Fred Seibert's Blog

And Adventure Time’s fan art continues. It’ AWESOME!!!

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Christmastime for Jews by Robert Smigel. Dedicated to my wife and sons.

So far, My Life as a Teenage Robot (2003) is the last short from Oh Yeah! Cartoons to go to series (read: “so far”). Here’s the final interview and album from Jerry Beck’s and Russell Hicks’ Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons!. And there’s more from the book on Oh Yeah! Cartoons, Random! Cartoons, and The Fairly Oddparents.
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Rob Renzetti, Creator: What made Teenage Robot truly different was the way it looked. Alex Kirwan and my designers gave the show what we called a “future deco” look, which means they brought 1930s influences into designs.

Alex Kirwan, Art Director: We both liked the look of the 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons, and we noticed that no one had really done animation in art deco style. We wanted to see what sort of influence that style could bring to the character designs. We took the “pie cuts” out of the character’s eyeballs, which helped define the genre we were going to use.

Rob Renzetti: We used art deco influences for the architecture and the props, and we tried to get a deco poster feel in all the backgrounds. We made a great-looking and very different world. It’s very sophisticated, but not too sophisticated for kids.

Alex Kirwan: We loved the look of the old Astroboy cartoon series, because you can feel all the cool things that you associate with anime and science fiction. One of the things we loved about Astroboy was the weird hairstyles that made humans look like cartoon animals or birds. We latched onto that right away.

Rob Renzetti: We tried to translate that look into Nora and Brad, and, to a lesser degree, Tuck.

Alex Kirwan: It was as if we could define the personalities of the characters by giving them hair that resembled cartoon spiders or birds, or maybe even cat ears. It was cool.

Rob Renzetti: That includes Jenny too, who is a robot and has no reason at all to have two ponytails stuck up on her head. We gave her a reason by making them into jets. Originally, the ponytails were supposed to give her a kind of Mickey Mouse silhouette, and, in fact, we often mistakenly called them ears.

Alex Kirwan: Some things that became important to the production were not part of the show. Every year Nickelodeon holds a Halloween event where the employees bring their children and their friends into the studio.

Rob Renzetti: There’s an ocean of kids– thousands of them.

Alex Kirwan: Each Nick production would build a haunted house, and every year the houses got bigger and the crews more competitive. In our last year we built a giant flying saucer facade over part of our production area, and a cardboard city that the saucer had invaded.

Rob Renzetti: Kids could walk through our demolished city and then into the flying saucer and see aliens. We had an elaborate diorama with Jenny being attacked and electrocuted by aliens, and we built a life-size replica of Queen Vexus with light effects. We had Eartha Kitt, who voiced the character, record some cackling for our replica.

Alex Kirwan: That haunted house was so elaborate that it took quite a chunk out of our production time to built it. A large portion of our crew was not only working hard to meet our show’s deadlines, but also to assemble and paint these cardboard buildings. We took almost as much pride in them as we did in the show, and the kids were just thrilled.

In 2001, ChalkZone was the second series put into series production out of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. But CZ was one of the first shorts we produced; I greenlit storyboard soon after we started production in 1997, and production chief (and prime OY! supporter) Albie Hecht fell in love with the idea from the board alone.

Here a short interview with the creators and a scan album of the pages from Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons!. Only MLaaTR to go; and here’s Oh Yeah!, Random!, and FOP.
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Larry Huber, Co-Creator: It would be hard to find two guys with such incredibly diverse opinions–political, social, and otherwise–who work so well together that they can make a show as creatively in sync as ChalkZone. We drew on each other’s talents and styles, as well as our own eclectic viewpoints, to produce an entertaining, well-rounded show that features many different perspectives.

Bill Burnett, Co-Creator: Larry is a mountain man who loves to go hunting and camping. He uses flintlocks, like they did in the 1860s, and when Larry shoots a deer, he uses every last bit of it, down to the marrow in the bone. He’s conservative and methodical, always doing things strictly by the rules. The word “virtue” hangs above his door.

Larry Huber: My specialty is graphic drawing, and Bill’s is music. As a musician and performance artist, Bill is a boisterous, outgoing type of guy. I’m a little more laid-back and reserved. But our personality differences are really the strength of ChalkZone, because if two partners think the same way, then one of them is certainly unnecessary.

Bill Burnett: We found ways to work our different backgrounds and personalities into the show. My mother was an opera singer, and so is Rudy Tabootie’s mom. She sings in a high, sing-songy voice when she wants Rudy to come to dinner, just like my mom used to do. Larry’s father was a butcher, and so is Joe Tabootie, Rudy’s dad. Larry actually worked in his fathers’ shop and knows how to butcher animals.

Larry Huber: Bill brings experience from his days in an advertising agency, and he’s kind of like the grandmeister of jingles. I’ve heard kids in the playgrounds humming these songs in English. I’m talking about kids who don’t speak English as a first language–that’s how catchy they are.

Bill Burnett: ChalkZone is where Larry’s interests and mine converge. It’s a high-concept show about an alternate universe that’s really trippy when you think about it. In this universe, any place on Earth–a classroom, the “specials” board at a restaurant, or a hopscotch court–can be a portal to another world, where all the things that people have drawn over the centuries still live. The idea of ChalkZone is very empowering to kids: when they create a work of art, they’re actually bringing something to life.

Larry Huber: I’m a little emotional about the characters on ChalkZone. Rudy, Penny, and all the other characters are like living creatures to us, just like Rudy’s drawings of Snap are real to him. Bill and I are just two big guys who never grew up.

Bill Burnett: With our own magic piece of chalk.

Continuing with our dance through the Frederator productions featured in the new Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons! here’s an interview included in the book and some scans of the pages.
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Butch Hartman, Creator: In 1996 I was working on Johnny Bravo over at Cartoon Network, having the time of my life. Then the first season came out, and they didn’t like it. Fred Seibert, whom I knew from Cartoon Network, had moved over to Nickelodeon to develop a series that featured original animated shorts called Oh Yeah! Cartoons. I decided that I would make up a cartoon for Fred.

Fred Seibert, Creator, Oh Yeah! Cartoons and Random Cartoons: I used to call Butch’s agents once a month and ask if he was free yet, and they would tell me he wasn’t. By the end of the year I stopped calling, because I was tired of being rejected. When his agents finally called me at the end of the year, I signed him, characters unseen. The first thing he brought in was The Fairly OddParents.

Butch Hartman: I wrote the pitch in fifteen minutes. I wanted to make a show about a boy who could go anywhere, because I never wanted to be stuck for a story transition. I wanted to be able to just pop him from place to place. Magic seemed to be the best way to handle that. I drew the boy, and I named him after my youngest brother, Timmy. Then I thought, Okay, how do I do the magic thing? I decided to give him a fairy godmother. So I drew Wanda. I thought that it would be even better if she had a husband. I’d never seen a fairy godfather before, but I drew Cosmo. Timmy is an only child–he’s lonely–which is why his godparents show up to help him in the first place. His enemy is his babysitter, Vicky. Once I mapped out the characters, the show developed from there, with one thing leading to another. I did ten Fairly OddParents shorts for Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Kevin Kay really liked them, so Nickelodeon tested three of them on a focus group. Lo and behold, they gave me six half-hours of an actual series to create.

Kevin Kay, Former EVP, Programming and Production, Nickelodeon: When we looked at The Fairly OddParents, we immediately said, “Well, there they are. Great characters, great frenetic energy.” And nobody has more frenetic energy than Butch Hartman.

Margie Cohn, EVP, Development and Original Programming, Nickelodeon: I went to Burbank for the first board pitch and literally almost jumped out of my skin. It was so funny and felt like it was going to be a monster hit.

Fred Seibert: The series was hugely successful. It is the second most popular show currently on Nickelodeon, and one of our three or four most popular shows since the network began.

Butch Hartman: The cool thing about The Fairly OddParents was that the ratings kept going up every time they’d run a new episode. Nick ordered more shows, and the original six episodes had to run by themselves for about a year. In that time, I took the original Oh Yeah! shorts that I did and reformatted them. By the time the new ones came out, The Fairly OddParents really started doing great. The show was just pure fun to work on. It was everything I had wanted to do as a kid. I got my wish.

Here’s the Random! Cartoons chapter of Jerry Beck’s Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons (the beautiful brainchild of Nickelodeon Worldwide Creative Director Russell Hicks). Yesterday I posted Oh Yeah! Cartoons 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: A few years had gone by since Oh Yeah! Cartoons, a few series had been created and aired, and I felt that a battle had been fought—and won. The reason I say that is because in 1997, when we started developing Oh Yeah! Cartoons, the industry was undergoing a huge upheaval. In 1990 there were no series that I would call “cartoon” series. They were all, in my opinion, “animated” series. The people who were dedicated to cartoons as opposed to the general medium of animation didn’t feel like they had a home in the industry. They were just starting to find their footholds in the business, and Oh Yeah! Cartoons developed a crew of creators who became the vanguard of the revival of the commercial cartoon.

Today, I think it’s fair to say that ninety-five percent of the animated shows on TV can truly be called cartoon series. At this point, the notion of wanting to revive the cartoon is no longer a burning issue in the creative community. Take the newest people in the business, the students coming out of the major animation schools—these are the kids who grew up with the first generation of what I like to call the “Silver Age” cartoons. I’m talking about Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats, Dexter’s Labaratory, Powerpuff Girls. The idea of fighting a war to revive the cartoon never even occurred to them, because they grew up in a world that had cartoons! Suddenly, the talent pool was radically different.

By 2004, the entire ethnic and gender composition of that talent pool had changed. As late as the 1990s, white males had a stranglehold on the animation business. Of the first five thousand pitches I took, less than ten of them were from women, and less than five were from people of color. I found that to be very sad, because that meant diverse points of view were not being represented on screen, so audiences were going to be less diverse, too.

However, by 2004, the women who had been interns at Hanna-Barbera were now entrenched in the business. Various ethnicities, particularly Latinos and Asians, became part of the business as well. Something else was also apparent—a wide range of animation styles had become acceptable in the commercial marketplace, a trend started by Nickelodeon in the early 1990s.

With that, we cast our net much wider for Random! Cartoons. By now, our notion of doing shorts, which was quaintly tolerated in the 1990s, was now accepted as a mainstream approach to producing cartoons. When we announced that we were doing a new range of shorts, people from literally all over the world got in touch with us.

The result? First, Random! Cartoons boasts a wider and more diverse group of creators than ever before. Eight creators are women, including Anne Walker (Mind the Kitty), Aliki Theofilopoulous (Yaki and Yumi), and Niki Yang (The Two Witch Sisters). Hispanic, Asian, and African-American talents such as Raul Aguirre Jr. and Bill Ho (Hero Heights), Seo jun-ko and Kang yo-kong (Dr. Dee and Bit Boy), and Greg Eagles (Teapot) join a creator pool that also includes such experienced independent filmmakers as Bill Plympton and John Dilworth. Nickelodeon now has thirty-nine new cartoons, and I honestly believe that this is the most exciting group of films that we’ve had in years.

Pen Ward’s post about the plethora of Adventure Time fan created art had me in such awe I had to go looking for it myself. I eventually put together a gallery of over 100 images!

OK, so any show with fans is algebraic. Any show that inspires fans to draw or write stories is mathematical. But jeez, Adventure Time is one seven minute short. That’s never been on television. That’s been taken off of every major sharing site dozens of times.

My personal favorite? Too many to call, but I really like the earrings.

Pen Ward is an amazing filmmaker.

Find more cartoons on Channel Frederator RAW

I could have sworn I posted this link but I guess not…

Here’s the original ’shooting’ storyboard for Adventure Time, a cartoon short made for Nickelodeon’s Random! Cartoons that has exploded as an internet phenomenon, with over 1,000,000 views to date.

It’s incredible to see how intact Pen Ward’s vision was from the very beginning of the project.

RHOMBUS!!

Adventure Time, 2006
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Created by Pendleton Ward
for Random! Cartoons

A Frederator Studios/Nickelodeon Production

Executive Producers: Larry Huber & Fred Seibert

YOU WANT YOUR BOOTIES?!!!

Writing about filmmaker Marv Newland several times over the past year got us in phone touch for the first time in the 21st Century and spawned a few joint projects I’ll be telling you about sometime.

The first is a short film, Marv’s (and Frederator’s) natural medium. Over the past six months or so Marv’s been sending us from his trips around the world (the one above’s from Hollywood). And in addition to the obvious –our New York address– there’s a cartoon embedded on the left, animated to a hot 1920’s Joe Venuti soundtrack.

Stay tooned.

Tuesday night, September 18, 2007
Eric, Kevin and I went right from our feature meeting with Doug TenNapel to the last screening for Random! Cartoons, featuring Doug’s Squirly Town, Karl Toerge & Jim Wyatt’s Ratzafratz, and 6 Monsters. We’ve now screened all 39 Random! shorts for the LA studio (as well as a New York ASIFA screening in May), and it’s sad they’re over, everyone did such a great job on their films. Nickelodeon’s been having a hard time scheduling an air date, so in the meanwhile we’ll do with the good feelings from our private screenings.

Karl and Jim prepped a great surprise for their honored guest June Foray when they pulled out a cake for her 90th birthday. My pictures weren’t too great, but they capture some of the wonderful mood, June looking better than anyone has a right to look, and many others having a good time.

Wednesday
Early day again when I make a reference call on one of our great interns to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It’s always feel good to give a solid recommendation for a hard working intern. Then it was breakfast with my former Hanna-Barbera colleague, Julie Kane-Ritsch who now, as part of the Gotham Group, represents creators like Bob Boyle, Dana Galin, Diane Kredensor, and too many others to mention in a blog post less than 1mm characters long.

I’d met Baby Prodigy creator Barbara Marcus at New York’s BrainCamp two years ago, and she came by the studio to chat on Wednesday.

Afterwards, I zoomed over to Cartoon Network Studios to take Ramsey Naito, head of their long form development, to Starbucks. As we’re getting fired up on the Samurai Jack feature I like to keep her up to date.

The Market City Diner was across the street from Starbucks, and lucky thing too, since that’s where I was to meet Scott Greenberg, Film
Roman/Starz production president, and our fantastic partner on Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! We never seem to spend enough time together in the office, so this lunch was a good chance to catch up.

Director/artist Howard Hoffman and I have worked together since back in the day starting on MTV and Nickelodeon network IDs. we’re working together again on Ape Escape Cartoons, and it’s always good when he drops by Frederator when I’m in Hollywood.

Speaking of back in the day, Bill Burnett, creator of ChalkZone and eight other Oh Yeah! and Random! cartoons came by too. We first worked together at Fred/Alan in New York, and then again at Hanna-Barbera and Frederator. We’re working on a lot of stuff at Next New Networks. We have so many things to talk about, cartoons and more, I won’t bore you with all of them.

Finally, it’s a great dinner at Firefly in the Valley. With great friend Rita Street, our Radar Cartoons colleague on the Nicktoons Network Animation Festival, Boneheads, and more.

A little sleep, and Hollywood continues Thursday.