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.

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.

From a Frederator fan:

Were all the CN’s World Premiere Toons and Nickelodeon’s Oh Yeah! Cartoons considered to be pilots for series or are some made to be one-shot stuff?

Andrés, from Chile.

Good question Andrés, and one we get fairly often, even from some of our potential creators.

Of course, the answer is “Yes and No.”

Ultimately, the purpose of doing all our shorts (not only World Premiere/What A Cartoon! and Oh Yeah!, but also the latest set of Random! Cartoons) is looking for filmmakers and characters that are strong enough to sustain lots of great cartoons. Not unlike it was back in the day when Felix, or Betty Boop, or Mickey or Bugs launched with one short that led to another and another and another. The optimistic hope we always have is developing the kinds of relationships we have had with creators over the last 15 years that lead to wonderful series of films.

However, when we call for ideas to come in, one of the first things we always say is that we’re not really looking for “pilots,” but great stand alone cartoons that have memorable characters at their center. A pilot” often tries to solve all the problems and answer all the questions that might arise in the future of a series. Frequently, there’s an attempt to introduce all the main characters and plot points. I think that’s a mistake, because the pilot episode then becames pedantic and sometimes pretty boring.

Our hope in a short is, not to put too fine a point on it, great. A tall order to be sure. But the way I figure it is that a fantastically funny short without all its questions answered has a better chance to be a wonderful series, than an only OK short. And yes, I understand that it’s not so darn easy to make a great cartoon. Look at all the talented creators we’ve worked with over the years, and how seldom their films become hit series.

In the end, the reality is no matter how hard we try to find cartoons with rich, memorable characters we have a lot of shorts that are just fun one-offs. We’ll be running one on Channel Frederator in a couple of weeks, Harvey Kurtzman’s Hey Look!. It’s based on an early newspaper strip of Harvey’s, sublimely adapted and directed by Vincent Waller, and we tried like the dickens to make the characters funny and indelible. Are they? You’ll tell us, but to my mind, it’s a great one-shot.

Ah well, that’s the way the cartoons animate.

Frederator Studios is at the end producing the 39 original shorts that will make up the Random! Cartoons series on Nickelodeon. We started making original short cartoons in the early 90s at Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network with 48 What A Cartoon!s a.k.a. World Premiere Toons (six series were spun off from those shorts), then with 51 Oh Yeah! Cartoons (plus another 51 shorts and three series) and now these 39. Occasionally in this space I’ve been recounting how we got here. When we last left off the new Hanna-Barbera production team of 1992 (under Ted Turner’s recent acquisition of the studio) was busy putting together a production team for these cockamamie shorts.

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.

When I first joined the studio, completely ignorant of the process of making commercial cartoons, I’d talk to anyone who could give me a clue (and quite a few who couldn’t). John Kricfalusi introduced me to the artist/writer Pat Ventura when I told him I’d asked Joe Barbera to include an update of Screwball Squirrel in his new Fox Kids Droopy series (he rightly pointed out Pat, a Tex Avery fan, was already on the Tom & Jerry Kids Show writing staff, why start searching for someone new?). Along with John, Pat’s inadvertent influence on our future shorts would be incalculable.

As a little background, Pat graduated from CalArts in the 70s and proceeded to work all over the business as an artist, storyboarder, writer (he quickly found out that “writers” were in demand, writers-who-wrote-on-boards were not) and had done a great stint as a gag man at Disney features during their 1980s revival, writing many of the Roger Rabbit shorts. He left for the Tom & Jerry Kids Show because he had the great and rare insight to realize the opportunity to work with an old master of the shorts form was virtually extinct; working every day with Joe Barbera was too great to pass up. Which is when we met.

I took an immediate liking to Pat and he was one of the few people I took into my confidence about the looney idea of reviving the cartoon form through shorts. He was a great film historian and student (particularly the silents) and would patiently give me instruction. He’d tell me about his preference for Keaton, Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy. And why he preferred the composer Scott Bradley to the more revered Carl Stalling. He did his best to show me how gags were set up and staged and why, while he thought Looney Tunes were OK, he liked the Fleischers.

And we talked incessantly about short cartoons. Why they were good, why they weren’t. Why writing on boards was good and what you could learn from them. Because of Pat we started a weekly screening series at Hanna-Barbera where we could share some of the great shorts (animated and live action) Ted Turner had in his vast library with the studio staff who cared.

When I started talking to John and Pat I came at everything like a studio head. (It would take me a little while to get smarter.) How do I find hit shows? Shorts seemed like a good idea since we could get 25 “at bats” for every series we’d try the old way. So when I first broached the idea with Pat I said I wanted to do as many shorts as possible; I suggested that a bunch of three minute shorts would give us an idea of what characters we liked.

“No, not three minutes. Six, seven, eight,” Pat told me.

My logical “Why?” was answered that if I wanted to make cartoons then they needed to be made with artists who loved cartoons. And if I was going that way then the cartoons needed to be, well, cartoons. And cartoons absolutely were not three minutes.

Pat was so certain I just agreed on the spot. It took me a long time to realize just why his instinct was so right on. But from then on that was it. All our shorts, well over 100 by now, are seven minutes long. It drives some of our talented creators crazy (of course, we realize no matter what length we set, someone would be annoyed) but seven minutes it is. A real legacy of short cartoons. Shaped in part by our friend Pat Ventura.

Now, if only I could convince the folks at Cartoon Network.

(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.

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.

Starting at Hanna-Barbera in 1992 it was clear I wanted the studio to produce short cartoons, but I was only beginning to figure out how we should actually go about it.

Anyone who would listen I’d talk to about shorts. And I picked up tips anywhere I could.

Buzz Potamkin was our new head of production. His New York studio had produced my original MTV “Moonman” animation before he packed it in to go to Hollywood to make Saturday morning shows, and over the years he’d given me a pretty fair education on how TV cartoon studios worked in general, and in particular how Hanna-Barbera had gotten into the sad shape it was in. Together with my operating partner Jed Simmons we figured we could credibly ask for enough money from our boss Scott Sassa to make 48 short cartoons. It would cost about the same as two series, but instead of two chances to succeed (or fail, like with 2 Stupid Dogs or SWAT Kats)) we’d have 48. “Scott, I know I know nothing about making cartoons. But with 48 shots even someone as ignorant as me can hit,” I pleaded.

Buzz also suggested Larry Huber as supervising producer. Having proved his ability to work with new people and new ideas on 2 Stupid Dogs he would be perfect.

John Kricfalusi had long preached the difference between traditional writers and cartoon-artist-as-writers (“Fred, every writer puts a cartoon scene in where ‘the bomb blows up in his face’ and thinks it’s funny. A bomb going off is not funny! It’s how the face looks before the bomb, how long it waits to blow up, how it blows up, and what happens after it blows up that might be funny. An artist shows you that.”) and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

As a pitcher and buyer of shows I knew the limitations of the traditional pitch: Here’s the idea, here’s two pages describing the idea, and here’s a few pictures of what the idea might look like. After listening to folks like Friz Freleng, Joe Barbera, and Chuck Jones talk about shorts pitches back in the day, I determined we would only put a short into production after a full storyboard pitch from the artist originating it. Please show us the actual film you want to make, not describe the idea of the film. I’d been in advertising long enough to know the difference between an idea and the actual execution; the gap was light years. If we saw the storyboard we’d have some idea of whether or not the creator had any real notion of cartoons (versus animation, not the same thing at all), whether he/she really understood their character, and whether or not he or she actually understood story.

OK, so there was a framework to operate in. Now what?

(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.

(L)Mike Lazzo, originating programmer, Cartoon Network & (R) Joe Barbera

It was almost an accident I became president of the famous Hanna-Barbera studio, but it was a chance to revive cartoons through my idea of making shorts the way they did in the theatrical days.

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.

Cartoon Network had just launched and senior creative executive and programmer Mike Lazzo had a great idea for a “Cartoon Advisory Board” really just a great excuse to hang with legends. He assembled a room somewhere in Hollywood with Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Friz Freleng, Noel Blanc (Mel’s son), and John Kricfalusi. (…:::Later, Jerry Beck refreshes my recollections below in comments.) Mike had a bunch of questions he asked and they answered, but only one sticks in my mind. As I remember it went something like this:

Mike Lazzo: What makes a good producer?

Joe Barbera: Fred Quimby was a great producer!

(Note from FS: I knew Joe despised Quimby, so this confused me right off the bat.)

Quimby would come in around 10 in the morning, go right to his office and make some phone calls. Around 11 his barber would come in and give him his daily trim and shave. 12:30 he was off to lunch, back at 2:30 for some calls to East Coast distributors and then he’d go home.

Mike Lazzo: What was the production unit doing all day?

Joe Barbera: We were making the cartoons we felt like making. Like I said, Fred Quimby was a great producer!

I was listening closely. “Hey, I can do that job!” I said out loud.

(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.

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.

Within months of arriving at Hanna-Barbera I had greenlit two series in the traditional way. But all I could think about was the idea of doing shorts the way I had pitched to Nickelodeon in the late 80s.

Impressed by the passion of the Trembley brothers (creators of SWAT Kats) I put the series into production under the direction of young Hanna-Barbera veteran Davis Doi, who made the show using the mainstream production techniques of the 80s. The creative team worked very hard, and we had a lot of hope for the show but by distributing it through syndication, which had become the weakest way to find a kids’ audience, ultimately the series failed. (Though there are currently 102,000[!] mentions on the internet.)

In the long run the pick-up of 2 Stupid Dogs affected me, Hanna-Barbera, and in fact, the entire cartoon industry, a lot more. Donovan Cook was a recently graduated CalArts animation whipper snapper who came in the office with half a storyboard. It had a great title, it was pretty funny, and it had a graphic style influenced by classic UPA and Hanna-Barbera that I loved (I was such a newbie to the business that I was completely unaware the style had become the mainstream of CalArts graduates who were more interested in cartoons than feature animation.) Donovan’s energy was infectious, and like an idiot I said “go!” on a 13 episode series that had no distribution commitment, half a storyboard, and a creator who’d barely done anything ever before. (The 2 Stupid Dogs story is interesting in and of itself to those who care, but that’ll be for another time.) We assigned another industry old hand, Larry Huber, to partner with Donovan, which turned out to be one of the smarted moves I’ve made in my career.

Little did I know that the most revolutionary thing I’d done in my animation career to that point was not in green lighting these two series, but in allowing the Trembley brothers and Donovan to actually make the series they wanted to make, rather than what our studio system had in store for them.

Simultaneously with these new productions the studio was finishing off shows sold by the previous administration, and my new partner Jed Simmons was trying like hell to turn around the business battleship that was stuck in the bathtub. If we didn’t turn around the downward trend of the financial graph, there was no way Ted Turner and Scott Sassa were going to let us do anything more, no matter how great it was.

And in the meantime, I was talking shorts to anyone who would sit long enough to listen. Some who listened were studio crew who sat because I was the boss, but thought I was a raving lunatic (from their perspective shorts had died 30 years before). Competitors and network executives politely nodded their heads and told me it sounded great (great for them that is; the faster I started this stupid idea, the faster I’d be shipped out of Hollywood). A lot of young folk were cautiously excited because they’d gotten into the business to make cartoons, even though the industry had actually abandoned cartoons years ago.

(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.

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.

I started as the new President of Hanna-Barbera in June of 1992.

First of all I need to get to know 300 new employees, in a new industry, in a new city. Within hours the development department was coming in with new pitches for series, specials, and feature films. I had absolutely no idea how to decide whether anything was any good, and who was talented enough. Everyone seemed talented.

So I talked with everyone who wanted to talk. Anyone who wanted to give me a theory about what made a hit could get a date with me. Three (or four) meals a day, six or seven days a week. Sometimes a midnight meeting at an artist’s house just to hang out.

One day a writer who’d worked at the studio for 30 years came by with an idea. “Imagine a pig.” OK I can do that. “And he works in a post office.” OK. “But, he’s really a superhero!”

Please, deliver me. Back to New York, preferably.

I told everyone I met about how I loved the Hanna-Barbera classic cartoons. Most of them laughed at me like I was an old fart (41 year old at the time). But along the way I’d run into a few folks, like John Kricfalusi, who enjoyed my interests and helped me to understand a little more about how to do what I wanted to do.

Then one day one of our newer development executives, Margot McDonough, thought there were some younger creative types she thought I might like. No one else with my kind of position would really want to meet them, but, after the pig in the post office I was desperate.

(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.

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.

After suddenly closing my ad agency, getting divorced, and moving to Los Angeles after 25 years in New York, I found myself running a famous company that hadn’t had a hit in over a decade, in a business where I knew almost nothing and no one.

Here’s what my COO partner Jed Simmons and I had to look forward to when we got to Hanna-Barbera in 1992:

The last hit at the studio was The Smurfs in 1981.
Tom & Jerry Kids was a hit on Fox Kids.
Fish Police was being finished up to air in primetime on CBS.
Capitol Critters was being produced with Steven Bochco for ABC.
Once Upon A Forest and The Pagemaster were feature films being made for 20th Century Fox.
Yo Yogi!, the adventures of a teenaged Yogi Bear at the mall, was being finished up for NBC.

One bright note: Eric Homan was cleaning cells in the Animation Art Department.

Had no one in this place ever seen a cartoon? I thought I was going to kill myself.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.