looking to the artist as the leader of the project. Was I cutting noses off to spite our faces? Were we in danger of losing the opportunities wonderful writers might bring our way? Probably. Could artists really ‘write’? Who knew? The only thing I absolutely knew for sure was that most ‘writers’ couldn’t ‘write’ either. It’s really hard to create characters that the audience loved, and it didn’t matter a whit to me whether the originator used a pencil with drawings or a word processor. And for our cartoon studio the bias was always going to go to the artist/creator.

Lastly, and probably the most confusing to many, I wanted every final pitch to be in person. I wanted the board to be pinned up on the wall and the creator up in front telling us about the film he/she wanted to make. It was fine for a bunch of executives to read the board in privacy and then discuss it among themselves, but I wanted to see the creator, see the fire (or water) in their eyes, judge for myself exactly how much they cared about making cartoons. If they couldn’t prove it in person, with their film right in front of them, I wasn’t particularly interest. We would only win with the passionate filmmakers who had to make cartoons.

I guess the hard part to come would be in who would decide what cartoons to make? There were a number of interests to satisfy. Our studio development executives thought it was their job but our production executives thought it was theirs, the network wasn’t going to put up with anything it wasn’t completely satisfied with, and certainly there were my corporate financial overseers who were skeptical of the whole thing. And hey, there was me!

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original cartoon shorts.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11. Part 12. Part 13. Part 14. Part 15. Part 16. Part 17. Part 18.