Fred Seibert's Blog

When I first got to Hanna-Barbera in 1992 the studio was nine years past it’s last big success (The Smurfs) and Ted Turner was on the verge of closing the place (producer David Kirschner [Pagemaster, Cats Don’t Dance] convinced Ted to keep the doors open, primarily to save production of his ultimately doomed features). I had absolutely no idea how to turn the studio around –I wasn’t even a novice when it came to making cartoons– but I certainly knew how to resurrect the image of the place. We’d start the turnaround there.

                                                         1979


1969                                              1974

I wasn’t too crazy about the now-classic 70s HB logo (I know a lot of you disagree) because I felt the studio had turned its back on the powerful heritage they had making cartoons (I was insulted by the way that the prior regime had continued producing junk-for-revenue like Yo! Yogi and numerous pale Flintstones specials). I much preferred the graphic vibe of the 50s and I was determined to reclaim it. I turned to my pals Tom Corey and Scott Nash who had developed the Nickelodeon logo and gave them my rap. I also handed them Iraj Paran’s re-drawing of the vintage HB script. Tom and Scott agreed with my basic philosophy that contemporary trademarks should be kinetic in conception and presented dozens of logos that incorporated the classic characters (and not only the usual suspects, but Muttley, Barney, Secret Squirrel, Jonny Quest, and others) and Iraj’s script, and they added in the elemental shapes of ovals, circles, squares, and rectangles. I’m not sure we caught the exact spirit I was looking for (that would have to wait until Craig Kellman’s reclaiming of The Flinstones art authenticity) but I felt like we were ready to rock.

When it came to business cards (I’ve posted autographed versions from our founders Joe Barbera & Bill Hanna), I was still smarting from 12 years of purchasing bureaucrats at MTV Networks who’d constantly thwarted my efforts to make dozens of simultaneous business cards from dozens of variations of MTV and Nickelodeon logos. I thought it would be fun and make the brands sing, the company thought it would be wasteful. So, now I was in charge of a company, and multiple, collectible business cards were the order of the day; in fact, my ‘President’ cards were actually printed with the legend “Collect all 8″. The only person who was skeptical was by partner Jed Simmons because he loved making notes on the backs of his cards, and printing the character pictures frustrated his efforts. He got over it.

They were a big hit; when we were at business functions we all quickly ran out of cards. Soon, lots of companies in the entertainment business followed suit with fun collections of business cards (even MTV and Nickelodeon).

If only we could figure out how to make hit cartoons.

The backs of the 1990’s Hanna-Barbera business cards

Ricochet Rabbit illustrated by Lou Brooks

Occasionally, I post some essays from Hanna-Barbera in the 90s. Everyone at the studio greatly admired what Joe and Bill had accomplished through the decades but strongly felt many of their milestones had gone uncommented beyond the aficionados. I commissioned HB Creative Director Bill Burnett to slightly rectify the situation.

ENTERING THE CULTURE

The true test of popularity is when the catch phrase of a cartoon becomes part of the language. “Yabba-dabba-doo” is one good example, but others like Astro’s “Rats rall right Reorge,” and of course, Yogi’s “smarter than the average bear” have become universal as well. (…continues here…)

It took a long time, at least three or four years, to get from the idea in my head to actually getting a ‘green light’ to think about making cartoon shorts in the old school kind of way.

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. Part 15. Part 16. Part 17.

I’d worked at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons for less than a year when I passed the first big hurdle to getting my shorts idea going. But once I’d been able to convince the woman who ran Cartoon Network that doing 48 shorts was actually her idea, there were still quite a few obstacles remaining. In no particular order:

Ted Turner wanted to make stuff –TV movies, feature films, news shows, cartoons, whatever– he just wanted to make the stuff on his own terms. Meaning without unions, residuals, and royalties. His thinking, actually prevalent in old Hollywood, was that if he paid your salary he’d taken all the risk and he should own all your ideas lock, stock, and barrel. Theoretically, I didn’t blame him; they’re a nightmare costing millions over the years of people administering them and all that, but hey! that’s the way of the world, right? Eventually, Ted relented and approved sharing success with talent, but it took a year and a half.

A lot of other folks at Turner were confused by the whole thing. Not cartoons, per se –they didn’t care a whit if something was a cartoon, a movie, or a steel factory it seemed– it was just that the company was in the TV network business, and up until that time they’d only licensed shows and movies to run, never made them. So when we were suggesting spending a lot of money on completely risky productions (when you license a movie already made, you know whether it’s successful or not) and couldn’t accurately predict how much money would be made in advance, well, they stay confused. Somehow, over a two year period we wore them down with financial analysis and they eventually, grudgingly capitulated.

Then there were the folks in the TV animation industry, our competitors and friends. They completely thought I was nuts. It just wasn’t the way things were done. Shorts were so …uh, yesterday. It was the way the old guys did things in the old days. Well, duh, yeah. The way they did them when they made the greatest cartoons of all time, you jerks. (To be fair, there were a couple of people who were amazingly supportive. Particularly, Warner Bros. Animation President and former Hanna-Barbera executive Jean MacCurdy, and director/producer Phil Roman. Both of them made me feel emboldened and confident to go on.)

Probably the most disheartening were some of the creative people in the industry, both in and out of Hanna-Barbera. Some of them were folks who’d been entrenched in the way the system had operated for the 20 years before. Efficiency was all that mattered, and the only management worth listening to was the most senior person in the room, be they from the studio or, better, from the network. Development executives were committed to the status quo; after all, cartoon production had morphed into an aping of live action television, the place all of the D-execs aspired. The others who thought I was an idiot were the ones who already had ‘good’ jobs on shows like The Simpsons, Animaniacs, or Batman (we weren’t even a tiny blip on the feature films radar; they could care less about anything in TV); why should they care about what their inferiors were up to, they were being paid well for a long period of time? Well, the only way this thing was going to work was to ignore them all, so, I did.

So where’d our continuing faith and confidence come from? It was all the cartoonists who flocked to our doors with their ideas.

(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. Part 15. Part 16. Part 17.

We’re going more shorts crazy around here than ever before. Aside from the long-awaited Random! Cartoons (Nickelodeon will eventually play these on TV, really), and The Meth Minute 39 launching this next week, we’ve got plans for millions more! You read it right, millions! What better time than now to continue the tale of our journey.

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. Part 15. Part 16.

Now, what was the pitch going to be to my Turner Entertainment colleagues, a bunch of high flying, smarter than the room, young cable television executives? Why in hell would they want to do cartoon shorts like the old school?

There were some really smart people at Cartoon Network like Mike Lazzo (the original programmer and soul of the place, and not incidentally the brains behind [adult swim]) and Scott Sassa (Turner’s entertainment bossman and mine too), but it looked like some others around there were going to have to be finessed into agreeing to our wacky plan to go back-to-future and make cartoon shorts.

First up was the question “Does Cartoon Network really have to work with Hanna-Barbera on its original programming? There are a lot of other newer, cooler studios.” Yes, came the answer from on-high. Why else would we have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the joint and kept the studio running?

Next, “Well, what have you got for us?”

This issue was more challenging. Everyone was used to a certain kind of programming (animated sitcoms) pitched in a certain way (character drawings, story premises, “bibles”) which would be picked to death by network executives. I had no interest in this system and wanted to give cartoonists freedom to make cartoons the way they wanted: funny, short, and funny.

Besides, Cartoon Network’s agenda wasn’t actually making good cartoons. The agenda was to get the network distributed across the world (they were in less than 5 million of 95million+ homes in America) and the cable companies wondered why Nickelodeon wasn’t enough. Original programming was one of the answers.

So, essentially my pitch went thusly:

The studio just released two series with a lot of seeming promise (2 Stupid Dogs and SWAT Kats). They cost over $10million and failed within six weeks and everyone at Cartoon Network had liked them. With all said and done they essentially failed.

Since cable companies don’t really watch cartoons, the quality of the cartoons didn’t particularly matter to them that much (not that it didn’t matter to us), it was the ability to promise new programs. Spending $10million for two public ‘promises’ (that is, two new cartoon series) didn’t seem like that great a deal to me.

Instead, why not let Hanna-Barbera spend the $10million to make forty eight promises. That’s right, Hanna-Barbera will produce 48 brand new cartoons for the Cartoon Network in two years. That would be a public relations announcement of an original program every two weeks for two years. Original premieres would debut at 7pm before every other Sunday night movie on the channel.

Additionally, it would add to the thousands of cartoons already in the Turner Entertainment library. And hadn’t the company been running hundreds of non-famous early Looney Tunes on their networks and selling ads around them 50 or 60 years after they were made and seemingly forgotten?

And besides, one of them could be spun off as a hit series. It was clear to everyone I had no experience making cartoons, but ignorant though I was, how stupid would I have to be to produce 48 shorts and not have one of them be good enough for a series?

(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. Part 15. Part 16.

Jerry 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 was in our contemporary culture. And I asked you what I should write and you gave me some great ideas.

I’m really late with this essay and I have no idea whether it’ll even be accepted. But I wanted to say thanks and share it with you all.

The Coolest Job
By Fred Seibert

One of my proudest working days was when I became the President of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1992. The coolest job at the coolest place.

When I first started traveling to LA in the late 70s I’d get a chill going past the Hanna-Barbera Cartoons building, wondering what kind of magic went on behind the imposing concrete screens. Just the studio name in plain black type up top screamed out to me. But my work had nothing to do with cartoons so there was really no reason to stop and go in. “I was a seven year old fan of Huckleberry Hound. Could you show me around your studio?”

Fifteen years later, in June 1990, I was at Universal Studios Florida on its opening day at the first Hanna-Barbera theme park ride. At the end of the ride they had a store, and I bought as much as I could hold, including a great watch. Months later, out to dinner with friend at a fancy restaurant, he asked “What’s that watch?” I said, “This is my Hanna Barbera watch; here’s Yogi, Scooby, Fred and the gang. What’s yours, a rolex?” My friend, Scott Sassa, was President of Turner Broadcasting and, fast-forwarding 18 months, he calls one day and says, “You know we just bought Hanna-Barbera. … You want to run it?” And I looked down and I had the same watch on. (It was 10:35am.)

We worked like hell to revive the magic and produce the greatest cartoons of a (new) generation. We plugged away almost as hard to make the building special. Painting it day-glo colors and putting up giant posters of the classic characters was a great rush. (Of course, that was before the neighborhood association threatened to sue, not to mention the purists in the building who wanted to keep the original post-office-beige color.) And searching the world for vintage toy collections of the company’s characters to decorate the offices was better than toys at Christmas.When Bill Hanna came into my office (originally his) and exclaimed, “Wow! It really looks like a cartoon studio now!” I knew I was in the right place.

If I was compiling a book like this to collect those feelings, Jerry Beck would be my first ten choices to do it. Here’s hoping his publisher will send over a case of them to share with family and friends.

A close friend of ours is writing a short deadline book on the imposing legacy of the Hanna-Barbera studios. It sounds like the fun book I’ve been waiting for for years. He’s been nice enough to ask me to write a preface, and, notwithstanding my halting ability to write, I’ve agreed.

Because how can I miss a chance to publicly acknowledge one of the great honors of my life? The chance to brush against greatness, to spend a little time around two of the men who helped me laugh throughout my life?

I’ve been given a little guidance, but I thought maybe you could help too. Here’s some of what’s been suggested all of which makes sense to me:

1. “When I became president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1992, I was most concerned with revitalizing an amazing heritage and legacy…”

2. How & why you started/purchased the H-B archive (the merchandise)

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

And it’s safe to assume the author, one of our great historians, will cover all the facts on the characters and the series.

But, what would you want to hear from me?

Endpaper from The World of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons

Jerry Beck’s quick snap and reflection on the Hanna-Barbera building facade in Los Angeles reminded me of how great it felt to work in that place and what it meant to me.

When I first started traveling to LA in the late 70s I’d get a chill going past the building, wondering what kind of magic went on behind the concrete screens. Just the name in plain black type up top screamed out to me. Working there in the 90s we worked like hell to make the building special; putting up those giant posters of the classic characters was a great rush. One of the happiest days of my life was when Bill Hanna came into my office (originally his) and exclaimed, “Wow! It really looks like a cartoon studio now!”

The last picture I have of the renovated Hanna-Barbera building, 1994-95.

(Of course, that was before the neighborhood association threatened to sue, not to mention the purists in the building who wanted to keep the original post-office-beige color.)

A vital city needs to keep changing, as does a industry and its architecture, and most studios completely disappear, but props out to Jordan Reichek for all the hard work he did to keep it up. It’ll still be nice to get a sense memory of the place, more than we can say for a lot of other homes of great work in the town.

Cartoon Network’s got a little tour of some of the classic moments inside the studio. And here’s a couple of post-cartoon views of the building before it’s latest, and last, renovation.

Frederator Studios is at the end producing the 39 original shorts that will make up the Random! Cartoons series on Nickelodeon. We started making original short cartoons in the early 90s at Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network with 48 What A Cartoon!s a.k.a. World Premiere Toons (six series were spun off from those shorts), then with 51 Oh Yeah! Cartoons (plus another 51 shorts and three series) and now these 39. Occasionally in this space I’ve been recounting how we got here. When we last left off the new Hanna-Barbera production team of 1992 (under Ted Turner’s recent acquisition of the studio) was busy putting together a production team for these cockamamie shorts.

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. Part 15.

When I first joined the studio, completely ignorant of the process of making commercial cartoons, I’d talk to anyone who could give me a clue (and quite a few who couldn’t). John Kricfalusi introduced me to the artist/writer Pat Ventura when I told him I’d asked Joe Barbera to include an update of Screwball Squirrel in his new Fox Kids Droopy series (he rightly pointed out Pat, a Tex Avery fan, was already on the Tom & Jerry Kids Show writing staff, why start searching for someone new?). Along with John, Pat’s inadvertent influence on our future shorts would be incalculable.

As a little background, Pat graduated from CalArts in the 70s and proceeded to work all over the business as an artist, storyboarder, writer (he quickly found out that “writers” were in demand, writers-who-wrote-on-boards were not) and had done a great stint as a gag man at Disney features during their 1980s revival, writing many of the Roger Rabbit shorts. He left for the Tom & Jerry Kids Show because he had the great and rare insight to realize the opportunity to work with an old master of the shorts form was virtually extinct; working every day with Joe Barbera was too great to pass up. Which is when we met.

I took an immediate liking to Pat and he was one of the few people I took into my confidence about the looney idea of reviving the cartoon form through shorts. He was a great film historian and student (particularly the silents) and would patiently give me instruction. He’d tell me about his preference for Keaton, Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy. And why he preferred the composer Scott Bradley to the more revered Carl Stalling. He did his best to show me how gags were set up and staged and why, while he thought Looney Tunes were OK, he liked the Fleischers.

And we talked incessantly about short cartoons. Why they were good, why they weren’t. Why writing on boards was good and what you could learn from them. Because of Pat we started a weekly screening series at Hanna-Barbera where we could share some of the great shorts (animated and live action) Ted Turner had in his vast library with the studio staff who cared.

When I started talking to John and Pat I came at everything like a studio head. (It would take me a little while to get smarter.) How do I find hit shows? Shorts seemed like a good idea since we could get 25 “at bats” for every series we’d try the old way. So when I first broached the idea with Pat I said I wanted to do as many shorts as possible; I suggested that a bunch of three minute shorts would give us an idea of what characters we liked.

“No, not three minutes. Six, seven, eight,” Pat told me.

My logical “Why?” was answered that if I wanted to make cartoons then they needed to be made with artists who loved cartoons. And if I was going that way then the cartoons needed to be, well, cartoons. And cartoons absolutely were not three minutes.

Pat was so certain I just agreed on the spot. It took me a long time to realize just why his instinct was so right on. But from then on that was it. All our shorts, well over 100 by now, are seven minutes long. It drives some of our talented creators crazy (of course, we realize no matter what length we set, someone would be annoyed) but seven minutes it is. A real legacy of short cartoons. Shaped in part by our friend Pat Ventura.

Now, if only I could convince the folks at Cartoon Network.

(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. Part 15.

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.

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.