Fred Seibert's Blog

Jerry Beck’s done it again and compiled one of the great books on contemporary animation. Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons is the beautiful brainchild of Nickelodeon Worldwide Creative Director Russell Hicks (one of my great colleagues from Hanna-Barbera Cartoons), and reviews all the cartoon shows Nick’s done since the launch of the Nicktoons in 1991. I’m posting a couple of the pieces on our shorts shows including short interviews with me about them, and I’m gathering up the chapters on ChalkZone, My Life as a Teenage Robot, and The Fairly Oddparents.
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Fred Seibert: Don’t worry about introducing characters: worry about making them believable. Don’t worry about some future plot point: worry about making the film exciting. If you make your characters and your stories great, and everything will fall into place. The longest-lived and most beloved cartoons are the ones with the greatest characters, not the greatest plots. I want a character that I’m going to fall in love with. That’s my theory, anyway.

Why a short and not a pilot? Well, from a consumer’s point of view, rarely do I watch a series from the beginning. From a producer’s viewpoint, why do I need to make a film that explains all sorts of things that the consumer will never see? Besides, whether the product is a great short film or a great pilot, all the things wrong with it will be forgotten when it goes to series. But if it’s only, well, okay, and it answers all of the little details, it’ll never be green-lit anyway. Why focus on the things that make it a pilot instead of focusing on what makes it a great film?

My understanding of the Saturday morning cartoon business was that they had stopped developing cartoons in the unique way that the great cartoons of the 1930s and ’40s were developed. What you saw those days was more like half-hour kid sitcoms, and that, in my opinion, was the problem with the animation business. In the days of the theatrical short, a cartoon would be made featuring a character, it would be run in theaters, and if the audience really liked it, more would be made. If not, then that was that.

First I wanted to identify the talent capable of making hit cartoons, then the characters that were capable of moving into series play or feature films. Oh Yeah! Cartoons, in just three years, generated fifty-one cartoons featuring unique, one-of-a-kind characters in a way that hadn’t been done in more than forty years. Again, I took the approach that the great cartoon studios such as Disney,
Warner, and MGM used back in the day, and adapted it to television. What we did was green-light a large number of cartoon shorts that were completely creator-driven. I really looked at them as short films that introduced new characters.

Mark Taylor [VP/GM, Nickelodeon Studios]: That meant 99 cartoons in a very short period of time, each one being its own cartoon, yet needing to be done in a timely manner while following certain guidelines. This was one of the biggest challenges we ever had as a series.

Fred Seibert: To this day I’m amazed that this concept was even sold. I’m shocked when I realize that it happened at all. Oh Yeah! Cartoons requires a heavier investment than usual; you end up spending a good fifty percent more per short than on anything else, and there’s always a lower rating because there’s no continuing character to fall in love with, or any idea what to expect, week after week. That’s a really difficult sell, but we realized that if all we did was launch one successful series, the investment would be well worth it. The angle I took to sell this idea was the premise that we weren’t just launching some successful series; we were finding talent that would be part of our family for a very long time.

Mark Taylor:It was fascinating to see all those different looks, styles, and stories develop within Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Out of that one concept came The Fairly OddParents, Chalk Zone, My Life as a Teenage Robot—all of them winners for Nick.