Fred Seibert's Blog

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.

Starting at Hanna-Barbera in 1992 it was clear I wanted the studio to produce short cartoons, but I was only beginning to figure out how we should actually go about it.

Anyone who would listen I’d talk to about shorts. And I picked up tips anywhere I could.

Buzz Potamkin was our new head of production. His New York studio had produced my original MTV “Moonman” animation before he packed it in to go to Hollywood to make Saturday morning shows, and over the years he’d given me a pretty fair education on how TV cartoon studios worked in general, and in particular how Hanna-Barbera had gotten into the sad shape it was in. Together with my operating partner Jed Simmons we figured we could credibly ask for enough money from our boss Scott Sassa to make 48 short cartoons. It would cost about the same as two series, but instead of two chances to succeed (or fail, like with 2 Stupid Dogs or SWAT Kats)) we’d have 48. “Scott, I know I know nothing about making cartoons. But with 48 shots even someone as ignorant as me can hit,” I pleaded.

Buzz also suggested Larry Huber as supervising producer. Having proved his ability to work with new people and new ideas on 2 Stupid Dogs he would be perfect.

John Kricfalusi had long preached the difference between traditional writers and cartoon-artist-as-writers (“Fred, every writer puts a cartoon scene in where ‘the bomb blows up in his face’ and thinks it’s funny. A bomb going off is not funny! It’s how the face looks before the bomb, how long it waits to blow up, how it blows up, and what happens after it blows up that might be funny. An artist shows you that.”) and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

As a pitcher and buyer of shows I knew the limitations of the traditional pitch: Here’s the idea, here’s two pages describing the idea, and here’s a few pictures of what the idea might look like. After listening to folks like Friz Freleng, Joe Barbera, and Chuck Jones talk about shorts pitches back in the day, I determined we would only put a short into production after a full storyboard pitch from the artist originating it. Please show us the actual film you want to make, not describe the idea of the film. I’d been in advertising long enough to know the difference between an idea and the actual execution; the gap was light years. If we saw the storyboard we’d have some idea of whether or not the creator had any real notion of cartoons (versus animation, not the same thing at all), whether he/she really understood their character, and whether or not he or she actually understood story.

OK, so there was a framework to operate in. Now what?

(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.

(L)Mike Lazzo, originating programmer, Cartoon Network & (R) Joe Barbera

It was almost an accident I became president of the famous Hanna-Barbera studio, but it was a chance to revive cartoons through my idea of making shorts the way they did in the theatrical days.

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.

Cartoon Network had just launched and senior creative executive and programmer Mike Lazzo had a great idea for a “Cartoon Advisory Board” really just a great excuse to hang with legends. He assembled a room somewhere in Hollywood with Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Friz Freleng, Noel Blanc (Mel’s son), and John Kricfalusi. (…:::Later, Jerry Beck refreshes my recollections below in comments.) Mike had a bunch of questions he asked and they answered, but only one sticks in my mind. As I remember it went something like this:

Mike Lazzo: What makes a good producer?

Joe Barbera: Fred Quimby was a great producer!

(Note from FS: I knew Joe despised Quimby, so this confused me right off the bat.)

Quimby would come in around 10 in the morning, go right to his office and make some phone calls. Around 11 his barber would come in and give him his daily trim and shave. 12:30 he was off to lunch, back at 2:30 for some calls to East Coast distributors and then he’d go home.

Mike Lazzo: What was the production unit doing all day?

Joe Barbera: We were making the cartoons we felt like making. Like I said, Fred Quimby was a great producer!

I was listening closely. “Hey, I can do that job!” I said out loud.

(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.

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.

Within months of arriving at Hanna-Barbera I had greenlit two series in the traditional way. But all I could think about was the idea of doing shorts the way I had pitched to Nickelodeon in the late 80s.

Impressed by the passion of the Trembley brothers (creators of SWAT Kats) I put the series into production under the direction of young Hanna-Barbera veteran Davis Doi, who made the show using the mainstream production techniques of the 80s. The creative team worked very hard, and we had a lot of hope for the show but by distributing it through syndication, which had become the weakest way to find a kids’ audience, ultimately the series failed. (Though there are currently 102,000[!] mentions on the internet.)

In the long run the pick-up of 2 Stupid Dogs affected me, Hanna-Barbera, and in fact, the entire cartoon industry, a lot more. Donovan Cook was a recently graduated CalArts animation whipper snapper who came in the office with half a storyboard. It had a great title, it was pretty funny, and it had a graphic style influenced by classic UPA and Hanna-Barbera that I loved (I was such a newbie to the business that I was completely unaware the style had become the mainstream of CalArts graduates who were more interested in cartoons than feature animation.) Donovan’s energy was infectious, and like an idiot I said “go!” on a 13 episode series that had no distribution commitment, half a storyboard, and a creator who’d barely done anything ever before. (The 2 Stupid Dogs story is interesting in and of itself to those who care, but that’ll be for another time.) We assigned another industry old hand, Larry Huber, to partner with Donovan, which turned out to be one of the smarted moves I’ve made in my career.

Little did I know that the most revolutionary thing I’d done in my animation career to that point was not in green lighting these two series, but in allowing the Trembley brothers and Donovan to actually make the series they wanted to make, rather than what our studio system had in store for them.

Simultaneously with these new productions the studio was finishing off shows sold by the previous administration, and my new partner Jed Simmons was trying like hell to turn around the business battleship that was stuck in the bathtub. If we didn’t turn around the downward trend of the financial graph, there was no way Ted Turner and Scott Sassa were going to let us do anything more, no matter how great it was.

And in the meantime, I was talking shorts to anyone who would sit long enough to listen. Some who listened were studio crew who sat because I was the boss, but thought I was a raving lunatic (from their perspective shorts had died 30 years before). Competitors and network executives politely nodded their heads and told me it sounded great (great for them that is; the faster I started this stupid idea, the faster I’d be shipped out of Hollywood). A lot of young folk were cautiously excited because they’d gotten into the business to make cartoons, even though the industry had actually abandoned cartoons years ago.

(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.

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.

I started as the new President of Hanna-Barbera in June of 1992.

First of all I need to get to know 300 new employees, in a new industry, in a new city. Within hours the development department was coming in with new pitches for series, specials, and feature films. I had absolutely no idea how to decide whether anything was any good, and who was talented enough. Everyone seemed talented.

So I talked with everyone who wanted to talk. Anyone who wanted to give me a theory about what made a hit could get a date with me. Three (or four) meals a day, six or seven days a week. Sometimes a midnight meeting at an artist’s house just to hang out.

One day a writer who’d worked at the studio for 30 years came by with an idea. “Imagine a pig.” OK I can do that. “And he works in a post office.” OK. “But, he’s really a superhero!”

Please, deliver me. Back to New York, preferably.

I told everyone I met about how I loved the Hanna-Barbera classic cartoons. Most of them laughed at me like I was an old fart (41 year old at the time). But along the way I’d run into a few folks, like John Kricfalusi, who enjoyed my interests and helped me to understand a little more about how to do what I wanted to do.

Then one day one of our newer development executives, Margot McDonough, thought there were some younger creative types she thought I might like. No one else with my kind of position would really want to meet them, but, after the pig in the post office I was desperate.

(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.

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.

After suddenly closing my ad agency, getting divorced, and moving to Los Angeles after 25 years in New York, I found myself running a famous company that hadn’t had a hit in over a decade, in a business where I knew almost nothing and no one.

Here’s what my COO partner Jed Simmons and I had to look forward to when we got to Hanna-Barbera in 1992:

The last hit at the studio was The Smurfs in 1981.
Tom & Jerry Kids was a hit on Fox Kids.
Fish Police was being finished up to air in primetime on CBS.
Capitol Critters was being produced with Steven Bochco for ABC.
Once Upon A Forest and The Pagemaster were feature films being made for 20th Century Fox.
Yo Yogi!, the adventures of a teenaged Yogi Bear at the mall, was being finished up for NBC.

One bright note: Eric Homan was cleaning cells in the Animation Art Department.

Had no one in this place ever seen a cartoon? I thought I was going to kill myself.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10.

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9.

After trying, and failing, to convince Nickelodeon to go “back to the future” of animation, and use classic cartoon style shorts to create their innovative entry into the animated programming biz (they did better than great without me), my company continued to consult cable TV networks on branding and advertising.

“So,” said Scott Sassa, President of Ted Turner’s entertainment networks, “do you want to come out to Hollywood and run Hanna-Barbera for us?”

Was he crazy?!

I’d been a jazz record producer, a cable television promotion executive, and a marketing and branding entrepreneur; one thing I certainly was not was a producer of cartoons. Sure, I’d had my hand in making a few TV series, but they were mainly run by my partners, Alan Goodman and Albie Hecht. And it was clear I loved cartoons; I often loudly proclaimed that my childhood of cartoon watching was the best preparation for the groundbreaking work we did with rock’n’roll and television on MTV. But, actually make the cartoons? How was I supposed to do that? I knew next to nothing about cartoon production, I knew absolutely nothing about scripts and stories, and I knew nothing about how Hollywood worked. And Hollywood was the home of Hanna-Barbera Productions, and one of the reasons Ted Turner wanted to studio to begin with.

The announcement of my becoming President of Hanna-Barbera Productions was made the day of the LA riots in April of 1992; I started full time in June. Shown my giant corner office, originally built as Bill Hanna’s when the building opened in 1961, I was so frightened I didn’t sit at the custom built desk for over six months; I just parked myself on one corner of Bill’s couch and just shivered every day as studio staff and others came in one by one wanting something resembling smarts from me.

But unlike some of my friends and colleagues, I loved Hanna-Barbera. Especially the great early years, when Joe Barbera and his crack team invented Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, The Flintstones and the others, and Bill Hanna streamlined the animation production systems into the unlimited imagination of limited animation (thanks Billll Burnett). And I remembered the charge I’d been getting for the fifteen years I’d been traveling to Los Angeles and passing that great building with the “HANNA-BARBERA” sign up on the top.

And, I had this nutty idea about shorts.

(More next time.)

Blog History of Frederator’s original short cartoons.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.
Part 7. Part 8. Part 9.

On a whirlwind one day trip to Hollywood last week for a wrap party for Butch Hartman’s The Fairly Oddparents (the second successful spin-off series from Oh Yeah!), I had a chance to catch up with a new friend, and a couple of long timers.

Melissa will be filling you in on Adam Henry’s Tiffany.

Up next was the unique and talented ‘Pat’ Ventura, the first man I ever offered a short, and the person who convinced me the classic seven minute cartoon would become my format of choice. His love for Laurel & Hardy is contagious, as is his Dangerous Duck Brothers.

I started an international storyboard contest at Hanna-Barbera in the 90s. The first second prize winner was Dave Kirwan. The next year’s winner should have been his 16 year old son Alex, but, when we found out he was below our legal winning age, we hired him instead, as an apprentice on Johnny Bravo. Then he became our first creator in 1998’s Oh Yeah! Cartoons on Nickelodeon, and has since become one of the leading art directors (Frederator’s own My Life as a Teenage Robot and Call Me Bessie!) in the cartoon industry (all before he was 25 years old!). So, I guess we were forced to see Alex Kirwan’s pitch on Mike & the Kingdom of Petunia.

Thanks to Pat and Alex for their kind permission to post their artwork.

I’ve been a huge fan of the cartoon music ever since I was a kid and realized there was a difference between Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera. I had an essay written once about the greatness of HB’s Hoyt Curtin (there was already plenty on Carl Stalling), and when I started making cartoons I vowed to pay special attention to the scoring, since I felt it was an essential ‘character’ in a film. So, every once in a while I’d like to pay homage to the great contemporary composers who work on Frederator cartoons.

Guy Moon has produced more scores for us than any other composer; we met through Bodie Chandler, Hanna-Barbera’s music director, a great champion of new artists. Starting with The Addams Family, Guy went on to really prove his chops on the deceptively challenging What A Cartoon! shorts, which led to Cow & Chicken and Johnny Bravo. When we moved over to Nickelodeon Guy would hold the record for the most scores for Oh Yeah! Cartoons, and those in turn led to the lead chair on The Fairly Oddparents and ChalkZone, in addition to one of our movies, The Electric Piper. And Guy’s been no slouch working on other shows and films either. Whew!

Growing up in Wisconsin, going to college in Arizona (loving Chick Corea’s Return to Forever), Guy and his family live in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

Thanks Guy, for all your great work.

Bernie Petterson has been one of the stellar artists on various Frederator cartoons (among others) for longer than anyone would like to admit. Brought into the Oh Yeah! Cartoons by Dave Wasson, he became a key part of the teams on ChalkZone and My Life as a Teenage Robot. Here are two typically wonderful illustrations Bernie’s done of ChalkZone creators Bill Burnett & Larry Huber.

I’ve qvelled about Larry Huber before on this blog.

But writer/producer Bill Burnett (or Billllll, as he sometimes goes by) is probably someone new to most of you. Our long and wonderful relationship began when Bill was a writer at my advertising agency in New York in 1988. He eventually became our Creative Director, creating some groundbreaking campaigns for Nick-at-Nite, Sassy Magazine, and Nickelodeon; he even named a network called Comedy Central. The two of us bonded over our mutual belief in popular music as a supreme cultural force, and I found out that after songwriting, his next passion was for cartoons.

Against all logic, I was named president of the venerable Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1992, and, no surprise, one of my first creative hires was…Bill Burnett. Officially, he moved to Hollywood to run our marketing department, but he and I both knew that he would make his way into production. He became story editor on Dave Feiss’ legendary Cow & Chicken, and went on to create a record eight shorts for Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Including, of course, ChalkZone. And I’m happy to announce that along with co-creator Jaime Diaz, Bill will join the Oh Yeah! team again to produce Dr Froyd’s Funny Farm.