Fred Seibert's Blog

It’s been a long time coming.

Rob Renzetti’s beloved “My Life as a Teenage Robot” played the last episode of its 2nd season a couple of years ago, and by the infinite wisdom of corporations the until now unseen 3rd season sat on the shelf until this week. Go figure.

Well no! Go watch! Every Saturday on the Nicktoons Animation Network.

The team came up with some great stuff, beautiful as ever. It’s a great way to catch up with Jenny.

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Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

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.
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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.
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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.

Bill Burnett: With our own magic piece of chalk.

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.
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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.