Channel Frederator Blog

I am really happy to lead off our first-ever holiday episode with one of the funniest of the original Oh Yeah! Cartoons, Mike Bell’s Super Santa in South Pole Joe.

We first met Mike at Hanna-Barbera when he pitched us his short Commander Cork (which we stupidly did not make), and then he joined our OY! team as a writer on Dave Wasson’s Goose Lady fairy tales. And that led him to a handful of solo cartoons for us, Super Santa being the first.

Mike’s gone on to develop a live action Santa film for Paramount and Nickelodeon, and boarding and writing for (among others) Spongebob Squarepants and My Life as a Teenage Robot.

And as Eric always reminds, you can see all the Channel Frederator episodes from our Website, or subscribe to the whole series through iTunes.

–Fred

Earlier tonight Fred mentioned he saw my comment on an earlier post distinguishing the difference between what makes an Oh Yeah! cartoon and a Channel Frederator cartoon. Here’s a slightly different take.

As you probably know by now, we’re making Oh Yeah! shorts with and for our friends at Nickelodeon. Here are the rules: character-driven, funny, seven-minute shorts for kids between the ages of six and eleven. We want that 10-year-old to fall in love with a character, like how I fell in love with Scooby, and the way kids (and adults) are falling in love with SongeBob today. And we want to work with the filmmakers who can pull that off.

Channel Frederator shorts are a much different ballgame with much fewer rules: they’ve got to be animated. It really helps if they’re funny and tell a story, but neither is necessary. They can be something you’d find on Nick Jr or at a Spike and Mike festival. In our first two [Read more…]