A quarter of a century ago this week, Cartoon Network aired the first short from its sister company Hanna-Barbera’s What a Cartoon! program, an anthology series and cartoon incubator that birthed six of Cartoon Network’s biggest series from the 1990s: Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls, Genndy Tartakovsky‘s Dexter’s Laboratory, Dave Feiss’s Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel, Van Partible’s Johnny Bravo, and John R. Dilworth’s Courage the Cowardly Dog. The series was pioneered by former Hanna-Barbera president Fred Seibert, who would go on to play a big role at Nickelodeon and found Frederator Studios. His idea brought a new model of cartoon development to television that would result in a proliferation of anthology programs—Cartoon Network’s The Cartoon Cartoon Show, Nickelodeon’s Oh Yeah! Cartoons, and Frederator’s Random! Cartoons—that would later launch a multitude of hit series, including The Fairly OddParents and Adventure Time.
Hanna-Barbera assembled an extraordinary group of creators for the program, including studio founders William Hanna and Joe Barbera, Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto, and adult independent animator Ralph Bakshi, and a slew of its youngest creators—Tartakovsky, McCracken, and Seth MacFarlane among them—would go on to be some of the biggest names in American animation. To mark the show’s 25th anniversary, The Dot and Line sat down with Seibert to discuss just how What a Cartoon! began.
The Dot and Line: I have questions.
Fred Seibert: I have answers.
You’ve mentioned before that you didn’t have a ton of cartooning experience before you took over at Hanna-Barbera.
None. I had a little bit of animation experience, but no cartooning.
What kind of animation experience?
I did 1,000 ten-second network IDs for MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, Comedy Central, Lifetime, Showtime, the Movie Channel. In ten years, we did a thousand ten second animated pieces.
And that was before digital animation would have made things like that easy. That must have been an insane process.
Well, we worked with independent animators across the world. And I say to all the folks here that that was basically my personal film school because I had not gone to film school. I didn’t know anything about film. And so making a ten-second piece requires in many ways similar kinds of discipline and even a beginning, middle, and end. And doing it a thousand times meant that we could experiment like crazy with different techniques and I could learn things about thinking about film, and get through the process in a very short period of time and just start again.
So you had that experience, but no narrative experience. Then you came into Hanna-Barbera and did something that no one had ever really done. Had anyone done anthology cartoons really, besides Looney Tunes?
Honestly, the way I got to doing that — so first of all, it didn’t start as an anthology, per se. What happened was, I started talking to Joe and Bill, and then eventually Friz Freling and a couple of the older folks — literally the people who invented the cartoon business. And I asked them, How did you make cartoons back in the day? And the answer came back really easily: one at a time. And they basically said, “Well, when we made a cartoon, and they put it in the theaters, if people liked it, we’d make another one.” And so before I got to Hanna-Barbera, I had suggested that method to Nickelodeon. They liked part of it, but they didn’t really like the idea of actually making the film to put on air and seeing what the audience thought. They had a more traditional television pilot approach: why don’t we make a pilot, then decide what we like about it or what we don’t like about it? And my feeling was that that method didn’t give the filmmaker as much inspiration to really go out there naked and see what people thought.
But the idea was to go back to the beginning. Tex Avery did the first Bugs Bunny cartoon [Ed. note: “A Wild Hare”!], and people liked it enough that they did another one — and then eventually, I don’t know whether he left the studio or they didn’t like what he was doing and they gave it to one of the other guys to try. And that kept going for years. But when he was in MGM, they did a Screwball Squirrel cartoon, and then they did another one, and then they did another one, and after six they decided no one liked it and they never made any more. And that idea of sort of jumping in the water without knowing really how to swim was really attractive to me.
So when I got to Hanna-Barbera, it took me a couple of years to actually convince Ted Turner that it was a good idea. But it just seemed really logical to me. The other thing you need to understand — because I didn’t know anything about cartoons — is that I didn’t believe that I could tell someone what to do with cartoons. So we sort of reversed the process. Most of the historical output of Hanna-Barbera had been generated in-house by a small development group led by Joe Barbera, and for many years it was very successful, but then for many years it was not.
And were you working with mostly pre-existing properties when you came in?
They were working with pre-existing properties. I had a clean slate. And I actually developed a couple of shows in the traditional way, one called SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron and the other called 2 Stupid Dogs, and we spent literally over $10 million on these two series, and they failed immediately. It just struck me as an incredibly inefficient way to fail. That’s when I went to Ted and my boss, a guy named Scott Sassa, and I said look, I can take $10 million and re-spin it so that we get almost 50 tries at bat. And I don’t even really need to know too much about cartoons because if I do something 50 times, one of them’s got to work. I think that really appealed to Ted’s entrepreneurial spirit.
That’s basically what we did. We took another pot of money and we split it up by as many shorts as we could make. It turned out to be 48, actually. So it was my view that it was kind of a Back to the Future kind of concept, which is, I went back to how the greatest cartoons in history were made and just applied it to a television environment. Then we put the word out to the world. And we got 5,000 pitches.
How did you vet?
Basically, our development group would look at the first bunch, and anything that seemed like it might be good we put in a separate pile. And the ones that might be good — we also had a completely different development approach which wasn’t idea-based, it was storyboard-based. Again, one of the things I learned by studying the old guys is that the way they pitched the cartoon within the cartoon unit is that they literally would put the board up on a pin board and act out the cartoon for the other cartoonists.
Like the equivalent of journalists pitching on spec rather than just the pitch—give us an idea of what you’re actually going to put on paper.
That was what I used to say to people. The idea doesn’t really tell you much. Usually what they wanted was to give us a pilot, then for us to give them a pile of money, and then we’d spend a year developing it. And what that didn’t tell me is whether the creator actually knew how to make a cartoon. Everybody’s got an idea. That was like the first lesson I learned in TV—everyone has an idea. Not everybody can make the idea come to life.
By getting them to physically pitch it, we got more of a sense of whether there was an actual film there . First of all, they had to do the work to develop the film, which the cartoon industry was not used to doing. In fact, many people resented it at the time. They were like, “You have to pay me for my work,” and I’m like, “But you own the cartoon! If we say no, it’s still yours.” But no one else was doing it in the business that way, so there was a lot of resentment to that.
Anyway, we got an idea of whether there was an actual film there. Then we’d get a notion of who the creator was, because one of the things that anybody in cartoons will tell you is that in most of the most successful cartoons, the lead characters are a reflection of their creator. You’ve seen the old footage in Disney where they would act out the animation and you could see the person’s face. They’re really direct reflections of those creative people. So we wanted to get a sense of who that person behind the idea was. Do they have an innate acting ability, for instance? Can they really perform? Because animators are really performers in a lot of ways.
We got that idea. We learned a lot about the whole process. And by the way, because it was a room full of people in those days vetting the cartoons, there were development executives from Hanna-Barbera, there were programming executives from our sister company, the Cartoon Network, and there were animators too. We could sort of share our points of view out loud. None of us had anything at stake because it was the creator that was pitching it. And we could kind of learn together who we all were, because this is a whole new group of people who’d never done this before. So it was kind of interesting.
This is before it becomes an anthology, right? This is when they’re all just individual shorts.
This was at the very beginning of Cartoon Network, which launched in 1992. They had no idea what worked and what didn’t work. Every Sunday night, they were running an animated movie in those days. The original notion that I pitched to Cartoon Network was, “Why don’t we do it just like the old days? Why don’t we run a short before every movie?” And so basically, we made it kind of like a movie, the old fashioned movie experience. And I think the first group of the shorts ran that way until they decided not to do movies anymore, and that’s when it turned into an anthology.
And so once it became an anthology, did the process change at all?
No, the pitch development and production process didn’t change at all. Interestingly, that anthology and all that we’ve had since were bound to be ratings failures. The whole point of a TV series is that you know what you’re going to get next week, or at least you know where you’re going to start. Because the character, especially in a comedy, always resets to the beginning. And then next week, you know where you’re starting and you’re starting all over again.
The thing about an anthology show is that by definition, there is no thread that makes the audience have any idea what they’re going to get next week. So in the earliest days, when Cartoon Network was still kind of a novelty, running a half hour anthology actually got a rating. But very quickly that rating faded, and while I have insisted in every anthology show since that we have a half-hour block in which to run it, the programmers all hate it. And as the television market became more and more financially competitive, it became very difficult for them to run the half-hour anthology, because it could really tank their ratings. And in a competitive environment, if you have a show with a tanked rating, getting that audience back for the next half hour is really brutal.
But I wanted it, because I thought it really made a difference to the filmmakers, knowing that their stuff would actually air. I think it puts an urgency behind it. It’s kind of like Saturday Night Live. There’s a reason that for 40 years they have not pre-taped Saturday Night Live—because they know that going out live on stage creates an urgency in the performances that you can’t get any other way. And I always felt that knowing that the thing would air would create an urgency for the filmmakers in those months before the film was finished.
Did you ever have to battle Cartoon Network on some of the content of these shows?
Interestingly, at Hanna-Barbera, I ran the shop, so I didn’t have to battle anybody. And by the way, at that point with What a Cartoon!, Cartoon Network didn’t even have a standards and practices department, so literally anything we came up with would go. And it wasn’t “my studio,” in quotes, but it was a studio that I ran, so it was my budget, not Cartoon Network’s budget.
Whether for mitigation of the ratings or any other purposes, did you come up with a structure for how you would run the shorts? Did you run two or three at a time, typically?
Three. In those days, all of our stuff was seven minutes because, copycat that I am, I wanted to copy exactly what the great theatrical shorts were, and they were all approximately six to seven minutes. Some of them were eight, but it was in that range. Remember, by this point Nickelodeon had established 11 minutes as the standard, but it had never been before. But I had a creative reason behind my decision, which was, if you really look carefully at a seven minute cartoon , it’s not plot driven—it’s situation driven, character driven, and then, ultimately, it’s comedy driven. A lot of classic cartoons just kind of…stop. Like, “OK, the footage is done, we’re done, come up with some little bow, tie it up and go on.”
What I liked about that was that it was a radically different creative approach. Television cartoons had not been driven by animators at that point for over 30 years. It was all driven by the writing staff. There is a classic conventional wisdom in television: it all starts with the written word…. But for shorts like these, where the comedy is physical, we knew it had to start with the art.
That was such a radical thought. It actually still is a radical thought in the cartoon business. The conventional wisdom to this day in the cartoon business is, that artists can’t write. And my point of view, based on all of the scripts that have been pitched to me over the years, is most writers can’t write. They can type, but they can’t necessarily write. And you know from journalism that that’s true. Just because you can string together a bunch of words doesn’t mean it’s a coherent sentence. That doesn’t mean you can make a paragraph and it doesn’t mean you can make a story. So my rule was that only animators could pitch us cartoons. And if you were a traditional writer, you had to partner with an animator. And if you didn’t have an animator, you could come and visit me and talk to me and we’d partner you with an animator. But the animator had to pitch.
The story’s not the product. The cartoon is the product.
That was such a radical thought. And when we put out the word, we got 5,000 pitches, and they were all from artists from all over the world. For 30 years, no one had paid attention to the artists. In fact, even at Hanna-Barbera, the writers had the best offices, and the animators were all stuck in a building called the Annex. It was shocking to me that the animator had become the least important person in the process. I decided that I wanted to reverse that whole process and elevate the animator up to the boss.
And that gave you a bigger pool?
It was a small pool, actually. There aren’t that many animators, you know.
Was there a variety and style that you hadn’t seen before because of that choice?
It was an interesting thing, if you think about it. The kind of cartoons we were talking about had mostly faded out by the mid-1960s. We were in the 1990s. It had been 30 years. And interestingly, while I got pictures from old people, many were from young people. Because if you were a young person animator in the early ’90s, you got into the business when there was no business — when the basic cartoon product was shit. Which means that you became an animator because you so desperately wanted to be making cartoons that you didn’t care that there was no industry, you were just going to do it. So, what was in those people’s heads? What was in their heads were the kind of cartoons they grew up with, that generally were old cartoons, because all new animation was basically half-hour sitcoms or adventure shows.
Nobody in 1993, or in 1995, knew what a cartoon was anymore. They knew what animation was! But here I was saying, I want a cartoon. I set up parameters — seven minutes — and that was a dog whistle to traditionalists. “Oh, he really means it, he wants cartoons, not animated sitcoms.”
Well, their only model was a model that was 30 years out of date, so most of what was pitched was pitched as if 30 years hadn’t gone by, and they were pitching cartoons the way they used to be. It wasn’t until later that we started getting pitches that reflected the fact that cartoons had come and gone. By the 2000s, there was a new generation of people who wanted their own versions of cartoons, and you started seeing things like Chowder, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Adventure Time. Those all came from new generations of cartoonists who had grown up with our shorts from the 1990s and said, “This is how you make a modern cartoon.”
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