Fred Seibert's Blog

 
“Victor the Delivery Dog” title sequence, by Niki Yang

Well, not really. But ever since I got into the cartoon business the classic way of introducing a short animated film keeps animating me.

In anticipation of our belated debut of the Random! Cartoons shorts (December 6 on Nicktoons, in case you were wondering), I just posted 31 of the title card sequences over on our site. (Yes, there are 39 different shorts, but some of the sequences are animated, some just haven’t made their way to me yet.) Most of them were designed and illustrated by the shorts’ individual creators. I think you’ll enjoy the wide range of approaches they’ve taken as much as we do.

And as a bonus, here are some frame grabs from our original shorts program, What A Cartoon!, from before I was smart enough to save the original artwork.

Whenever I get a little free time (like now, on vacation) I pull crap off of my shelves and scan it for posterity. Like these two Hanna-Barbera Cartoons calendars from the 90s (I posted 1995 on last summer’s vacation).

Over the years I’ve collected all sorts of stuff that have pop culture images printed on them (skateboards, glasses, calendars, et cetera) and when I got to Hanna-Barbera it seemed to me the studio was in need of some image repair. Calendars were my obsession of that moment, so we put together some incredible design talent and photographers (SpotCo and Mark Hill for 1994, HB in-house talent in 1995) and spiffed ourselves up a little.

I suppose you’d have to be a certain age to appreciate this poster my old ad agency created in the 1980s for Nick-at-Nite. Or any of the other ads we made for them. But I wanted to put them up anyway because it’s some of my favorite work from those days (and it’s funny). My partner Alan Goodman and I conceived the idea for the network and built it for Nickelodeon in 1985, and Fred/Alan Creative Directors Bill Burnett and Noel Frankel created the campaign. (You probably know Bill from his cartoon life as the co-creator of ChalkZone and a number of Oh Yeah! Cartoons.)

For whatever it’s worth, I’ll throw in the first written description we put together for Nick-at-Nite, two or three years after it went on the air. You might note that it’s also the first linking of Nick-at-Nite with TV Land (”Hello out there from TV Land!” a variation of the 1950s original “Hello out there in TV Land!”), the precursor to MTV Networks spinning off the 24 hour network called TV Land.

One of the great things about this season’s development is opening up the field much wider in New York, where I’m currently based.

For instance, Robert Teer & Damiam DeMartino are a team who come out of playwriting, graphic design, and comics. Today they came in to pitch their cartoon Gloom & Dread.

Thanks to Robert & Damian for kind permission to post one of their pitch drawings.