Fred Seibert's Blog

We keep getting asked about how we started making original cartoons like the ones in Oh Yeah!, so I thought it might be good occasionally to post a bit of the back story here. Feel free to interrupt with any questions.

In the early 80s, after getting my start in TV as MTV’s original creative director, Alan Goodman and I had started Fred/Alan, the first company to introduce the concept of branding to television networks. Our first client, and first success, was the relaunching of Nickelodeon, where we made them the number one cable channel in six months. (Amazingly, since they’d been the lowest rated network in America.)

Chief programmer Debby Beece and business head Anne Sweeney asked me to breakfast at New York’s Paramount Hotel sometime in 1988 or 89, and said it was necessary for Nickelodeon to seriously start producing it’s own programming, and they wanted to start with animation. Since Alan and I had brought hundreds of wild, award-winning, animated network identifications to the channel, did I have any idea how they could get started? Honestly, other than random conversations I’d had with NY commercial producer Buzz Potamkin, I’d never given animated programming much thought. We were branding and promotion specialists, I reminded them, with no background in storytelling, and there was a world of difference between little 10 second dancing animals (as wonderful as they might be) and comedy. Debby and Ann insisted we were the ones to help them out, and I began improvising.

Why not copy from the best, I suggested. Why not emulate Looney Tunes?

(More next time.)