Fred Seibert's Blog

Mailed the week of April 14, 2008

We finally have gotten word on the airing of Random! Cartoonsfrom Nickelodeon. It’s looking like December of this year. More details to follow when they’re available.

Random! Cartoons logo
Designed by Michael Lapinski
Inspired by Darron Moore

Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

There’s always someone who blows up the conventional wisdom and then the world is never the same. Ralph Bakshi is the one in animation, and we can all thank him every day.

Jon M. Gibson and Chris McDonnell have written Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi and filled it with insights and tons of art that will remind a lot of people why they thought it would be cool to be in the cartoon business, suggest to others why they wonder why they got in, and introduce everyone else to the person some of us always describe by “What can you say about Ralph?”

I should add I was thrilled Jon & Chris mentioned the couple of shorts of we did with Ralph in the 90s at Hanna-Barbera. It was an honor he chose to work with our then experimental program (I guess it’s in keeping with the man) and helped introduce our wacky idea to the world. Thanks Ralph.

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. Part 19.Part 18. Part 20.

So the Hanna-Barbera shorts program –still unnamed– was off and running. Everyone in development, and the production department leaders, was out beating the bushes looking for animators who wanted to make their own cartoons, their own way.

As we were out in the world trying to convince creative folks that Hanna-Barbera was serious about doing original shorts (remember, the animation industry had made it clear that original ideas were not to interesting or, for that matter, commercially viable), our hardest immediate job was convincing people already working at the studio. For years there had been almost no history of taking an idea from a staff member for a show. Everyone thought I was just spouting a line, or at the very least naive, and most of the company went about their daily jobs not paying too much attention to my call for shorts.

If I remember correctly, the first person who started a short was Pat Ventura. We met through John K while he was a writer on Tom & Jerry Kids (he wanted first hand experience working with a master like Joe Barbera) and struck up an immediate sympatico. He helped me often in my thinking about the shorts program, and his original style and excitement (tinged with a shade of cynicism) made me want to start a project with him. Since he was a Tex Avery fan I thought maybe launching him with one of Tex’s characters could make a smooth transition into the program, and when he suggested George and Juniorwe gave him the greenlight.

Of course, any short we began with would start a ruckus, and Pat was the perfect guy to help us through the muck.

From the very start there was a huge, tremendous positive. Basically, the feeling among the artists was, “If he’ll give that guy a short, he must be serious. Or crazy. Maybe both.” It was clear to everyone that Pat was a complete original who would never get a chance to do his own thing anywhere in the Hollywood commercial animation establishment. He was obviously a talent who would get a chance to contribute to some studio project (he’d worked on Aladdin and Roger Rabbit at Disney, for instance), but really, wasn’t he was too out there? Once it was clear that Pat was a ‘go’ lots of the folks, newbies and veterans both, started working on their own boards.

Once work started on the short the shit really started to cascade.

A little background you might already know: the real revolution at Hanna-Barbera was the ability of Bill Hanna to create tightly organized productions that could be systematized, reducing costs enough to be affordable for television stations. Everything –art & models, layout, directing, animation, voice recording, etcetera– was split up into departments, all controlled at the top by Bill and Joe. Decision making was highly centralized into as few places as possible, reducing waste of time and money. It worked great at the beginning, when the whole staff was the cream of the world class folk who made the great theatricals of the first half of the century, but began breaking down into merely hack-like efficiency as newbies came into the industry during its 30+ years. By the time Ted Turner bought the company in 1991 there were decades of rationalization piled on convenience, the famous system was spiritually, not to say creatively, broken, and existed merely for the sake of inertia.

Everything came to a head most clearly over voice acting and directing. My head of production, Buzz Potamkin, assigned veteran Larry Huber to supervise all the shorts production. Larry had been in the business since 1969 and had seen the transition from full to limited animation, from full on American production to overseas animation, and was comfortable with his superiors, his peers, and the young turks invading. But, as much as we insisted we wanted a return to a unit system of individual responsibility for a cartoon, Larry had to get along with the still powerful vestiges of Bill’s system.

Voice directing had become centralized with a “real director” who “understood actors,” like there was a big secret. Pat’s short was plugged into the game and his script was given over to one of the “voice directors” who “allowed” Pat to sit in on casting and recording, as if it was their right to decide. When I asked Pat about the session he told me everything was great, wasn’t that just the way it was? I realized what was going on and ordered everyone in the production line that from then on each of the shorts creators was to have final cut on all casting and would direct their own voice actors. If there was a disaster, so be it. To this day, I’m sure there was some weaseling going on around the edges, but all in all it worked OK. No actors refused to act, no voice sessions ended in horror, no cartoons were harmed.

When it came to directing, Larry assigned another veteran, but someone who’d been a young turk when he entered the biz 20 years before, Robert Alvarez. Robert did a pass on the exposure sheets, and this time Pat did come by my office to complain.

“He made the eyes blink!”

So?

“Tom and Jerry never blinked. Touché Turtle did. I don’t want the eyes to blink.” Pat filled me in on the directing compromises needed in TV animation, and keeping the eyes blinking while nothing else in the frame moved a hair was one of them. It wasn’t what he was looking for in his cartoons.

I called Larry and he patiently explained to me that Robert was directing on the very strict rules he was told to follow if he wanted to keep his job. And who didn’t want to keep their job? It was the same at every studio in town by then, and if a director directed by their own instincts they wouldn’t be working for long. I told Pat to tell Robert what he wanted, and that he’d be happy with the result. Robert was not only a pro, he wanted to involved with wonderful cartoons. Follow the creator.

Next thing I knew I was face to face with Robert. Scared to death I might add. Who was I, with no animation experience whatsoever, to question the wisdom of the best system ever devised for television cartoons? But Robert, a good man as well as a talented one (to very roughly paraphrase an old blues) shook my hand instead. He thanked me for trusting talent like Pat’s and trusting Hanna-Barbera to make great cartoons again. Soon, Robert was the go-to guy for everyone who wanted great animation direction in the short program, as well as creating two wonderful shorts of his own (Pizza Boy and Tumbleweed Tex).

Creators started to rule again.

(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. Part 19.Part 18. Part 20.

Click here for

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.

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.

We’d finally gotten the “shorts” program approved by my Turner bosses Scott Sassa and Ted Turner, and convinced the person running Cartoon Network it was actually her idea to produce 48 ‘classic length’ cartoon shorts over two years. If only I was right and the talented people in animation really wanted to make cartoons.

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. Part 19.

Everyone at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons and Turner Broadcasting who cared fanned out across the globe to spread the word we were serious about making cartoons. Serious in every way. We were making 48 short cartoons over two years in a back-to-the-future kind of unit production way. Each “classic length” (7 minutes) short would debut, by itself, as a stand-alone cartoon on Cartoon Network. Each one would be a product of one cartoonist’s vision (or a self-selected team), produced the way the creator saw it. There was no concern on our part what an eventual series would be “about;” the short had to be great on its own without any allegiance to some preconceived “bible”. We didn’t care what the sitcom trends were, what Nickelodeon was doing, what the sales departments wanted. Even the music would be individually crafted scores, individually tailored to the film at hand, no stock library, pre-fabbed “beds” here. We wouldn’t ‘develop’ them; we wanted to make the cartoon the creator(s) wanted to make, not some executive idea of what they thought kids would like. And we wanted them to be laugh out loud funny.

We wanted cartoons.

Getting original cartoons into the studio and onto television required an army’s worth of work to begin with. Even those who thought this might be a good idea were hard pressed to explain it outside our BS sessions, and since not one person in the world had exactly been waiting for us to show up (at least, not consciously) it was going to require us to explain what we were talking about, explain it again, call back to cajole, convince artists that had never put together one classic cartoon idea from scratch (remember, studios and networks thought cartoons were hopefully passe´, animated sitcoms were where it was at) to put together a pitch storyboard. And, oh yes, the odds, as always in any entertainment project, were we were going to say “No” to their idea.

My closest studio co-conspirator during the run up to the shorts was the studio’s new head of production, Buzz Potamkin. We’d worked together on MTV in New York when he was an independent producer and he’d given me years of Hollywood cartoon biz insight which helped me get started at HB. Buzz could articulate better than I our strategy of re-creating the unit production system that had fueled the golden age, and suggested Larry Huber as the supervising producer for the new shorts unit (a role, among others, he’s successfully navigated through all 138 Hollywood based shorts we’ve produced). Buzz unsuccessfully suggested we make a short with Bill Plympton (it took me 20 years to get smart/brave enough to do it), but brought dozens of other creators to the table. Later, we’ll tell the story of how he convinced Ralph Bakshi to join our group of first-timers.

At Cartoon Network, founding programmer Mike Lazzo rallied his troops behind our efforts. He’d been managing Turner’s cartoons at Superstation TBS and TNT since he was, I don’t know, maybe two years old, and a uniquely brilliant blend of creative thinking and analytical programming. Mike was the person I turned to for inspiration, network thinking, and plain old jawing about cartoons.

The Hanna-Barbera development department (after slashing and pruning of about a dozen staff development writers –an extremely painful task– it was now primarily Jeff Holder, Ellen Cockrill, Margot McDonough, and Dan Smith) had a tough task. They needed to persuade folks that Hanna-Barbera was earnest about giving creative people a chance to do their own work. For decades HB had been a shop where you started or ended your career, but if you had creative ambitions you steered clear. I knew that to reverse the fortunes of the place, to keep Turner from closing the production studio altogether, we had to change that perception. Our shop had to become the place talent was clawing their way into. Hah!

And I was making the development job even harder. I didn’t want “development,” at least in the way they’d been trained, I just wanted them to go out and find hit cartoon creators (much easier typed than done, of course), people who could make a hit and sustain it no matter what happened to the executives or networks who discovered them in the first place. “Development” across television had become a haven for executives who had never produced anything themselves, or had washed out of the dog-eat-dog show biz environment, to take a fairly risk-less path to getting their own ideas out. A D-exec could lean back in their salaried chair and bark dictums (”make it funnier!” was a favorite of mine from an HBO executive) until an exciting, original piece of material resembled nothing more than a piece of product for the junk heap. When instead, they tried to bring me around to their point of view –why were they being paid as ‘development’ execs if their input wasn’t needed– I asked them a couple of simple questions.

“If there’s a successful cartoon series, who deserves the bonus? The creator or the executive?” “Both of us,” was the reply. Fine, and if there’s a failure, who gets fired? That wasn’t a question anyone wanted to answer. I was interested in a clear path back to a successful film, I wanted to know if the credit was “Created by Ray Sturgeon” it didn’t really mean “Created by Ray Sturgeon and a pack of execs.” Besides, I knew the average life of a development executive at studios was actually shorter than the time it took to get a hit series to air. If that was the case, and the exec was partially responsible for success, we were screwed if key members of the creative development worked for the competition by the time of the show. It had always struck me as a bogus approach anyway. William Shakespeare, Leonardo DaVinci, and Duke Ellington, had all made great, popular art with a singular vision. We could do it too. (Please don’t ras me with my artistic comparisons; I aim high.) When it was all said and done, our development folks bought the program, for as long as they were with us anyhow, and walked the walk and talked the talk.
So, anyway, all of us fanned out everywhere we could spreading the message, telling our story. Any way we could, we tried to put our money where our mouth was. We went to schools, we started a high visibility storyboard contest, we talked to union groups. We all had individual meetings with every artist in the studio who would be patient enough not to laugh in our faces. (Not a few came in ready to participate only to find out they wouldn’t be paid to create their storyboard. After all, all across the world entertainment business a creative idea was developed in free time, the creator got a royalty participation in all future success after all; no risk, no reward. But in animation, where it had always been “we have the ideas, you be the hands” it was pretty confusing to a lot of veterans.) We placed stories in the press in the US, Europe, and Asia. We were relentless in looking for talent. After all, we had 48 cartoons to make from a dead stop.

(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. Part 19.