Soon Nick-at-Nite was the most popular cable network in prime time and we needed to start selling some ads. Bill Burnett came up with the idea of a faux editorial campaign for the advertising trade magazines (like Advertising Age and Adweek) from a media pundit, Raul Degado (written by Bill, modeled by Tom Pomposello, who had one outrageous media buying scheme after another, every week. By the end of each column, of course, Nick-at-Nite seemed the perfect real time solution to the advertisers’ problems.
This one could be my favorite. It’s funny, and, it came true!
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 ofOh 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.
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.
Scott Nash has been one of my great friends and closest colleagues for over 25 years, though I don’t think we’ve actually done anything together for at least 15. He not only illustrates and writes books, consults on graphic design, teaches, and produces animation and movies, Scott (and Tom Corey) designed the Nickelodeon logo for my agency.
Scott stopped by with Nancy and Dave to catch up and fill us in on his animated project The Uh-Ohs.
Scott’s been hiding his wife from me for 25 years, so I was thrilled to finally meet the talented Nancy Gibson-Nash, a collage artist. She’s quite lovely, so of course Scott kept her out of sight.
DaveSchlafman is an independent filmmaker designing and directing a great project with Scott, The Uh-Ohs, and he dropped in on Eric at Frederator/West a couple of weeks ago. Dave was working at Soup 2 Nuts when he and Scott met.
It was great seeing everyone, especially Nancy. (Oh OK, it was awesome hanging with Scott and Dave too.)
Brown Johnson was on our blog back when we were on Blogger and I called her one of animation’s great star executives. Today, Variety reports she’s been named President of animation at Nickelodeon, our home studio for kid projects for the last 12 years.
Brown’s going to make a great difference in the cartoon business, she’s still a great star.
….. Johnson takes reins at Nickelodeon
Exec named president of animation
By MICHAEL SCHNEIDER
Brown Johnson, the architect of Nickelodeon’s hugely successful preschool division, has been tapped to tackle the company’s animation business.
As part of an executive realignment at Nick, Johnson has been named president of animation for Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group. She’ll be charged with overseeing development and production for all animated programming across Nickelodeon, known for hits including “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
At the same time, Johnson will continue to handle preschool programming — which includes Nick Jr. and the recently expanded 24-hour cabler Noggin.
Johnson will commute between New York and Los Angeles, with an emphasis on getting to know Nickelodeon Animation’s large West Coast studio in Burbank.
Until now, Nickelodeon development exec VP Marjorie Cohen oversaw both animated and live-action programming. But with the channel continuing to add more live-action product to the mix, Cohen will now focus on that world. That allowed Nick to create an animation presidency for Johnson.
Johnson will continue to report to Cyma Zarghami, president of Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group.
“I feel that animation is still the core of our business, and it does deserve somebody at its helm,” Zarghami said. “We’ve got a fantastic studio in Burbank, and it’s been bugging me that we don’t have anyone who hangs their name on the door as the one responsible for it. That studio will become Brown’s studio.”
Johnson said she’ll spend much of the coming weeks getting to know animators and producers handling work for Nickelodeon.
DreamWorks, for example, is behind the upcoming “The Penguins of Madagascar.”
Johnson also takes over the animation side just as the division expands its output and starts focusing on other platforms, such as mobile and VOD.
Nickelodeon airs about 90 hours of animated programming per week. The network’s animation studio will increase its output by 50% this year — with 225 half-hours delivered. Studio will also produce 29 hours of CG animation this year.
Johnson first joined Nick in 1988 as exec in charge of production, before turning her attention to the preschool world in the early 1990s.
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.
….. 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.
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.
….. 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.
I could have sworn I posted this link but I guess not…
Here’s the original ’shooting’ storyboard for Adventure Time, a cartoon short made for Nickelodeon’s Random! Cartoons that has exploded as an internet phenomenon, with over 1,000,000 views to date.
It’s incredible to see how intact Pen Ward’s vision was from the very beginning of the project.
Back in the day my partner Alan Goodman and I were known as the logo guys. It was both flattering and annoying, because we’re not designers and it deflected attention from the brilliant people we worked with often, like Manhattan Design (Frank Olinsky, Pat Gorman, and Patti Rogoff) and Corey & Co. But after we became known as the group who developed (not designed) the MTV logo, our reps were set in stone for a while. Eventually we were able to morph it into the idea of developing media brands, which more accurately reflected how Alan and I thought of ourselves.
After setting the vocabulary (more important than design in many ways) and “look” of MTV Alan and I left MTV Networks to set up our independent Fred/Alan Inc. and our first client was… MTV Networks. By 1984, the five year old Nickelodeon was in trouble, having lost an accumulated $40 million (that’s in 1980’s money, like $200 million today) and worse, it was the absolute lowest rated cable network in America. Dead last. MTVN chief Bob Pittman asked Alan and I to help. It was a tough decision for us to make since we were broke but had no interest in children’s television or the people who worked in it. The ‘broke’ part won out.
The key decisions we made:
• Keep the name “Nickelodeon.”
We figured that 10,000,000 kids (there current circulation) knew the name and what it stood for. Management wanted to switch to “Nick,” since it was easier to spell and say; let’s forget that everyone outside the company would wonder why they were named after a garage mechanic. There were a lot of reasons for killing it: no one under a certain age had ever heard of a nickelodeon, and those who had knew it had nothing whatsoever to do with children; the word was hard to spell correctly in the age of pre-Google and spellcheck; and, the word was way too long and thin to dominate a television screen.
• Treat the network like an exclusive club, where only kids could join, not like a TV station with all kids shows.
Kids in June of 1984 (when we started work) needed something they could call their own. They felt on the rear end of life, they told us so constantly. Adults (parents and teachers) made all the decisions for them. TV in the 80s wasn’t for them. They were scared of getting older, but their unconscious biology kept egging them on to age faster.
• Ban the word “FUN” from the Nickelodeon vocabulary.
Every network promo told the kids that Nickelodeon was fun. It wasn’t. We thought it was better to be “fun” than say “fun.”
• Redesign the logo.
Famous television designer, a moonlighting Lou Dorfsman, had designed the logo in 1981, and our brilliant friend Bob Klein had added a silver ball that zoomed around the screen in and out of everything a kid might find exciting. Alan and I didn’t find it exciting.
We’d been working a lot with a new friend, Tom Corey, who owned Corey & Co. (tragically, Tom’s passed away, his companies are now called Corey McPherson Nash & Big Blue Dot)in Boston. He came down to the Fred/Alan office in New York with his partner Scott Nash and heard our pitch for the network. we told them about our decisions I talked about above, and told them while we didn’t know anything about kids’ programming we knew that the offices of Nickelodeon were as quiet as a chapel (as one of the internal wags put it) and that in order to spice the place up we hoped that when our jobs were done they’d all be shooting spitballs at each other. Tom and Scott dug in eagerly.
I wish I had their presentation. It was pretty informal –a bunch of logos sketched on a page– and none any of us were all that crazy about. Eventually, we settled on one that was 3D in nature that revolved around itself, and kind of a standard designer treatment of a trademark. We were about to settle when Alan spoke up and said he didn’t think it was in keeping with our reputation as moving image thinkers about logos.
The MTV logo had been sold in with two thoughts. 1) Rock’N’Roll was a dynamic constantly changing medium and a logo should have a built in updating mechanism. And 2) More importantly, television was moving pictures. Logos were generally designed by print designers who wanted a perfect image, then handed off to moving image designers who had to figure out how to make the damn thing move. Often, it ended up with a big hunk of metal hurtling through space, cause what else were they going to do? We’d argued that in the 1980s that was a dumb thing to do. Why not just design a logo with movement baked into the conceptual frame right from the beginning? TV was the most important place to see the logo, and print designers could just *STOP* the motion and pick an image for an ad; it would be more dynamic even in the print that way.
Alan pointed out that’s how we’d made our bones, and besides were right, darn it. Movement was the way to go, constant change made for a energetic network, and kids were the most vital force in the world. Give them something they relate to: change. He was looking at the orange splat on their page. Tom and Scott argued that orange generally clashed with everything and that would make the logo stand out (as long as we didn’t let designers try and make it work “correctly.”) The splat could morph into any image we liked. And it wasn’t the MTV version of change. I came along for the ride that Tom, Scott, and Alan were proposing, and we trucked over to Bob Pittman’s and Gerry Laybourne’s office to make the pitch.
Bob and Gerry didn’t buy it. No one else there did either. “It doesn’t match anything.” “It’s flat.” “It’s not as cool as the MTV logo, what happened to you guys?”
Ultimately, we prevailed. I’m not really sure how, since all their objections were right on. But we were the “logo guys,” so they eventually bought our action. I’m thrilled they did, since our work with Nickelodeon is some of my favorite stuff in our careers. Tom and Scott went on to be among the premiere designers in television and kids (Scott’s now one of the leading children’s book authors and illustrators), Alan’s a successful producer and brand strategist (still consulting Nickelodeon), and they all deserved the accolades the world could throw at them.
(By the way, the book Nickelodeon Logo Logic was put together in 1998 by the in-house creative services department after Alan and I had stopped full time consulting to the company six years before. The company had expanded so dramatically and so many people had trademark needs that without us –the “logo police”– around they needed some objective rules set down for designers and marketers to follow. I’m not so sure we’d agree with all their points but a trademark is a dynamic thing. Different people interpret it different ways, kind of like a musical composition, and it’s natural it’ll be looked at in new ways over the years.)
