Fred Seibert's Blog

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

Our career making cartoons was over before it began. We continued to consult on cable network branding and promoting Nickelodeon’s first original slate of animation, but it looked that our idea of using shorts to find the new generation of stars was going to be another one of those ‘coulda been’ things.

Alan Goodman and I had been involved in more than 10 years of building, branding, and programming cable TV networks and we were a little bored by it. Everyone wanted to know our secrets, but were more interested in paying for programming than branding. Never shy, I kept whining and by February of 92 we were completely exasperated at an endless, annoying negotiation with MTV Networks; we woke up on a Tuesday morning and announced the end of our company after 12 years. No plans, no nothing, just please make it stop.

The very next morning Scott Sassa, then the President of Ted Turner’s entertainment networks (eventually President of the NBC Television Network) and always on top of the best gossip, called and told me he’d heard about our closing, reminding me that Turner had just purchased the venerable Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio. Half listening I glanced down at my cartoon watch; it was 10:35am and, believe it or not, at 12 was Fred Flinstone, 3 was Yogi Bear, 6 was Scooby, and 9 was Huckleberry Hound! (It’s not the watch up above, by the way. When I find it, I’ll snap a pic and replace it.)

“So,” says Scott, “do you want to come out to Hollywood and run Hanna-Barbera for us?”

(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.

Alan Goodman’s post about his cartoon schooling reminded me of a huge influence he had on the cartoon revival of the 90s.

Alan and I met in college radio in the early 70s and immediately started working on projects together. Doing audio comedy skits was very popular at our station. One of our favorite discoveries in the record library were some early, scratchy 60s releases of the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library. Our age made us HB freaks, and we had the greatest time mining the stuff for our productions.

Fast forward, against all odds I become the president of Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1992, and one of the first calls I got was from Alan asking when I was going to get him the ‘official’ library. After months of useless bureaucracy I found out the veteran studio personal was completely dismissive of this part of their hertiage, given that some of the effects dated back to the 1940s and Bill Hanna’s supervision of the Tom & Jerry production.

I’ll spare you the boredom, but after five years we finally released the library in the quality treatment it deserved. I’m still hearing those 60 year old effects in commercials (and cartoons). I feel like Alan did a good thing.