Fred Seibert's Blog

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.

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.

Over a year ago I started what I figured would be a quick round-up of how we got to where we are today in the short cartoon game. But with the launch of Channel Frederator in November things got a lot busier than I would have ever imagined. And we haven’t even gotten to the first short we made. So here’s the first six posts and we’ll pick up where we left off.

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

Looking back on the first parts of this story and the almost 20 years since it started I realize we’ve mid-wifed almost 150 original short cartoons and over 1000 more their creators made when the shorts prospered as series. All in the face of an industry that to this day has virtually abandoned the short form which had made it rich (historians like Jerry Beck or Michael Barrier are in a better position to speculate why it happened). The obvious question would be why beat our heads against the wall so constantly when it might be easier to do what everyone else is doing?

To begin with when confronted with the idea of actually being involved with making cartoons I looked around to see what cartoons were the greatest ever. Not the best of the day (late 80s) but the best of all time. Like everyone else I’m a product of my past (I’m 54, so I started watching screens in the early 1950s) so my first exposure to cartoons was the shoveling of theatrical cartoons from the first half of the 20th century onto the fledgling medium of television. From Farmer Gray to Disney shorts, from Out of the Inkwell to Mighty Mouse I was in love with them all. But, of course, I mostly loved the Looney Tunes, which then and now, I thought were absolutely unparalleled. So the first seed of shorts addiction was in by 1960.

Like most people (though not most of this blog’s readers) I stopped watching cartoons regularly around 11 or 12 and graduated to pop music, propelled by the Beatles coming to America in 1964. So begins another devotion to a short form of popular culture, the Top 40. No matter where my musical travels have brought me, from art-rock through avant-garde jazz, the economy of pop from Benny Goodman to The Beatles to Nirvana has been, for me, the cornerstone of the one of the most inventive arts to have descended onto earth.

My initial instinct when asked about making cartoons was to make them like the ultimate, like Looney Tunes. Not that I thought we could ever equal them, and, of course, I had no idea how Looney Tunes were made; my initial thoughts, had they been implemented would have been abject failures. But when I met John Kricfalusi he gave me a quick tutorial on the primacy of the artist in cartooning, and with further discussions with Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna, Friz Freleng and others I decided that I would attempt to make cartoons primarily created by artists/animators/directors rather than writers or executives (not to ignore either, but rather, to put them in their appropriate place in the creative mix). And it seemed to me (still does) that a short form is a better form to start films with artists. Cartoons are more character based than story and plot driven, and rather than put artist/creators at disadvantage, the short form could allow the artist with character and story predilections to be at his or her strongest from the get go. Shorts seem like the ideal artist film medium.

So, from the beginning the wallop and the sense of the short form sat right with me. Let’s emulate the greatest ever and since the greatest were short (averaging around seven minutes), by golly, come hell or high water, that’s what we were going to do.

(More next time. Soon, I hope.)

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

It’s always a great day at Frederator Studios when our great friend John Kricfalusi comes by with cartoon ideas like Wally.

Many of you have heard me talk about the importance of John to our approach to making cartoons. Though we were circling around the idea of classic style shorts like Looney Tunes, it wasn’t until we moved to Hollywood and met John that we understood how we would approach them. The value of artists as the prime movers, the make-each-drawing-funny neccessity, timing, acting… the list of influential items is enormous. Of course, it’s not that Mr. Kricfalusi invented this stuff, but, I think it’s fair to say, he was most definitely the most vocal person in reviving these notions as important in the new generation entering the business in the 90s.

For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of watching a John K pitch, my really crappy cell phone camera caught this classic Spumco moment.

Thanks John, you’ve made a great difference to all of us.

Thanks to John Kricfalusi for his kind permission to post this drawing of Wally.

Blog History of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Part 1. Part 2.
Part 3.

I am admiring of how Nickelodeon went about interpreting our suggestions for getting into the original cartoon business in the late 80s. They listened respectfully to our approach to go back-to-the-future of cartoon creation to model their entry on Looney Tunes. That is, make a single, short cartoon, with highly talented and skilled filmmakers, show it to the audience, and, if they like it, make more.

So, as the best clients often do, they took what they wanted from that advice, and did it their way.

And their way worked like crazy. Nick’s head of development & production (now Chairman) Herb Scannell enlisted the help of Vanessa Coffey and Mary Harrington, two cartoon novices (though with oodles more experience than Herb, or me for that matter). Herb, Vanessa, and Mary identified five indie studios to make pilots: John K’s Spumco, Klasky-Csupo, Jim Jinkin’s Jumbo, Joey Ahlbum, and I don’t remember the fifth. The results made animation history, and changed the game in TV animation forever: Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, and Doug, all from Nickelodeon’s initial foray into original cartoons.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Part 1. Part 2.
Part 3.