Fred Seibert's Blog

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.

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.

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.

Blog History of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Part 1. Part 2.
Part 3. Part 4.

It was hard hearing from Nickelodeon that they didn’t like everything about our cartoon ideas.

So, as was usual in the 80s, Nickelodeon loved our idea of how to get into original cartoons in a thoroughly original way, but they felt the need to adapt it their way, as was their right. And, also usual for the 80s, we were both thrilled to have sparked their actions, but simultaneously incredibly frustrated that they needed to change our approach.

“Change it?” you say. “How?” They listened to us carefully about how Looney Tunes did it. They loved the idea of getting fresh creative people not generally involved in the mainstream animation biz of the 80s (no Hanna-Barbera, no Ruby-Spears, no Filmation). They loved the idea of short pilots to test the ideas for a reasonable price…

Wait a minute! That’s where they veered off course. At least as far as my idea went.

What I loved about the Looney Tunes model was that the shorts they made in the 30s & 40s had nothing to do with the concept of “pilots.” The WB powers-that-be greenlit an original character picture by one of Termite Terrace teams, they made the picture, they put it in the theatres. They listened for laughter directly from the audience, and if they laughed enough they made more shorts. If not, that the was the end of the line for our hapless original character. They did not play the cartoon for a few people in a room (like a focus group), decided they liked the thing, and then start ‘developing’ it before they would make another.

Nickelodeon decided because they were in the TV business, you couldn’t really take that approach. Pilots were the way to go. Make a short film, whatever the length as long as it was short, focus group it, ‘develop’ it, and go. Now, like I said in the last post, this approach worked, and Nick changed the animation world with Ren&Stimpy, Rugrats, and Doug, so God bless them.

But, in my opinion, our approach was essentially different. In no real order:

* A filmmaker making a short that will actually be seen by an audience conceives it unlike a picture made for a group of executives. I don’t really have to explain thia thought further, right?

* A cartoon made to be played on television will be, by it’s nature, a more disciplined affair. At the very least, the network will usually set a format, a length, for the picture. Working to a parameter almost always has the filmmaker paying closer attention to the details.

* Modeling your projects on the best films ever made will invariably allow you to score better.

From my humble vantage point, the best cartoons ever made were the Looney Tunes, the Disney shorts, the Fleischers. I figure, if you’re going into a new area of creative exploration (as was Nickelodeon by going into animation), start by looking at the best. Don’t look at the Snorks and feel that’s the baseline you need to beat.

To be perfectly honest, there was probably no reason for me to be disheartened. I was really annoyed the Nickelodeon team did not follow my plan exactly. I know they were successful, but I wanted them to do it my way. And for all my whining, complaining, and rationales, for no other reason than I liked my way.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Part 1. Part 2.
Part 3. Part 4.

Oh Yeah! Cartoons, started in 1998, but our minds were on original cartoons as far back as the 80s.

Blog History of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Part 1.

Quickly improvising, I put all the meager knowledge I had of cartoons and the cartoon biz into a jumble of sentences.

The way I looked at it was Looney Tunes were considered the cartoon ideal of my Beatle-like view of contemporary art and culture; the films were the height of the art and unbelievably popular too. A great one-two punch. They were also short (cheaper to make than a half hour series), funny (kids like funny better than anything over the long run), and eclectic (sure, Bugs was the star, but they tried dozens of characters over the years to find their hits).

(Of course, this fit my view of our interests too. In my mind, I was trying to get my company into this new Nick/animation equation. If I could weave a senario that was unique in the contemporary landscape, who else would they entrust this new effort too, but the innovative folks at Fred/Alan?)

Nickelodeon prided itself as doing kids TV differently than the conventional wisdom (remember, this was the 80s, when Saturday morning television ruled the roost in the family industry, when tired formulas and commercialized toy-animation was seen as the only profitable route, when cynical executives decreed foolishness about kids every day).

It seemed this approach to lots of shorts by off-the-beaten-path talent was the perfect path for Nick to travel into animation.

Debby and Ann were enthusiastic. Looked like I was in like Flynn. Sort of.

(More next time.)
Blog History of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Part 1.

We keep getting asked about how we started making original cartoons like the ones in Oh Yeah!, so I thought it might be good occasionally to post a bit of the back story here. Feel free to interrupt with any questions.

In the early 80s, after getting my start in TV as MTV’s original creative director, Alan Goodman and I had started Fred/Alan, the first company to introduce the concept of branding to television networks. Our first client, and first success, was the relaunching of Nickelodeon, where we made them the number one cable channel in six months. (Amazingly, since they’d been the lowest rated network in America.)

Chief programmer Debby Beece and business head Anne Sweeney asked me to breakfast at New York’s Paramount Hotel sometime in 1988 or 89, and said it was necessary for Nickelodeon to seriously start producing it’s own programming, and they wanted to start with animation. Since Alan and I had brought hundreds of wild, award-winning, animated network identifications to the channel, did I have any idea how they could get started? Honestly, other than random conversations I’d had with NY commercial producer Buzz Potamkin, I’d never given animated programming much thought. We were branding and promotion specialists, I reminded them, with no background in storytelling, and there was a world of difference between little 10 second dancing animals (as wonderful as they might be) and comedy. Debby and Ann insisted we were the ones to help them out, and I began improvising.

Why not copy from the best, I suggested. Why not emulate Looney Tunes?

(More next time.)