Fred Seibert's Blog

I think you covered some of this in your series of posts a while back. I tihnk the bit about your HB watch would be a nice story to include.

“What it was like working with Bill and Joe. What influence they’ve had on your career.”

-howse about goin’ a little further back an’ talkin’ a little about “growing up” with the HB influence as a kid, there wuz a time not so very long ago, when being a kid pretty much meant living for saturday morning cartoons and hunting down the stray cartoons after school,no Nick no CN,no Nintendo,and NOTHING “on demand”, we weren’t so jaded and things like yogi bear and huckleberry hound played a somewhat different role in kids lives in that era - what was your experience?….just wunderin’……

1)I think it would be cool to hear everything. from how the building smelled, to how the chairs would squeak.
2)What their friendship was like, from your outsider view.
3)What it was like when you first arrived on the scene.
4)What was it like to know you were at the helm of cartoons you grew up with.
5)Did they ever tell you where they got their inspirations for certain characters from?
6)Were any characters based on people working in the HB office?
7)What was it like working alongside them? 8)What did you learn from them?
9)What was your favorite memory of them?
10)What would you want people to know about them, that not too many people knew about? i.e. Joe liked egg sandwiches or Bill liked a certain flavor ice cream. Like weird little things.
11)Any funny stories about them that you can recall? i.e. we all went out to dinner and Joe accidentally took the salt shaker.
(i dunno maybe I’m hungry right now lol)
12)What’s the one piece of advice from them you still think of and still apply to yourself today in both work and life?
13)what was your favorite cartoon of theirs?
14)which HB characters would you say they acted or resembled most like? i.e. Joe acted like Fred Flintstone and Bill looked like George Jetson
These are Qs designed to help you get your motor running and get you to start thinking about where to start writing.
No need to answer these, but if you want to I won’t mind.
If you do answer any of them my personal choices for “Must Know” are #’s 12 & 14!
Such a great honor to write for that book Fred! Congrats.
See you tomorrow!
-JX!

My kids, 7 & 5, watch Tom and Jerry everyday on Cartoon Network. Did Bill and Joe know from the very beginning that they were creating timeless classics? And if not, when did they realize the enormous gift they left us. Did censorship play any role in their work? What would they have said about today’s cartoons?

i hope it’s more than just a poofy historical overview with pictures…..that’s about as deep as anyone seems to want to go with HB - there are still alot of people around who were there during the various HB eras, why not dig deeper and take a closer look?……it deserves an indepth study,it played an important part in shaping, not only the modern animation industry, but also impacted on the entertainment industry as a whole…

I hope that that there will be some of the REAL stories about the studio and the people that worked there. We have all read the history of how the studio got started and list of shows that were produced. Lets see some of those great stories about Bill,Joe and the artist that were members of that great studio. It is too bad that a lot of the veterans now gone. I can remember spending time sitting in Ray Paterson’s office and he would go on about the “good old days”. I look foward to the book.

So Robert, I don’t know the exact focus of the book, but could I convince you to start talking to people and collecting some of these stories? Let me know.

I would love to help out I still have all my HB stuff in boxes. It might help tell some great stories.

What thought Bill, Joe and/or their former staff about the Adult Swim retooling of their characthers?

The thing that comes to mind, is what your first day on that lot was like. From the time you got up. What were you thinking when you were driving to the studio. Fears? Joys? Excitement? And who did you meet that day? Was Bobby on the gate? How’d you find your parking place? Was it next to Bill and Joe’s? Who did you have lunch with? And I still want to know what was going through your mind. Were there paper clips in your desk that you could sit and play with and wonder how the heck you got yourself into this mess and what were you going to do, or were you like a kid in a candy store and couldn’t wait to shake things up and get them moving again? And how did people treat you? Were there warm welcomes or raised eyebrows or both? And on the way home… what was going through your mind then?

As Robert says above, I do hope this is a REAL book. I couldn’t wait for that Hanna-Barbera Cartoons book to come out back in the ’80’s, and I was so disappointed with it when it finally did come out that I didn’t even buy it. Nothing but a bunch of publicity art and some superficial history that we’ve all read before.

I remember spending a lunch hour in Star Wirth’s office. She was there - and Nelda Ridley (who had been at H-B since 1961) and Al Gmer and a couple of others, talking about the days when that place was really hopping as a production studio- not just reproduction. These are wonderful people with equally wonderful memories of a place that they seemed to hold dear. Their stories should be documented.

I am long winded, as usual.

Fourth line from the bottom of my last post should have read “really hopping as a production studio - not just PRE-production.
Oops.
-

So Brian, I don’t know the exact focus of the book, but could I convince you to start talking to people and collecting some of these stories? Let me know.

[…] Beck was the one who kindly asked me to write an introduction for his upcoming book on great art from Hanna-Barbera and how neat it […]