Fred Seibert's Blog

It took a long time, at least three or four years, to get from the idea in my head to actually getting a ‘green light’ to think about making cartoon shorts in the old school kind of way.

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.

I’d worked at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons for less than a year when I passed the first big hurdle to getting my shorts idea going. But once I’d been able to convince the woman who ran Cartoon Network that doing 48 shorts was actually her idea, there were still quite a few obstacles remaining. In no particular order:

Ted Turner wanted to make stuff –TV movies, feature films, news shows, cartoons, whatever– he just wanted to make the stuff on his own terms. Meaning without unions, residuals, and royalties. His thinking, actually prevalent in old Hollywood, was that if he paid your salary he’d taken all the risk and he should own all your ideas lock, stock, and barrel. Theoretically, I didn’t blame him; they’re a nightmare costing millions over the years of people administering them and all that, but hey! that’s the way of the world, right? Eventually, Ted relented and approved sharing success with talent, but it took a year and a half.

A lot of other folks at Turner were confused by the whole thing. Not cartoons, per se –they didn’t care a whit if something was a cartoon, a movie, or a steel factory it seemed– it was just that the company was in the TV network business, and up until that time they’d only licensed shows and movies to run, never made them. So when we were suggesting spending a lot of money on completely risky productions (when you license a movie already made, you know whether it’s successful or not) and couldn’t accurately predict how much money would be made in advance, well, they stay confused. Somehow, over a two year period we wore them down with financial analysis and they eventually, grudgingly capitulated.

Then there were the folks in the TV animation industry, our competitors and friends. They completely thought I was nuts. It just wasn’t the way things were done. Shorts were so …uh, yesterday. It was the way the old guys did things in the old days. Well, duh, yeah. The way they did them when they made the greatest cartoons of all time, you jerks. (To be fair, there were a couple of people who were amazingly supportive. Particularly, Warner Bros. Animation President and former Hanna-Barbera executive Jean MacCurdy, and director/producer Phil Roman. Both of them made me feel emboldened and confident to go on.)

Probably the most disheartening were some of the creative people in the industry, both in and out of Hanna-Barbera. Some of them were folks who’d been entrenched in the way the system had operated for the 20 years before. Efficiency was all that mattered, and the only management worth listening to was the most senior person in the room, be they from the studio or, better, from the network. Development executives were committed to the status quo; after all, cartoon production had morphed into an aping of live action television, the place all of the D-execs aspired. The others who thought I was an idiot were the ones who already had ‘good’ jobs on shows like The Simpsons, Animaniacs, or Batman (we weren’t even a tiny blip on the feature films radar; they could care less about anything in TV); why should they care about what their inferiors were up to, they were being paid well for a long period of time? Well, the only way this thing was going to work was to ignore them all, so, I did.

So where’d our continuing faith and confidence come from? It was all the cartoonists who flocked to our doors with their ideas.

(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.

We’re going more shorts crazy around here than ever before. Aside from the long-awaited Random! Cartoons (Nickelodeon will eventually play these on TV, really), and The Meth Minute 39 launching this next week, we’ve got plans for millions more! You read it right, millions! What better time than now to continue the tale of our journey.

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.

Now, what was the pitch going to be to my Turner Entertainment colleagues, a bunch of high flying, smarter than the room, young cable television executives? Why in hell would they want to do cartoon shorts like the old school?

There were some really smart people at Cartoon Network like Mike Lazzo (the original programmer and soul of the place, and not incidentally the brains behind [adult swim]) and Scott Sassa (Turner’s entertainment bossman and mine too), but it looked like some others around there were going to have to be finessed into agreeing to our wacky plan to go back-to-future and make cartoon shorts.

First up was the question “Does Cartoon Network really have to work with Hanna-Barbera on its original programming? There are a lot of other newer, cooler studios.” Yes, came the answer from on-high. Why else would we have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the joint and kept the studio running?

Next, “Well, what have you got for us?”

This issue was more challenging. Everyone was used to a certain kind of programming (animated sitcoms) pitched in a certain way (character drawings, story premises, “bibles”) which would be picked to death by network executives. I had no interest in this system and wanted to give cartoonists freedom to make cartoons the way they wanted: funny, short, and funny.

Besides, Cartoon Network’s agenda wasn’t actually making good cartoons. The agenda was to get the network distributed across the world (they were in less than 5 million of 95million+ homes in America) and the cable companies wondered why Nickelodeon wasn’t enough. Original programming was one of the answers.

So, essentially my pitch went thusly:

The studio just released two series with a lot of seeming promise (2 Stupid Dogs and SWAT Kats). They cost over $10million and failed within six weeks and everyone at Cartoon Network had liked them. With all said and done they essentially failed.

Since cable companies don’t really watch cartoons, the quality of the cartoons didn’t particularly matter to them that much, it was the ability to promise new programs. Spending $10million for two public ‘promises’ (that is, two new cartoon series) didn’t seem like that great a deal to me.

Instead, why not let Hanna-Barbera spend the $10million to make forty eight promises. That’s right, Hanna-Barbera will produce 48 brand new cartoons for the Cartoon Network in two years. That would be a public relations announcement of an original program every two weeks for two years. Original premieres would debut at 7pm before every other Sunday night movie on the channel.

Additionally, it would add to the thousands of cartoons already in the Turner Entertainment library. And hadn’t the company been running hundreds of non-famous early Looney Tunes on their networks and selling ads around them 50 or 60 years after they were made and seemingly forgotten?

And besides, one of them could be spun off as a hit series. It was clear to everyone I had no experience making cartoons, but ignorant though I was, how stupid would I have to be to produce 48 shorts and not have one of them be good enough for a series?

(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.