Fred Seibert's Blog

Two of our cherished Random! creators. Adam Muto needs a portrait for film festivals, so he turned to his close friends Pen Ward.

Our good friends Rita and Hadley from Radar Cartoons came by Frederator/Burbank to tell us some stuff about their Radical Cute project, and talk a little bit about plans for Boneheads.

And Adventure Time’s fan art continues. It’ AWESOME!!!

Thanks n8tehbaghead.

Mailed out the week of December 16, 2007

There’s been a vicious rumor for the last couple of years that we’ve done a shorts show for Nickelodeon. We’re sending out this card to put that rumor to rest.

Seriously, it drives us as crazy as you that Nickelodeon has chosen not to air, or even set an airdate for, any of the Random! Cartoons shorts. And, because there’s a significant financial implication with the voice actors’ union, we’ve only been able to air one of the shorts on the web.

Everyone at Frederator is proud of all the creators and their cartoons, so we’re going to continue to promote the series whenever and wherever we can. This postcard is just the smallest way.

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

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.

Pen Ward’s post about the plethora of Adventure Time fan created art had me in such awe I had to go looking for it myself. I eventually put together a gallery of over 100 images!

OK, so any show with fans is algebraic. Any show that inspires fans to draw or write stories is mathematical. But jeez, Adventure Time is one seven minute short. That’s never been on television. That’s been taken off of every major sharing site dozens of times.

My personal favorite? Too many to call, but I really like the earrings.

Pen Ward is an amazing filmmaker.

Find more cartoons on Channel Frederator RAW

“Adventure Time” original short storyboard

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.

RHOMBUS!!

Adventure Time, 2006
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Created by Pendleton Ward
for Random! Cartoons

A Frederator Studios/Nickelodeon Production

Executive Producers: Larry Huber & Fred Seibert

YOU WANT YOUR BOOTIES?!!!

Tuesday night, September 18, 2007
Eric, Kevin and I went right from our feature meeting with Doug TenNapel to the last screening for Random! Cartoons, featuring Doug’s Squirly Town, Karl Toerge & Jim Wyatt’s Ratzafratz, and 6 Monsters. We’ve now screened all 39 Random! shorts for the LA studio (as well as a New York ASIFA screening in May), and it’s sad they’re over, everyone did such a great job on their films. Nickelodeon’s been having a hard time scheduling an air date, so in the meanwhile we’ll do with the good feelings from our private screenings.

Karl and Jim prepped a great surprise for their honored guest June Foray when they pulled out a cake for her 90th birthday. My pictures weren’t too great, but they capture some of the wonderful mood, June looking better than anyone has a right to look, and many others having a good time.

Wednesday
Early day again when I make a reference call on one of our great interns to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It’s always feel good to give a solid recommendation for a hard working intern. Then it was breakfast with my former Hanna-Barbera colleague, Julie Kane-Ritsch who now, as part of the Gotham Group, represents creators like Bob Boyle, Dana Galin, Diane Kredensor, and too many others to mention in a blog post less than 1mm characters long.

I’d met Baby Prodigy creator Barbara Marcus at New York’s BrainCamp two years ago, and she came by the studio to chat on Wednesday.

Afterwards, I zoomed over to Cartoon Network Studios to take Ramsey Naito, head of their long form development, to Starbucks. As we’re getting fired up on the Samurai Jack feature I like to keep her up to date.

The Market City Diner was across the street from Starbucks, and lucky thing too, since that’s where I was to meet Scott Greenberg, Film
Roman/Starz production president, and our fantastic partner on Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! We never seem to spend enough time together in the office, so this lunch was a good chance to catch up.

Director/artist Howard Hoffman and I have worked together since back in the day starting on MTV and Nickelodeon network IDs. we’re working together again on Ape Escape Cartoons, and it’s always good when he drops by Frederator when I’m in Hollywood.

Speaking of back in the day, Bill Burnett, creator of ChalkZone and eight other Oh Yeah! and Random! cartoons came by too. We first worked together at Fred/Alan in New York, and then again at Hanna-Barbera and Frederator. We’re working on a lot of stuff at Next New Networks. We have so many things to talk about, cartoons and more, I won’t bore you with all of them.

Finally, it’s a great dinner at Firefly in the Valley. With great friend Rita Street, our Radar Cartoons colleague on the Nicktoons Network Animation Festival, Boneheads, and more.

A little sleep, and Hollywood continues Thursday.

One of the things I love most about working in cartoons is the grind that makes up the sausage, the early drawings, models, layouts, backgrounds, and, of course, storyboards. It’s great to look at the early work and see what kind of evolutions a creator’s mind and pencil go through.

RHOMBUS!!

It’s so seldom we civilians actually get to see this stuff that I thought it would be fun to take a look at one of the boards we picked from the almost 1000 presentations we got to select the 39 Random! Cartoons.

WE’RE GOIN IN TURBO TIME!!!

It’s amazing to see the intact vision of Pen Ward with Adventure Time. From the board’s first frame it’s obvious this man is reinventing the future of cartoons.

YOU WANT YOUR BOOTIES???!!!

I spent a lot of time with ASIFA-East President/animator/author David Levy this week. Of course, he sponsored our Random! Cartoons screening the other night, but I forgot to mention the NY panel he asked me to be on at New York’s ACM SIGGRAPH on self promotion and how to get noticed in the cartoon biz. My fellow distinguished panels included our friend, filmmaker Patrick Smith, recruiter Ila Abramson, and PR/marketing expert Karma Martell.

Oh, the art above? That’s the fantasticness what happens when I bring our new colleague Jeaux Janovsky comes along to an event. Thanks Jeaux, your notes are awesome.