Read Part 4 here
Did the two dogs ever had names?
[laugh] Somebody asked me about that recently.
Mark Kennedy, Ash Brannon, Chris Ure...I called them up and said "Let's get together and make a cartoon," because I was working at Disney Features, and I think Mark Kennedy was there, and Chris was at Warner Bros., because they had a shorts division at the time, and Ash I think was at Warner Bros. too. So were were all working and I was like "Let's not disappear into Studio Whatever, let's keep making stuff, you know?" So I brought everyone up to The Alamo in Valencia, and at that dinner there were a bunch of ideas that came out. I still credit Ash Brannon for saying "Hey what about two really stupid dogs?" I liked that, and I think I wrote down three or four things out of that meeting, but it was the stupid dogs one that I thought was the funniest, and I loved dogs, I always had dogs when I was a kid.
Not long after that I happened to see a stray dog in the apartment complex where I lived. There was something about this one dog and scared and whatever, but he looked like he was living in a fantastic, adventurous life. That became a real spark of inspiration for me. They wern't humans, they [wern't humans drawn as dogs], they were actually dogs that lived in the human world as dogs. They were strays, they wern't pets. It was important to me that they wern't pets, that was a big part of the concept. I figured, a dog that wasn't a pet wouldn't name itself, it would just be "I am a dog."
Their names were "Big Dog" and "Little Dog", and that's why they never really had proper names. But there were a couple of episodes where, especially the Big Dog who had a couple of different names that were put upon him in an episode. There was an episode were he was called "Jonathan" once, by a hamster who was played by Maureen McCormick, who was Marsha Brady in "Brady Bunch" as you recall. There was a dramatic love scene between the Hamster and the Big Dog, and she called him Jonathan. That was a second season story, and in second season I kinda loosened up the reigns and things got a little wackier.
That's why they didn't have proper names. I'm surprised the studio let me do that. That's something I can credit to Fred [Seibert]. Fred was very experimental. He wasn't afraid of making a cartoon that, I dunno, had a flaw. I think he figured "Well, if that doesn't work, we'll make another one." That's a risk that nobody would let you make now. Like, let's have two characters that don't actually have names. I'd hate to think that in hindsight that it was a mistake, but, I dunno, maybe it made it harder to market them. [laugh]
Did you direct all the voice sessions on the show?
Yeah, I did. That came from...at CalArts, you basically learned, it's been many years since I've been there but I think it's still the same, but you basically learned to make your cartoon, it's very collaborative and you had all the classmates to help you, but you basically learned to make cartoons, really the old way. Which is kind of a small group of people, and at school it's mainly you and you do basically most of the work, but at school you had all these people supporting you and so that, to me, if I was going to be the guy who run the show, I need to direct the voices and at Hanna-Barbera at the time, they had a voice director, Gordon Hunt, who ran the casting department and was the main casting director and voice director. They had Kris Zimmerman, who was basically his protege, and who was about to take over the department. But I thought "why would I have someone else direct the voices when they wern't involved in creating the storyboards and writing the materials?" and John [Kricfalusi] of course directed his voices at Spumco and at the time I spent on features, on Mermaid and such, the directors directed the voices, so to me it was a very foreign idea that the person running the show wouldn't direct the voice. So while I didn't know what I was doing I remember John Musker, an amazing talented director and super nice guy, and also generous with his time when I interned and the year I spent there, so when it came time for me to direct the voices I asked if he would have lunch with me to spend an hour going over the approaches on how he would direct the voices, there's a little bit of, that I learned alot from John K., and alot from picking through John Musker's brain about, we just did it. I think there's some really talented voice directors, I had worked with them, and there's nothing wrong with it, but I think there's a false idea that animators, cartoonists, directors, don't really know how to talk to actors, and therefore you need voice directors to bridge the gap of language or whatever, but I think that's completely false. I think any directors, be it live-action or animation or whatever, your job is to communicate your ideas to the people you're collaborating with, and there's certainly there's ways to talk to actors and to gets actors motivitated, get them to visualize things, but there's no reason why an animation director can't do that. So I directed all the voices for that. Larry and I traded off directing voices for Secret Squirrel.
Some of the writers, board artists, including Mark Saraceni, sometimes went to the voice session with us. We never put the actors in a position where there were multiple direction, but we were there as a group.
How much work was done in pre-production before everything went overseas?
That was a very standard process, for television. Especially at Hanna-Barbera. Basically you would write outlines, draw the storyboards. At times, during outline, we would design something, like a character that we knew as new. But more often than not there were no designs done before the storyboard artists boarded it. They would make up a new design that worked for the storyboards, and once the storyboard was done, like if there was a new character, and there would always be a new location, we would design a show from the storyboards. At times, the board artists had a great design sensibility so in that first season it would have been Craig or Mike. Take, for example, that character Cubby. He first appeared at the Drive - In. Chris Ure drew him first in the pitch board, then it was Conrad [Vernon] who did the production design. So Craig basically did the final designs based on what was drawn in the storyboards. But we had times when the character designs in the storyboard that looked really, really different than what we wound up designing because we didn't really like the designs in the board, but we didn't have time to go back and revise the storyboards so I had a stamp that said "Character Off-Model. Follow the Model," and I sometimes had "Character Off-Model, Follow the Board," if the drawings were so funny I didn't want to mess up the drawings by putting them back on-model. So we would board it, then we would design it, and then we would record it after the board was done, and then after we recorded it we would create the story reels. We would lock the timing in the story reels and we would do animation sheets for the animation timing, and we would send it overseas from there. Months later it'd come back in color and we would frantically call for retakes, and then it was on TV. That's the process in television. It's a little different now with all the digital stuff, but it's still pretty much the same. We didn't invent anything how we did it in pre-production, although back then not too many places were doing story reels [animatics], we were doing it at Spumco, but Hanna-Barbera didn't and we invented that [at the studio], but now it's pretty standard practice, but back then nobody was doing it.
Part 6 coming soon
Showing posts with label interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interviews. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Donovan Cook interview, part 4
Read Part 3 here
Did the Standards and Practices ever gave you hard time on the show?
I'll tell you, at the time we thought we were getting hard time, but when you look at what people are like to you now versus what we did then, we got away with murder. We had shows where the dog's caught on fire and jumped out windows, drove in cars without seatbelts, all this stuff you can't do now. We were free as a bird.
I think the best story from S&P comes actually from a Secret Squirrel episode. It was [the one with a possum and his bat henchmen], all these nocturnal animals, so there was a scene where these bats beat the living hell out of Secret Squirrel with these baseball bats. We put it through...there wasn't really a formal Standards and Practices because we wern't doing it for a network, like if you were doing something for ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox, back then, the networks have formal S&P people, but we were doing it for syndication and TBS, and TBS never had original children's programming so basically there was Mike Lazzo at TBS who wanted to do basically everything, and guys like Buzz Potamkin [...] Buzz would handle production so they would basically look at stuff and say "I don't think we should do this," but we shipped that show overseas and it was animated with these characters beating Secret with wooden baseball bats, but when that one came back they saw it and they kinda freaked out, saying "You guys, no. We can't do this, it's too violent." But we wern't a rich show so I remember Larry and I, and Paul, I think it was a Rob Renzetti show [actually Paul Rudish, David Feiss, and Tony Craig] so we all started brainstorming and discussed what the hell we were going to do so finally we all thought "let's leave all the animation exactly the same" so instead of full retakes we added one scene where instead of picking up baseball bats the two bat characters blew up a long, narrow balloons. So we changed the bats to balloons but all the animation stayed the same, so it was still fantastically violent but they were hitting him with these balloons and they still beat the hell out of him. It was still hysterical, but that was one of the few times they wouldn't let us do something.
But yeah, I'm sure that if you asked me that question 15 or so years ago "Oh, god yes I have a long list of things they wouldn't let us do," but now in hindsight all I can do is look at almost every Stupid Dogs cartoons, there's a joke that would never, ever let me do now. In the "Door Jam" one, the Mike Mitchell one, where they misunderstood the concept of automatic doors and think they need shoes to get through the door, so they inexplictly start collecting shoes, and there's a scene in that cartoon where the two dogs go to a damn strip club, hollering at the stripper girl to take off her shoe! "The shoe! The shoe! Take off your shoe!" [laugh] And this wasn't, you know, Adult Swim or Comedy Central...I don't think Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon or Disney XD or any of those places would let you do that joke. They wouldn't even let you think about that joke.
So we had alot of freedom, especially in hindsight.
One of the characters in 2 Stupid Dogs was a big guy named Hollywood. What's the story of that?
Hollywood was inspired by a guy...I have a group of friends that go all the way back to high school. Every summer we'd run a beach house down San Diego, and one year there was a guy living in a house next door who was just incredibly loud and would always holler at things at the top of his lungs and we started him "Hollywood," I don't remember why we called him that, but that was the summer before we started production of Stupid Dogs so we were in development on the show. I can't remember exactly when Spumco got shut down 'cause I was still working there for the first few months when we were trying to figure out how to get a full greenlight on the show but, so, there was this crazy guy that me and my buddies, not from the animation world, called Hollywood and it was Cornflakes, the first Hollywood episode where he's a farmer, I think, and so we were talking about what do we do with this farmer and we decided to make him this guy with the joke that he had, that some people seemed to like, "Isn't that cute but it's wrong," which I thought was funny. I don't remember whether Rob [Renzetti] invented that in the board pitch or whether that was in the outline but that came up for the first time in that one and we all thought it was funny so we started using it everytime we used Hollywood.
Some of the secondary characters that came out of this show was Hollywood, or Cubby, the pimply faced teenager...he was in the "Drive-In" and I think that character got repeated because of Rob Paulsen, who voiced him. We all thought the voice was funny and we wanted to hear him again. So we started writing him into more cartoons. Funny thing is in the pitch there was a group of characters that never made it into a single cartoon. For example, when I pitched the show there was a gang of cats that would sometimes terrorize the dogs, but the cat gang just never seemed funny when we were developing the premises so we never used them.
Continue to Part 5
Did the Standards and Practices ever gave you hard time on the show?
I'll tell you, at the time we thought we were getting hard time, but when you look at what people are like to you now versus what we did then, we got away with murder. We had shows where the dog's caught on fire and jumped out windows, drove in cars without seatbelts, all this stuff you can't do now. We were free as a bird.
I think the best story from S&P comes actually from a Secret Squirrel episode. It was [the one with a possum and his bat henchmen], all these nocturnal animals, so there was a scene where these bats beat the living hell out of Secret Squirrel with these baseball bats. We put it through...there wasn't really a formal Standards and Practices because we wern't doing it for a network, like if you were doing something for ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox, back then, the networks have formal S&P people, but we were doing it for syndication and TBS, and TBS never had original children's programming so basically there was Mike Lazzo at TBS who wanted to do basically everything, and guys like Buzz Potamkin [...] Buzz would handle production so they would basically look at stuff and say "I don't think we should do this," but we shipped that show overseas and it was animated with these characters beating Secret with wooden baseball bats, but when that one came back they saw it and they kinda freaked out, saying "You guys, no. We can't do this, it's too violent." But we wern't a rich show so I remember Larry and I, and Paul, I think it was a Rob Renzetti show [actually Paul Rudish, David Feiss, and Tony Craig] so we all started brainstorming and discussed what the hell we were going to do so finally we all thought "let's leave all the animation exactly the same" so instead of full retakes we added one scene where instead of picking up baseball bats the two bat characters blew up a long, narrow balloons. So we changed the bats to balloons but all the animation stayed the same, so it was still fantastically violent but they were hitting him with these balloons and they still beat the hell out of him. It was still hysterical, but that was one of the few times they wouldn't let us do something.
But yeah, I'm sure that if you asked me that question 15 or so years ago "Oh, god yes I have a long list of things they wouldn't let us do," but now in hindsight all I can do is look at almost every Stupid Dogs cartoons, there's a joke that would never, ever let me do now. In the "Door Jam" one, the Mike Mitchell one, where they misunderstood the concept of automatic doors and think they need shoes to get through the door, so they inexplictly start collecting shoes, and there's a scene in that cartoon where the two dogs go to a damn strip club, hollering at the stripper girl to take off her shoe! "The shoe! The shoe! Take off your shoe!" [laugh] And this wasn't, you know, Adult Swim or Comedy Central...I don't think Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon or Disney XD or any of those places would let you do that joke. They wouldn't even let you think about that joke.
So we had alot of freedom, especially in hindsight.
One of the characters in 2 Stupid Dogs was a big guy named Hollywood. What's the story of that?
Hollywood was inspired by a guy...I have a group of friends that go all the way back to high school. Every summer we'd run a beach house down San Diego, and one year there was a guy living in a house next door who was just incredibly loud and would always holler at things at the top of his lungs and we started him "Hollywood," I don't remember why we called him that, but that was the summer before we started production of Stupid Dogs so we were in development on the show. I can't remember exactly when Spumco got shut down 'cause I was still working there for the first few months when we were trying to figure out how to get a full greenlight on the show but, so, there was this crazy guy that me and my buddies, not from the animation world, called Hollywood and it was Cornflakes, the first Hollywood episode where he's a farmer, I think, and so we were talking about what do we do with this farmer and we decided to make him this guy with the joke that he had, that some people seemed to like, "Isn't that cute but it's wrong," which I thought was funny. I don't remember whether Rob [Renzetti] invented that in the board pitch or whether that was in the outline but that came up for the first time in that one and we all thought it was funny so we started using it everytime we used Hollywood.
Some of the secondary characters that came out of this show was Hollywood, or Cubby, the pimply faced teenager...he was in the "Drive-In" and I think that character got repeated because of Rob Paulsen, who voiced him. We all thought the voice was funny and we wanted to hear him again. So we started writing him into more cartoons. Funny thing is in the pitch there was a group of characters that never made it into a single cartoon. For example, when I pitched the show there was a gang of cats that would sometimes terrorize the dogs, but the cat gang just never seemed funny when we were developing the premises so we never used them.
Continue to Part 5
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Donovan Cook interview, part 3
Read part 2 here.
Was writing on storyboards a big challenge? For years, throughout the '70s and '80s, cartoons were being written on scripts.
Personally I think a challenge is writing a cartoon with words. Great cartoons are visual, all their entertainment value is visual. The drawings are funny, the animation...the dialogues and things like that are never supposed to be primary. If you look at your favorite Warner Bros. cartoons, or if you're a Disney person you look at the old Disney shorts, it's all about visual storytelling and visual humor.
When I get a script, especially for a short cartoon, it's very frustrating to me. You have to develop the materials and the jokes and everything, visually. The challenge was that they haven't really done a storyboard-driven show for a while, so it seemed kinda new to the people at the studio, but that's how we made our films at school. Craig, and Genndy and Rob, had all just come right out of school, and...that's how we all did, so we kind of knew how to do it.
About a year ago I talked to Eddie Fitzgerald and he said that one of the frustrating things about scripts is that they're always too long, and whenever they trim it down they always took the funny part out.
[laugh] Yeah, and Eddie knows them. You know, it's really weird. For some reason, if you're going to make an 11-minute cartoon often people would script them at twelve, thirteen, maybe fifteen pages even, and it's like "Whoa whoa wait a minute. You've got a paragraph here that takes up three-four-five lines of script page but this is a huge piece of business. It can be a huge slapstick thing that I can develop for twenty-three seconds almost. You can take a great cartoonist and tell them to write with words and they're going to find themselves relying on words to tell the story rather than visuals, so when you've done that and you need to trim, you don't want to cut the dialogue, you want things that don't look like they're part of the storytelling. So yeah, he's right. The first things they cut are the comedy, but you know. It's all different ways. There have been people making great cartoons that are from, you know, scripts, but for me it's not the way I love to make it, and it's not the way my favorite cartoons are done.
Did you develop the art style in 2 Stupid Dogs, or did Craig McCracken?
Craig and Mike Moon were largely responsible for what the show looked like. When I pitched the show it had been with designs that were mainly done by Chris Ure, with a little bit of work by Barry Johnson as well, both were also in our class at CalArts. But when Craig came in I was really big fan of films and how they function, and we knew that on television...it's not like Hanna-Barbera was going to rain money on us to make this crazy little cartoon show so we didn't exactly have alot of money for the animation, so I knew that anything we could do to make it easier to draw and look good when it wasn't moving was going to be a smart move. So we were talking about that and Craig said "You know, do you mind if I took the shot at the character designs, and I can simplify them." My mantra was "simplification, simplification, simplification," so I though they were very simple, and they were, but I said "Absolutely. Take a whack at it," so he redesigned as they are and as everybody knows them. I knew Mike from school, but it was Craig's suggestion that I take in Mike to basically create and do all of the environmental stuff. So it was Craig and Mike who created the looks of the show.
We were really big fans of Ed Benedict at the time, who was an amazing designer.
What was the first episode of 2 Stupid Dogs that was in production after it got picked up?
The first that that I think we put into production was the Drive-In one, because when I was pitching the show I didn't have a full continuity storyboard but I had a storyboard that Chris Ure and I had done, that was like what I call sequence board, that basically had all the story, all the gags, just not fully fleshed out but I used that to pitch the show, and so that was the first one that was partially ready to go so I gave that pitch board to Conrad Vernon.
They never really came in and stayed on staff, but Conrad Vernon and Mike Mitchell were really influential on the first season of Stupid Dogs in terms of storyboarding. So Conrad did the drive-in storyboard. Conrad invented the whole, I don't know if you remember in the show, but the little dog does the little celebration dances, and Conrad invented that in the first Drive-In storyboard. And Mike Mitchell did it again, his first board was the one called "Door Jam," where they're trying to get through the electronic door at K-Mart, or whatever we called it. This, to me, is a great thing about storyboard-driven show where a crew pitches a storyboard to the crew. Everybody laughed so hard when Conrad pitched that celebration dance that Mike then wrote one for his cartoon, when they got through the door. That wasn't the thing that we sought around and said "We need to have this thing the little dog does where he does a little dance and sings a song. It just happened organically because it was funny to us and we kept doing it. That's the really organic way to develop characters and character personality trait.
I think Genndy's first one was called "Where's the Bone?" where the little dog thinks he lost his bone but it's sitting on his head, and they travel around the world looking for it, and big dog sees the bone on his head but doesn't know that's the one he's looking for.
I can't remember what Rob's first board was.
Cornflakes?
That might of been, yeah. That might've been. I think Tony Craig's first board was the one where the big dog gets his head stuck in the fence. It's funny, those early boards have some really fun moments and really rough moments, because we were all young and made our fair share of mistakes along the way.
The great thing about this summer is that the show's running on both Boomerang and on Cartoon Network so I hope they still stand up. It's great when people find me and they're fans of the show when they were kids. I love that people can still see 'em, and hopefully they still hold up, even the ones we made our mistakes on.
Continue to Part 4.
Was writing on storyboards a big challenge? For years, throughout the '70s and '80s, cartoons were being written on scripts.
Personally I think a challenge is writing a cartoon with words. Great cartoons are visual, all their entertainment value is visual. The drawings are funny, the animation...the dialogues and things like that are never supposed to be primary. If you look at your favorite Warner Bros. cartoons, or if you're a Disney person you look at the old Disney shorts, it's all about visual storytelling and visual humor.
When I get a script, especially for a short cartoon, it's very frustrating to me. You have to develop the materials and the jokes and everything, visually. The challenge was that they haven't really done a storyboard-driven show for a while, so it seemed kinda new to the people at the studio, but that's how we made our films at school. Craig, and Genndy and Rob, had all just come right out of school, and...that's how we all did, so we kind of knew how to do it.
About a year ago I talked to Eddie Fitzgerald and he said that one of the frustrating things about scripts is that they're always too long, and whenever they trim it down they always took the funny part out.
[laugh] Yeah, and Eddie knows them. You know, it's really weird. For some reason, if you're going to make an 11-minute cartoon often people would script them at twelve, thirteen, maybe fifteen pages even, and it's like "Whoa whoa wait a minute. You've got a paragraph here that takes up three-four-five lines of script page but this is a huge piece of business. It can be a huge slapstick thing that I can develop for twenty-three seconds almost. You can take a great cartoonist and tell them to write with words and they're going to find themselves relying on words to tell the story rather than visuals, so when you've done that and you need to trim, you don't want to cut the dialogue, you want things that don't look like they're part of the storytelling. So yeah, he's right. The first things they cut are the comedy, but you know. It's all different ways. There have been people making great cartoons that are from, you know, scripts, but for me it's not the way I love to make it, and it's not the way my favorite cartoons are done.
Did you develop the art style in 2 Stupid Dogs, or did Craig McCracken?
Craig and Mike Moon were largely responsible for what the show looked like. When I pitched the show it had been with designs that were mainly done by Chris Ure, with a little bit of work by Barry Johnson as well, both were also in our class at CalArts. But when Craig came in I was really big fan of films and how they function, and we knew that on television...it's not like Hanna-Barbera was going to rain money on us to make this crazy little cartoon show so we didn't exactly have alot of money for the animation, so I knew that anything we could do to make it easier to draw and look good when it wasn't moving was going to be a smart move. So we were talking about that and Craig said "You know, do you mind if I took the shot at the character designs, and I can simplify them." My mantra was "simplification, simplification, simplification," so I though they were very simple, and they were, but I said "Absolutely. Take a whack at it," so he redesigned as they are and as everybody knows them. I knew Mike from school, but it was Craig's suggestion that I take in Mike to basically create and do all of the environmental stuff. So it was Craig and Mike who created the looks of the show.
We were really big fans of Ed Benedict at the time, who was an amazing designer.
What was the first episode of 2 Stupid Dogs that was in production after it got picked up?
The first that that I think we put into production was the Drive-In one, because when I was pitching the show I didn't have a full continuity storyboard but I had a storyboard that Chris Ure and I had done, that was like what I call sequence board, that basically had all the story, all the gags, just not fully fleshed out but I used that to pitch the show, and so that was the first one that was partially ready to go so I gave that pitch board to Conrad Vernon.
They never really came in and stayed on staff, but Conrad Vernon and Mike Mitchell were really influential on the first season of Stupid Dogs in terms of storyboarding. So Conrad did the drive-in storyboard. Conrad invented the whole, I don't know if you remember in the show, but the little dog does the little celebration dances, and Conrad invented that in the first Drive-In storyboard. And Mike Mitchell did it again, his first board was the one called "Door Jam," where they're trying to get through the electronic door at K-Mart, or whatever we called it. This, to me, is a great thing about storyboard-driven show where a crew pitches a storyboard to the crew. Everybody laughed so hard when Conrad pitched that celebration dance that Mike then wrote one for his cartoon, when they got through the door. That wasn't the thing that we sought around and said "We need to have this thing the little dog does where he does a little dance and sings a song. It just happened organically because it was funny to us and we kept doing it. That's the really organic way to develop characters and character personality trait.
I think Genndy's first one was called "Where's the Bone?" where the little dog thinks he lost his bone but it's sitting on his head, and they travel around the world looking for it, and big dog sees the bone on his head but doesn't know that's the one he's looking for.
I can't remember what Rob's first board was.
Cornflakes?
That might of been, yeah. That might've been. I think Tony Craig's first board was the one where the big dog gets his head stuck in the fence. It's funny, those early boards have some really fun moments and really rough moments, because we were all young and made our fair share of mistakes along the way.
The great thing about this summer is that the show's running on both Boomerang and on Cartoon Network so I hope they still stand up. It's great when people find me and they're fans of the show when they were kids. I love that people can still see 'em, and hopefully they still hold up, even the ones we made our mistakes on.
Continue to Part 4.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Donovan Cook interview, part 2
Read Part 1 here
How did you pitch 2 Stupid Dogs? Who did you go to?
Specifically at Hanna-Barbera? We pitched Stupid Dogs pretty much anywhere. I think the only place that never got us to Stupid Dogs pitch was Disney TV. At the time nobody was really making short cartoons. John [Kricfalusi] had been doing it on Ren & Stimpy.
Just to be clear on the timeline, we created Stupid Dogs before the Ren & Stimpy pilot came out. Some people have been a little nasty about saying that Stupid Dogs was a ripoff, and if you watch the two of them back-to-back they're very different shows. John K. is a really amazing guy but he had different sensibilities than I do and the people that made Stupid Dogs, with me and Hanna-Barbera. So when I went to work at Spumco on Ren & Stimpy I had already pitched the show everywhere and we were in the long process of making a deal at Hanna-Barbera.
So we pitched all around and Hanna-Barbera was one of the last places. Hanna-Barbera happened to be making Tom and Jerry Kids short cartoons, so when I took the show to Warner Bros., or Fox TV, or alot of those places they would say "yeah, it looks like it could be funny but their shorts. What do you do with them?" I would be "well, you put three of them together and you get half-hour." I mean, that's how we watched Looney Tunes, so it was a little weird that so many television and production executives wouldn't really know what to do with it but at Hanna-Barbera they were making these Tom and Jerry Kids shorts so they immediately knew how to put shorts on television and I pitched to Margot McDonough, who was the creative executive there at the time and she got it and liked it.
The crazy thing is this got pitched on a Tuesday, and on Thursday Turner took over the company. So there was quite a bit of turnmoil and it took quite a long time to make the deal because they were interested and liked it, but for months they had no idea who was going to run the company. David Kirschner was running Hanna-Barbera at the time but they had no idea who was going to run it and finally they found Fred Seibert but it then was months before he actually came to California to take over so it was a long, drawn-out process as it often is, but it all worked out in the end.
Was Bill and Joe anywhere at Hanna-Barbera at the time?
Oh yeah, they were both there. They came in everyday. It's funny, I look back at it now and I regret not spending enough time with them but we got to see them alot. My best Joe Barbera story...we made updated Secret Squirrel cartoons at the same time we made the first season of Stupid Dogs and I took the first storyboard we had for Secret Squirrel and took it to Joe to show it to him. He was so funny because when I first took it to him to say "Hey Joe, how are you doing? You know, we're doing new versions of your cartoon, Secret Squirrel and I wanted to show you one of the storyboards". Joe said "we didn't make Secret Squirrel!" [laugh] And he literally had a plush toy of Secret Squirrel on his shelf. I took it off the shelf and handed it to him and said "yeah, you did. Look, you have a toy of it."
So I pitched him the whole storyboard, I think the first one was the one we called "Goldflipper." I pitched the whole board, the big damn thing, doing the voices, and at the end he cuddles the plush toy and looks at it and says "Oh Secret, they ruined you!" [laugh] It was heartbreaking, obviously, at the time but it's hysterical because it was like "Wait a minute! Ten minutes ago you told me you didn't create this character and now you're cuddling the toy and saying that I ruined it." But they were both great and they were always there and they obviously had alot of stories and good advice. It was a real treat to be able to spend time at the studio when they were still there.
Was it your idea to include Secret Squirrel in the show, or someone else's?
Yeah, that was my idea. For some reason Hanna-Barbera didn't think it was a great idea to run three Stupid Dogs cartoons in a row, which I never did understand that, so Fred said "Let's put something inbetween. What do you want to do?" I said that one of the many Hanna-Barbera cartoons that I loved as a kid was Secret Squirrel, and asked if I can mess around with that, and they said "sure".
Paul Rudish was also in our class at CalArts and I've always been a giant fan of Paul's work and so I called him up and asked if he wanted to come in and redevelop the show. I was there couple months on my own so Paul was the first person that I hired and he came in and immediately worked on redeveloping Secret Squirrel. I think alot of the Secret Squirrel cartoons we made are fantastic, but I don't know if it ever really worked having them inbetween Stupid Dogs. Back then we got some feedback from audiences saying they were confused, so it might not have been the best choice for what to put inbetween, but on their own some of those Secret Squirrel cartoons are fantastic. Paul really worked hard on those. He was really hands-on.
Was Larry Huber in charge of all the Secret Squirrels?
I had never produced a show before and didn't really have any idea of what I was doing, because when we finalized the deal and they hired me to be the creator/producer/director of the show...I was 22, I had been out of school for not long, I think two years, so I really had no experience, so it was Fred...I owe alot to Fred. Some of the people in the production management at Hanna-Barbera were pretty reluctant to let me run the show, but Fred was the one that said "Let's let him try, but let's give him someone who knows what he's doing as a partner." So they teamed me up with Larry and he was amazing with not just with me, but everybody, including Paul and Craig [McCracken], Genndy [Tartakovsky], Rob [Renzetti], everybody that was there. They all learned so much from Larry. But pretty quickly, Larry and I decided to split duties, so he basically teamed up with Paul to work on the Secret Squirrel, and I ran Stupid Dogs, but we collaborated on all of them. I think I directed quite a few of the voice sessions for the Secret Squirrel shorts and all the storyboard pitches...Larry was there for all the Stupid Dog pitches, and I was there for all the Secret Squirrel pitches, but we decided to stay out of each other's hair for a little bit, by splitting up the two shows that way.
I have no idea what he's doing now, but Larry spent years working on these really great stuff; he had a great run before any of us kids showed up at Hanna-Barbera. He was really a special guy and he was a real veteran, but he embraced a kind of this chaos this new generation showed up and all wanting to try crazy ideas for new cartoons. He had alot of impact on alot of cartoons that were made in the '90s and the 2000s with Cartoon Network and Frederator and stuff. He's tremendous guy.
Who would you consider to be the key people in 2 Stupid Dogs, (writers, storyboards, etc.)?
Mark Saraceni was story editor, but we all wrote outlines. I think my role was for seven-minute cartoons we'd have no more than a three or four page outlines. So what we would do is anybody who had an idea for one of the cartoons...I had a pretty long list of 'em from all the development work that I had done that I spent trying to pitch it, but we would have lunch meetings trying to talk about premise ideas for cartoons and then we would pick the ones we like and then Saraceni would go off and, he wrote alot of the outlines and Lane Raichert I think wrote some, Henry Gilroy wrote some outlines, Richard Pursel did us a favor and wrote up a few, I met him at Spumco...but then majority of the writing was done on the wall in the storyboards.
So the board artists would get the outlines, which like I said was three or four pages, which really had just, here's the setup, here's what's the conflict's going to be, some ideas of what will happen, how things will escalate, and sometimes it will have a solid ending, sometimes it will not. And the storyboard artists would spend maybe two or three weeks doing a rough storyboard where they would develop much of the material and the gags. It would get pinned up and pitch it and we'd spend a day or so kinda tearing it down as a group. Most of the storyboard artists and much of the crew would watch the pitch and stay together for the rest of the afternoon and pitch new gags and new character stuff and situations and kinda cover the wall with post-it notes and the board artists would go away for couple more weeks to sort it all out.
So the guys that were doing so much of the storyboards...Genndy, Rob Renzetti became really key guys in the storyboards. Tuck Tucker was there for a while in the first season. But the key people on 2 Stupid Dogs were Craig McCracken, he was huge. Mike Moon, and Rob Renzetti, Tartakovsky. All those guys that wound up running the place for years after that. We were all part of the first season here and everyone was tremendously impactful on the show.
Continue to Part 3
Interview (C) Charles Brubaker
2 Stupid Dogs, Secret Squirrel (C) Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.
How did you pitch 2 Stupid Dogs? Who did you go to?
Specifically at Hanna-Barbera? We pitched Stupid Dogs pretty much anywhere. I think the only place that never got us to Stupid Dogs pitch was Disney TV. At the time nobody was really making short cartoons. John [Kricfalusi] had been doing it on Ren & Stimpy.
Just to be clear on the timeline, we created Stupid Dogs before the Ren & Stimpy pilot came out. Some people have been a little nasty about saying that Stupid Dogs was a ripoff, and if you watch the two of them back-to-back they're very different shows. John K. is a really amazing guy but he had different sensibilities than I do and the people that made Stupid Dogs, with me and Hanna-Barbera. So when I went to work at Spumco on Ren & Stimpy I had already pitched the show everywhere and we were in the long process of making a deal at Hanna-Barbera.
So we pitched all around and Hanna-Barbera was one of the last places. Hanna-Barbera happened to be making Tom and Jerry Kids short cartoons, so when I took the show to Warner Bros., or Fox TV, or alot of those places they would say "yeah, it looks like it could be funny but their shorts. What do you do with them?" I would be "well, you put three of them together and you get half-hour." I mean, that's how we watched Looney Tunes, so it was a little weird that so many television and production executives wouldn't really know what to do with it but at Hanna-Barbera they were making these Tom and Jerry Kids shorts so they immediately knew how to put shorts on television and I pitched to Margot McDonough, who was the creative executive there at the time and she got it and liked it.
The crazy thing is this got pitched on a Tuesday, and on Thursday Turner took over the company. So there was quite a bit of turnmoil and it took quite a long time to make the deal because they were interested and liked it, but for months they had no idea who was going to run the company. David Kirschner was running Hanna-Barbera at the time but they had no idea who was going to run it and finally they found Fred Seibert but it then was months before he actually came to California to take over so it was a long, drawn-out process as it often is, but it all worked out in the end.
Was Bill and Joe anywhere at Hanna-Barbera at the time?
Oh yeah, they were both there. They came in everyday. It's funny, I look back at it now and I regret not spending enough time with them but we got to see them alot. My best Joe Barbera story...we made updated Secret Squirrel cartoons at the same time we made the first season of Stupid Dogs and I took the first storyboard we had for Secret Squirrel and took it to Joe to show it to him. He was so funny because when I first took it to him to say "Hey Joe, how are you doing? You know, we're doing new versions of your cartoon, Secret Squirrel and I wanted to show you one of the storyboards". Joe said "we didn't make Secret Squirrel!" [laugh] And he literally had a plush toy of Secret Squirrel on his shelf. I took it off the shelf and handed it to him and said "yeah, you did. Look, you have a toy of it."
So I pitched him the whole storyboard, I think the first one was the one we called "Goldflipper." I pitched the whole board, the big damn thing, doing the voices, and at the end he cuddles the plush toy and looks at it and says "Oh Secret, they ruined you!" [laugh] It was heartbreaking, obviously, at the time but it's hysterical because it was like "Wait a minute! Ten minutes ago you told me you didn't create this character and now you're cuddling the toy and saying that I ruined it." But they were both great and they were always there and they obviously had alot of stories and good advice. It was a real treat to be able to spend time at the studio when they were still there.
Was it your idea to include Secret Squirrel in the show, or someone else's?
Yeah, that was my idea. For some reason Hanna-Barbera didn't think it was a great idea to run three Stupid Dogs cartoons in a row, which I never did understand that, so Fred said "Let's put something inbetween. What do you want to do?" I said that one of the many Hanna-Barbera cartoons that I loved as a kid was Secret Squirrel, and asked if I can mess around with that, and they said "sure".
Paul Rudish was also in our class at CalArts and I've always been a giant fan of Paul's work and so I called him up and asked if he wanted to come in and redevelop the show. I was there couple months on my own so Paul was the first person that I hired and he came in and immediately worked on redeveloping Secret Squirrel. I think alot of the Secret Squirrel cartoons we made are fantastic, but I don't know if it ever really worked having them inbetween Stupid Dogs. Back then we got some feedback from audiences saying they were confused, so it might not have been the best choice for what to put inbetween, but on their own some of those Secret Squirrel cartoons are fantastic. Paul really worked hard on those. He was really hands-on.
Was Larry Huber in charge of all the Secret Squirrels?
I had never produced a show before and didn't really have any idea of what I was doing, because when we finalized the deal and they hired me to be the creator/producer/director of the show...I was 22, I had been out of school for not long, I think two years, so I really had no experience, so it was Fred...I owe alot to Fred. Some of the people in the production management at Hanna-Barbera were pretty reluctant to let me run the show, but Fred was the one that said "Let's let him try, but let's give him someone who knows what he's doing as a partner." So they teamed me up with Larry and he was amazing with not just with me, but everybody, including Paul and Craig [McCracken], Genndy [Tartakovsky], Rob [Renzetti], everybody that was there. They all learned so much from Larry. But pretty quickly, Larry and I decided to split duties, so he basically teamed up with Paul to work on the Secret Squirrel, and I ran Stupid Dogs, but we collaborated on all of them. I think I directed quite a few of the voice sessions for the Secret Squirrel shorts and all the storyboard pitches...Larry was there for all the Stupid Dog pitches, and I was there for all the Secret Squirrel pitches, but we decided to stay out of each other's hair for a little bit, by splitting up the two shows that way.
I have no idea what he's doing now, but Larry spent years working on these really great stuff; he had a great run before any of us kids showed up at Hanna-Barbera. He was really a special guy and he was a real veteran, but he embraced a kind of this chaos this new generation showed up and all wanting to try crazy ideas for new cartoons. He had alot of impact on alot of cartoons that were made in the '90s and the 2000s with Cartoon Network and Frederator and stuff. He's tremendous guy.
Who would you consider to be the key people in 2 Stupid Dogs, (writers, storyboards, etc.)?
Mark Saraceni was story editor, but we all wrote outlines. I think my role was for seven-minute cartoons we'd have no more than a three or four page outlines. So what we would do is anybody who had an idea for one of the cartoons...I had a pretty long list of 'em from all the development work that I had done that I spent trying to pitch it, but we would have lunch meetings trying to talk about premise ideas for cartoons and then we would pick the ones we like and then Saraceni would go off and, he wrote alot of the outlines and Lane Raichert I think wrote some, Henry Gilroy wrote some outlines, Richard Pursel did us a favor and wrote up a few, I met him at Spumco...but then majority of the writing was done on the wall in the storyboards.
So the board artists would get the outlines, which like I said was three or four pages, which really had just, here's the setup, here's what's the conflict's going to be, some ideas of what will happen, how things will escalate, and sometimes it will have a solid ending, sometimes it will not. And the storyboard artists would spend maybe two or three weeks doing a rough storyboard where they would develop much of the material and the gags. It would get pinned up and pitch it and we'd spend a day or so kinda tearing it down as a group. Most of the storyboard artists and much of the crew would watch the pitch and stay together for the rest of the afternoon and pitch new gags and new character stuff and situations and kinda cover the wall with post-it notes and the board artists would go away for couple more weeks to sort it all out.
So the guys that were doing so much of the storyboards...Genndy, Rob Renzetti became really key guys in the storyboards. Tuck Tucker was there for a while in the first season. But the key people on 2 Stupid Dogs were Craig McCracken, he was huge. Mike Moon, and Rob Renzetti, Tartakovsky. All those guys that wound up running the place for years after that. We were all part of the first season here and everyone was tremendously impactful on the show.
Continue to Part 3
Interview (C) Charles Brubaker
2 Stupid Dogs, Secret Squirrel (C) Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Donovan Cook interview, part 1
Donovan Cook is the creator of 2 Stupid Dogs, which aired on TBS and in syndication in 1993-95. It was then subsequently rerun on Cartoon Network where it gained following within animation fans. He has also worked at Disney, Spumco, and Klasky-Csupo. The phone interview took place on August 11, 2011.
Where are you from? What were your influences?
I'm from California. I grew up in northern California, then moved to southern California as a teenager. Influences, early on, were Disney cartoons, Warner Bros. cartoons and particularly a couple of Peanuts animated television specials. The Halloween special, the Christmas special. I loved those. Heavily influenced by those early on and Schulz in general. A little bit later, toward high school, obviously Calvin and Hobbes was huge for me back then.
And you went to CalArts?
Yeah, from '87 to '90.
Made any films there?
I made four films there. Generally in the character animation program at CalArts you make one film a year. I made a first year film, made a second year film. In the second year we started making some collaborative films, too. Made a couple of group films in the second and third year, but made terrible films the first couple of years. Last year I made my first film that was actually coherent. Got some laughs and things like that. I was in the same class with Pete Doctor, Ash Brannon, Chris Ure, Mark Kennedy. We were a great year. Great class.
Did you made any acquintances with fellow students that you would work with on other shows?
Oh sure. Quite a number of people from 2 Stupid Dogs were from CalArts. Craig McCracken, who art directed Stupid Dogs was a year, maybe two years behind my class. And Mike Moon, Genndy Tartakovsky, Rob Renzetti, Tony Craig. Almost all of us were from CalArts, right around the same time.
Did you get a job in animation after graduation almost instantly?
I was really fortunate. At the end of the second year I did an internship at Disney Feature Animation on Little Mermaid. At the end of my third year, which is when I graduated, I went back to Disney for a year. I left Disney to create 2 Stupid Dogs.
You worked at Spumco on Ren & Stimpy?
I did, yes. For a little while. I was at Spumco when all the really nasty stuff went down, when Nickelodeon shut it down. I left Disney, I was 22. I thought it would take me few months to sell Stupid Dogs. Ha ha. Took a year and a half. So in the meantime I did a few things and I was fortunate enough to meet John K. and spend some time there. I had never done any television work before so my first lessons in how to make TV cartoons was at Spumco with John K. so that was a great time for me. I learned alot from John, and Ron Hughart was there. Ken Bruce and Dan Jeup were there at the time. Those guys were all there directing and I came in as an assistant director and really learned alot about television and how to keep it from getting too rough around the edges. But then all hell broke loose. Luckily that happened right around the time when we had just finalized the deal with Hanna-Barbera so the timing was okay. So I left Spumco and went directly to Hanna-Barbera to start working on Stupid Dogs.
What did you do as an assistant director at Spumco?
Spumco was a great place. They were very hands on. They did what's called character layouts. Once the storyboards were done you would make story reel, or what people now call an animatic, to time out with the storyboard and the dialogue tracks. And then instead of immediately shipping it out overseas they would do character layouts, where alot of really talented artists would do, not all the key poses you would use if you were to animate, but, say, if you were going to have a scene you were going to animate with it was going to have maybe twelve key poses, in the character layout you would probably do maybe four or five of those, the really, really key ones. And so as an assistant director I helped work with the directors in timing some of the character layouts and if something wasn't working I would do some fixes to it. So I was there as a second hand to some of the directors, dealing with timing and character poses and things of that nature.
Continue to Part 2
Interview (C) Charles Brubaker
2 Stupid Dogs (C) Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.
The Ren & Stimpy Show (C) Viacom International
Where are you from? What were your influences?
I'm from California. I grew up in northern California, then moved to southern California as a teenager. Influences, early on, were Disney cartoons, Warner Bros. cartoons and particularly a couple of Peanuts animated television specials. The Halloween special, the Christmas special. I loved those. Heavily influenced by those early on and Schulz in general. A little bit later, toward high school, obviously Calvin and Hobbes was huge for me back then.
And you went to CalArts?
Yeah, from '87 to '90.
Made any films there?
I made four films there. Generally in the character animation program at CalArts you make one film a year. I made a first year film, made a second year film. In the second year we started making some collaborative films, too. Made a couple of group films in the second and third year, but made terrible films the first couple of years. Last year I made my first film that was actually coherent. Got some laughs and things like that. I was in the same class with Pete Doctor, Ash Brannon, Chris Ure, Mark Kennedy. We were a great year. Great class.
Did you made any acquintances with fellow students that you would work with on other shows?
Oh sure. Quite a number of people from 2 Stupid Dogs were from CalArts. Craig McCracken, who art directed Stupid Dogs was a year, maybe two years behind my class. And Mike Moon, Genndy Tartakovsky, Rob Renzetti, Tony Craig. Almost all of us were from CalArts, right around the same time.
Did you get a job in animation after graduation almost instantly?
I was really fortunate. At the end of the second year I did an internship at Disney Feature Animation on Little Mermaid. At the end of my third year, which is when I graduated, I went back to Disney for a year. I left Disney to create 2 Stupid Dogs.
You worked at Spumco on Ren & Stimpy?
I did, yes. For a little while. I was at Spumco when all the really nasty stuff went down, when Nickelodeon shut it down. I left Disney, I was 22. I thought it would take me few months to sell Stupid Dogs. Ha ha. Took a year and a half. So in the meantime I did a few things and I was fortunate enough to meet John K. and spend some time there. I had never done any television work before so my first lessons in how to make TV cartoons was at Spumco with John K. so that was a great time for me. I learned alot from John, and Ron Hughart was there. Ken Bruce and Dan Jeup were there at the time. Those guys were all there directing and I came in as an assistant director and really learned alot about television and how to keep it from getting too rough around the edges. But then all hell broke loose. Luckily that happened right around the time when we had just finalized the deal with Hanna-Barbera so the timing was okay. So I left Spumco and went directly to Hanna-Barbera to start working on Stupid Dogs.
What did you do as an assistant director at Spumco?
Spumco was a great place. They were very hands on. They did what's called character layouts. Once the storyboards were done you would make story reel, or what people now call an animatic, to time out with the storyboard and the dialogue tracks. And then instead of immediately shipping it out overseas they would do character layouts, where alot of really talented artists would do, not all the key poses you would use if you were to animate, but, say, if you were going to have a scene you were going to animate with it was going to have maybe twelve key poses, in the character layout you would probably do maybe four or five of those, the really, really key ones. And so as an assistant director I helped work with the directors in timing some of the character layouts and if something wasn't working I would do some fixes to it. So I was there as a second hand to some of the directors, dealing with timing and character poses and things of that nature.
Continue to Part 2
Interview (C) Charles Brubaker
2 Stupid Dogs (C) Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.
The Ren & Stimpy Show (C) Viacom International
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
David H. DePatie interview, final part
Read part 3 here.
Did The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat start production at the original studio, then completed at Marvel?
Yes, that was in mid-production when Friz and I shut down so I took it over to Marvel and basically it was the same production team because when I started the Marvel studio, it was kind of like when we started DePatie-Freleng, I reached in and took as many DFE personnel as I could and brought them over to Marvel when we started up at that studio.
And Pink Panther continued production right until the studio shut down?
That's right, and actually it went on a little beyond that because at Marvel we did a Pink Panther Valentine special for ABC called Pink at First Sight. That was done entirely when I was at Marvel.
Friz had no involvement with that special?
We got together on the original storyline and that was about it. The rest of the animation process we did entirely at Marvel.
To go back a bit, was Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, heavily involved with the TV specials?
Very much so. He was a very hands-on guy. He lived down in La Jolla and he would fly over here. During the course of the production it wasn't unusual to see him once a week. He was very instrumental in the creation of the series. Friz and I had a very good rapport with him. We enjoyed working with him and he enjoyed the studio and it was a far-cry from the bad experience he had with Chuck Jones on the earlier Christmas special.
So he enjoyed the specials the studio did.
Oh yeah. It was a very good relationship and everybody was pleased. I have sitting here front of me three Emmys that we won for Dr. Seuss specials, with Friz and I as producers. Yeah, it was a very successful operation and I often think of it as an important contribution to entertainment in general as we did with the Pink Panther. It was a very successful operation.
It's still on TV from time to time.
It's kind of convoluted because some of them were made for CBS and some of them were made for ABC and you never know when they're gonna pop up. And of course some of them were syndicated and I think I even seen one on Cartoon Network.
In the 1990s there was a new Pink Panther series where he talked.
We received a call from MGM that they wanted a new 16 or 17 half-hours of Panther for syndication. The only problem is, in order to get financing for it, is he's gonna have to get a voice. None of us wanted to do this. Finally, MGM persuaded everybody, our partners the Mirisch company, I assume you know the Panther copyright is owned by myself and my two partners, DePatie-Freleng and Geoffrey Productions, which is Blake Edwards company, and the Mirisch Company, which was the original producers. The three of us owned the copyright of the Pink Panther. So naturally we called the shots, but in this particular instance we were prevailed up to give the character a voice and the voice ended up being a fellow by the name of Matt Frewer. It was okay. To this day I prefer the pantomime version but the production was good. MGM, to accommodate this production, opened up a little animation unit over at MGM and it was the first time they had anything like that since the Tom and Jerry days. So that's where we did everything and it was renewed for the second year and I think we did another 16 or 17 of them, and that was it.
To go back to the studio, do you remember any of the musicians, like Bill Lava?
Going back to the Warner Bros. days, Bill Lava was the guy and the original Pink Panther theatrical shorts, Bill Lava did the music for alot of them. It was a mixed-bag with music because we insisted upon most of the music being the Mancini theme. So the rest of the background music that someone like Lava would do was minimal, because if you sit down and look at it, there was a liberal use of the Pink Panther Mancini theme. Another fellow that we used, quite liberally, was a fellow by the name of Doug Goodwin. You'll see his name all over the music credits.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
Pink Panther © Mirisch-Geoffrey-DePatie Freleng
Dr. Seuss specials © Dr. Seuss Enterprises
Did The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat start production at the original studio, then completed at Marvel?
Yes, that was in mid-production when Friz and I shut down so I took it over to Marvel and basically it was the same production team because when I started the Marvel studio, it was kind of like when we started DePatie-Freleng, I reached in and took as many DFE personnel as I could and brought them over to Marvel when we started up at that studio.
And Pink Panther continued production right until the studio shut down?
That's right, and actually it went on a little beyond that because at Marvel we did a Pink Panther Valentine special for ABC called Pink at First Sight. That was done entirely when I was at Marvel.
Friz had no involvement with that special?
We got together on the original storyline and that was about it. The rest of the animation process we did entirely at Marvel.
To go back a bit, was Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, heavily involved with the TV specials?
Very much so. He was a very hands-on guy. He lived down in La Jolla and he would fly over here. During the course of the production it wasn't unusual to see him once a week. He was very instrumental in the creation of the series. Friz and I had a very good rapport with him. We enjoyed working with him and he enjoyed the studio and it was a far-cry from the bad experience he had with Chuck Jones on the earlier Christmas special.
So he enjoyed the specials the studio did.
Oh yeah. It was a very good relationship and everybody was pleased. I have sitting here front of me three Emmys that we won for Dr. Seuss specials, with Friz and I as producers. Yeah, it was a very successful operation and I often think of it as an important contribution to entertainment in general as we did with the Pink Panther. It was a very successful operation.
It's still on TV from time to time.
It's kind of convoluted because some of them were made for CBS and some of them were made for ABC and you never know when they're gonna pop up. And of course some of them were syndicated and I think I even seen one on Cartoon Network.
In the 1990s there was a new Pink Panther series where he talked.
We received a call from MGM that they wanted a new 16 or 17 half-hours of Panther for syndication. The only problem is, in order to get financing for it, is he's gonna have to get a voice. None of us wanted to do this. Finally, MGM persuaded everybody, our partners the Mirisch company, I assume you know the Panther copyright is owned by myself and my two partners, DePatie-Freleng and Geoffrey Productions, which is Blake Edwards company, and the Mirisch Company, which was the original producers. The three of us owned the copyright of the Pink Panther. So naturally we called the shots, but in this particular instance we were prevailed up to give the character a voice and the voice ended up being a fellow by the name of Matt Frewer. It was okay. To this day I prefer the pantomime version but the production was good. MGM, to accommodate this production, opened up a little animation unit over at MGM and it was the first time they had anything like that since the Tom and Jerry days. So that's where we did everything and it was renewed for the second year and I think we did another 16 or 17 of them, and that was it.
To go back to the studio, do you remember any of the musicians, like Bill Lava?
Going back to the Warner Bros. days, Bill Lava was the guy and the original Pink Panther theatrical shorts, Bill Lava did the music for alot of them. It was a mixed-bag with music because we insisted upon most of the music being the Mancini theme. So the rest of the background music that someone like Lava would do was minimal, because if you sit down and look at it, there was a liberal use of the Pink Panther Mancini theme. Another fellow that we used, quite liberally, was a fellow by the name of Doug Goodwin. You'll see his name all over the music credits.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
Pink Panther © Mirisch-Geoffrey-DePatie Freleng
Dr. Seuss specials © Dr. Seuss Enterprises
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
David H. DePatie interview, part 3
Read part 2 here.
On the theatrical side The Blue Racer came out in 1972.
That'll be about right. He was very successful. People really liked that blue snake, the way he became involved, so it was a compliment to the rest of our library
Blue Racer chased the Japanese Beetle around. Did that character cause any complaints?
Not really. I will say this, though, on the ethnic subject. You are familiar with the original Tijuana Toads?
Yeah.
When they went on television, we had to completely change them around and the series became known as the Texas Toads, and we had to redo all of the tracks that had any type of ethnic content and it really watered down the series down. We all thought it was a hell of a lot more funny when it was the Tijuana Toads, but at the time we had to do it in order to bring the thing on television. However, I do not recall having that problem with the Blue Racer and the Japanese character. That one I don't remember. I think he went on just as he was in the theatrical cartoons.
And when the Blue Racer was still in production Hoot Kloot came out.
Hoot Kloot, to my recollection, was the last of the contractual theatrical cartoons we did for United Artists under the original 156 cartoon contract. Of course that was another one that went on to television. At one time we had a 90-minute show on NBC that lasted for a couple years, called the Pink Panther Laugh and a Half-Hour and a Half. Of course, 90 minutes, that really consumed alot of stuff and I think that's when we decided we needed another series and there came Hoot Kloot.
Several of the shorts were animated overseas. Do you remember any details of that?
Like so many of our competitors the time came when we financially had to move a certain amount of production overseas which we did. We worked primarily in Seoul, Korea. We had a studio over there run by a gentleman by the name of Nelson Shin. That's where we did most, if not all, of our overseas productions.
Nelson Shin was in Korea at the time?
Yes. Actually, he was an American but he was involved in a studio in Korea.
One of the Blue Racer shorts was done in Australia.
I don't remember that. It seems to me that we did experiment on Australia and it didn't work out for us. You may be correct there was one done there, but I don't remember except we did not have a good experience there. If we did anything, it would've been one or two at the most.
Some of the Hoot Kloot were done in Barcelona, Spain with Bob Balser.
Yes. Balser originally worked for us and he was [later] in Barcelona. We had a director by the name of Art Leonardi and we sent him over to work with Balser and we did do some work there.
After Hoot Kloot there was one more theatrical series called The Dogfather.
Yes, there was the Dogfather and Misterjaw that really concluded the series. I said earlier that it was Hoot Kloot but it really wasn't. It was Dogfather and Misterjaw, as I recall.
At this time Joe Ruby and Ken Spear came to the studio with The Barkleys and The Houndcats.
We negotiated a contract with Ruby and Spears. They have been writers at Hanna-Barbera and they were quite knowledgable in Saturday Morning programming. So I hired them and brought them over and you're right, the first thing they did for us was the Houndcats and the Barkleys, and I'm trying to remember what they did after that, but they were with us for several years.
Bailey's Comets?
Yes, that's the other one.
There was also the Marvel series, with Spider-Woman and the Fantastic Four.
Yes. I negotiated a deal with the Marvel Comics management to get the rights to these two shows and we did them. And I don't want to get ahead of myself but subsequently when Friz and I decided that we made enough cartoons we decided to shut down the studio and I founded Marvel Productions and was their first president and CEO for four years after Friz and I shut down our operation.
The studio also did several Dr. Seuss specials, starting with The Cat in the Hat. How did that deal came about?
Well, the first Dr. Seuss special was How the Grinch Stole Christmas and that was made by Chuck Jones at MGM. The second one was the Cat in the Hat [ed. note: actually the third, the second being Jones-directed Horton Hears a Who]. Jones and Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, did not get along. They were at each-others throats. Geisel and I were both represented by the International Creative Management (ICM) and my agent asked if we would be interested in taking over the work on The Cat in the Hat. We did, and we did all of the remaining specials. I think we did six in all. And that's how that got started.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
Blue Racer, Tijuana Toads, Hoot Kloot, Dogfather © MGM/UA
The Houndcats © Viacom
The Cat in the Hat © Dr. Seuss Enterprises
Part 4 tomorrow
On the theatrical side The Blue Racer came out in 1972.
That'll be about right. He was very successful. People really liked that blue snake, the way he became involved, so it was a compliment to the rest of our library
Blue Racer chased the Japanese Beetle around. Did that character cause any complaints?
Not really. I will say this, though, on the ethnic subject. You are familiar with the original Tijuana Toads?
Yeah.
When they went on television, we had to completely change them around and the series became known as the Texas Toads, and we had to redo all of the tracks that had any type of ethnic content and it really watered down the series down. We all thought it was a hell of a lot more funny when it was the Tijuana Toads, but at the time we had to do it in order to bring the thing on television. However, I do not recall having that problem with the Blue Racer and the Japanese character. That one I don't remember. I think he went on just as he was in the theatrical cartoons.
And when the Blue Racer was still in production Hoot Kloot came out.
Hoot Kloot, to my recollection, was the last of the contractual theatrical cartoons we did for United Artists under the original 156 cartoon contract. Of course that was another one that went on to television. At one time we had a 90-minute show on NBC that lasted for a couple years, called the Pink Panther Laugh and a Half-Hour and a Half. Of course, 90 minutes, that really consumed alot of stuff and I think that's when we decided we needed another series and there came Hoot Kloot.
Several of the shorts were animated overseas. Do you remember any details of that?
Like so many of our competitors the time came when we financially had to move a certain amount of production overseas which we did. We worked primarily in Seoul, Korea. We had a studio over there run by a gentleman by the name of Nelson Shin. That's where we did most, if not all, of our overseas productions.
Nelson Shin was in Korea at the time?
Yes. Actually, he was an American but he was involved in a studio in Korea.
One of the Blue Racer shorts was done in Australia.
I don't remember that. It seems to me that we did experiment on Australia and it didn't work out for us. You may be correct there was one done there, but I don't remember except we did not have a good experience there. If we did anything, it would've been one or two at the most.
Some of the Hoot Kloot were done in Barcelona, Spain with Bob Balser.
Yes. Balser originally worked for us and he was [later] in Barcelona. We had a director by the name of Art Leonardi and we sent him over to work with Balser and we did do some work there.
After Hoot Kloot there was one more theatrical series called The Dogfather.
Yes, there was the Dogfather and Misterjaw that really concluded the series. I said earlier that it was Hoot Kloot but it really wasn't. It was Dogfather and Misterjaw, as I recall.
At this time Joe Ruby and Ken Spear came to the studio with The Barkleys and The Houndcats.
We negotiated a contract with Ruby and Spears. They have been writers at Hanna-Barbera and they were quite knowledgable in Saturday Morning programming. So I hired them and brought them over and you're right, the first thing they did for us was the Houndcats and the Barkleys, and I'm trying to remember what they did after that, but they were with us for several years.
Bailey's Comets?
Yes, that's the other one.
There was also the Marvel series, with Spider-Woman and the Fantastic Four.
Yes. I negotiated a deal with the Marvel Comics management to get the rights to these two shows and we did them. And I don't want to get ahead of myself but subsequently when Friz and I decided that we made enough cartoons we decided to shut down the studio and I founded Marvel Productions and was their first president and CEO for four years after Friz and I shut down our operation.
The studio also did several Dr. Seuss specials, starting with The Cat in the Hat. How did that deal came about?
Well, the first Dr. Seuss special was How the Grinch Stole Christmas and that was made by Chuck Jones at MGM. The second one was the Cat in the Hat [ed. note: actually the third, the second being Jones-directed Horton Hears a Who]. Jones and Dr. Seuss, Ted Geisel, did not get along. They were at each-others throats. Geisel and I were both represented by the International Creative Management (ICM) and my agent asked if we would be interested in taking over the work on The Cat in the Hat. We did, and we did all of the remaining specials. I think we did six in all. And that's how that got started.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
Blue Racer, Tijuana Toads, Hoot Kloot, Dogfather © MGM/UA
The Houndcats © Viacom
The Cat in the Hat © Dr. Seuss Enterprises
Part 4 tomorrow
Monday, December 20, 2010
David H. DePatie interview, part 2
Read Part 1 here.
How did you and Blake Edwards get in touch with the Pink Panther titles?
We need to turn the clock back to around 1963. I had known Blake throughout the years on a friendship basis. And I got this call one day to come over and see him and I did and he handed me this script and I looked at it, and it's called The Pink Panther. He went on to say "I'm going to Rome to shoot this movie very soon and although it's a live-action movie, the idea of a Pink Panther really makes me want to have an animated character and I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but can you guys come up with an idea?"
So I went back to the studio and got together with Friz and...actually, one of our very important layout men, his name was Hawley Pratt. Hawley was the most instrumental in creating the original Panther. We must have come up with a hundred or more different drawings, variations, on what the Pink Panther is. We took these drawings over to Blake's house and laid them all out for him. He's a very decisive guy and he walked over and he said that's the one I want and he picked that particular drawing and the Panther was born. He went off to Rome to shoot the movie and the only thing he used the Panther on was on the letterheads and business cards and that sort of thing.
Friz and I didn't have any idea of where it was going to go from there. After the picture was completed I got a call from Blake and he said "I have a film in the can now and I would like to tell you what my thoughts are, so come on over". So I went over to see him and he said "now I know exactly what I'm going to use with this character. I want you to create a main title sequence for my movie where the Panther will come involved and work with the different credits." That's exactly where the Panther was born. We went on to create a storyboard with the character involved in all of the main title credits and he thought it was great. He had to take it over to the Mirisch Company, which was the production company for the film, and had to get the budget OK'd. It was quite an expensive operation. To my knowledge it was the first time that there had ever been an animated main title that featured complete, full animation throughout the title itself. It was expensive, but he got the budget cleared and went ahead and made the main title.
What was the reception with the title?
The reception was magnificent. We took the picture out to preview at Village Theatre in Westwood and when the titles came on, people got up and they were jumping around and screaming and yelling and at the end of the title sequence they had to turn off the projector and turn on the house lights because people were just going really crazy about it. So it came off with a very, very good start. I had the idea that maybe there was life in this Pink Panther after this main title sequence. To make a long story short I was able to convince the Mirisch Company and United Artists to give us a contract for Pink Panther shorts. You have to remember that this time in the animation business the cartoons were theatrical cartoons. The theatre owners ran a cartoon and a newsreel with the feature picture so that was the format. I was able to get a very large contract from United Artists that surprised me at the time. We got a contract for 156 six-minute theatrical shorts. So we were in business and moving right along so that really basically how it all got started.
Then the Inspector series came along.
The Inspector was the second. After we had started, we probably made around 13 different Pink Panther cartoons and we were asked by United Artists to come up with another character to work in conjunction with the Panther and that's when we decided upon the Inspector Clouseau character in animation. I would say that was probably a year to 18-months after the creation of the Pink Panther himself.
Then you would enter Saturday Morning, starting with The Super 6.
We made the decision to get into Saturday Morning television and you're right, the first all-new show that we made for NBC network was Super 6. That was our first effort into television itself. Now of course, later the networks, primarily NBC, bought the Panther for Saturday Morning television and it was on the networks for 12 to 15 years continuously in various formats. The existing theatrical cartoons with bridge materials, very much like what Warners had done previously, and some of the television shows were new, where we actually made Pink Panther cartoons for television.
How did the studio expand with the production of both the TV series and the theatricals?
Well, we had alot of materials going through. At the high point of the studio in production, we had close to 400 people in the studio so it really went from nothing to quite a large operation. Not as big as Hanna-Barbera but it was there.
After the production of The Inspector ended there was an introduction of new series with Roland and Rattfink, Tijuana Toads, and The Ant and the Aardvark.
Yes, and The Blue Racer. These were all different cartoons that our distributor, United Artists, asked us [in order] to vary our production. And they were all quite successful...We're getting to the point where I have to tell you that the theatrical cartoon persay, had really died. It was in the early '70s when the theatre people said we want to run the feature continuously. We don't want any interruptions with a cartoon or a newsreel. So my point here is, at that time, basically everything we were doing was directly for television.
John Dunn was responsible for most of the stories.
John was our head writer. He and I worked very close together. I was involved with the so-called literary end of animation while Friz was involved with the actual drawing part so I worked very close with John Dunn and he, probably, was the best creative mind, story-wise, that I had ever worked with. He was responsible for the success of the Pink Panther and it was one of his original ideas that we keep the Panther as a pantomime character. As you probably know, up until more recently the Panther never had a voice. This was a conscience decision that I made with along with John Dunn early on in the process.
At start, the directors were Hawley Pratt, Gerry Chiniquy, and Bob McKimson.
That is correct. Pratt, as I said earlier, was a layout artist and we promoted to directing once the Pink Panthers got underway [...] he was mostly the director on the Pink Panther for many years.
Warner Bros. eventually decided to re-open the studio in the late '60s.
I didn't really have anything to do with that. At this point in time our lease on the Warner studio has expired and in about 1970-71, DePatie-Freleng moved into its own studio away from the Warner lot. There was a period where the Warner Bros. was still dormant but they made the decision to get back into business and we had nothing to do with that.
Bob McKimson would briefly leave the studio to work at the new Warner studio.
Well, I don't remember that being accurate. If it was, it was a very short-period of time because he was working at DePatie-Freleng up until the day he died. And that's my recollection, I don't recall him working back to Warner's. If he did, that was a very short period of time. [ed. note: McKimson retired from animation in 1969, but went back to work in early 1970s to direct on the television series, where he stayed until his death in 1977]
Well, he only directed half-a-dozen cartoons there, so yes, it was short.
He would've been the only one available of the original Warner directors because Chuck Jones was off on his own and of course Friz was with me, so McKimson was it.
Art Davis would eventually become director.
Artie was an animator and eventually the production grew in volume and we needed an additional director and Artie was it.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
All images © MGM/UA
Continue to Part 3
How did you and Blake Edwards get in touch with the Pink Panther titles?
We need to turn the clock back to around 1963. I had known Blake throughout the years on a friendship basis. And I got this call one day to come over and see him and I did and he handed me this script and I looked at it, and it's called The Pink Panther. He went on to say "I'm going to Rome to shoot this movie very soon and although it's a live-action movie, the idea of a Pink Panther really makes me want to have an animated character and I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but can you guys come up with an idea?"
So I went back to the studio and got together with Friz and...actually, one of our very important layout men, his name was Hawley Pratt. Hawley was the most instrumental in creating the original Panther. We must have come up with a hundred or more different drawings, variations, on what the Pink Panther is. We took these drawings over to Blake's house and laid them all out for him. He's a very decisive guy and he walked over and he said that's the one I want and he picked that particular drawing and the Panther was born. He went off to Rome to shoot the movie and the only thing he used the Panther on was on the letterheads and business cards and that sort of thing.
Friz and I didn't have any idea of where it was going to go from there. After the picture was completed I got a call from Blake and he said "I have a film in the can now and I would like to tell you what my thoughts are, so come on over". So I went over to see him and he said "now I know exactly what I'm going to use with this character. I want you to create a main title sequence for my movie where the Panther will come involved and work with the different credits." That's exactly where the Panther was born. We went on to create a storyboard with the character involved in all of the main title credits and he thought it was great. He had to take it over to the Mirisch Company, which was the production company for the film, and had to get the budget OK'd. It was quite an expensive operation. To my knowledge it was the first time that there had ever been an animated main title that featured complete, full animation throughout the title itself. It was expensive, but he got the budget cleared and went ahead and made the main title.
What was the reception with the title?
The reception was magnificent. We took the picture out to preview at Village Theatre in Westwood and when the titles came on, people got up and they were jumping around and screaming and yelling and at the end of the title sequence they had to turn off the projector and turn on the house lights because people were just going really crazy about it. So it came off with a very, very good start. I had the idea that maybe there was life in this Pink Panther after this main title sequence. To make a long story short I was able to convince the Mirisch Company and United Artists to give us a contract for Pink Panther shorts. You have to remember that this time in the animation business the cartoons were theatrical cartoons. The theatre owners ran a cartoon and a newsreel with the feature picture so that was the format. I was able to get a very large contract from United Artists that surprised me at the time. We got a contract for 156 six-minute theatrical shorts. So we were in business and moving right along so that really basically how it all got started.
Then the Inspector series came along.
The Inspector was the second. After we had started, we probably made around 13 different Pink Panther cartoons and we were asked by United Artists to come up with another character to work in conjunction with the Panther and that's when we decided upon the Inspector Clouseau character in animation. I would say that was probably a year to 18-months after the creation of the Pink Panther himself.
Then you would enter Saturday Morning, starting with The Super 6.
We made the decision to get into Saturday Morning television and you're right, the first all-new show that we made for NBC network was Super 6. That was our first effort into television itself. Now of course, later the networks, primarily NBC, bought the Panther for Saturday Morning television and it was on the networks for 12 to 15 years continuously in various formats. The existing theatrical cartoons with bridge materials, very much like what Warners had done previously, and some of the television shows were new, where we actually made Pink Panther cartoons for television.
How did the studio expand with the production of both the TV series and the theatricals?
Well, we had alot of materials going through. At the high point of the studio in production, we had close to 400 people in the studio so it really went from nothing to quite a large operation. Not as big as Hanna-Barbera but it was there.
After the production of The Inspector ended there was an introduction of new series with Roland and Rattfink, Tijuana Toads, and The Ant and the Aardvark.
Yes, and The Blue Racer. These were all different cartoons that our distributor, United Artists, asked us [in order] to vary our production. And they were all quite successful...We're getting to the point where I have to tell you that the theatrical cartoon persay, had really died. It was in the early '70s when the theatre people said we want to run the feature continuously. We don't want any interruptions with a cartoon or a newsreel. So my point here is, at that time, basically everything we were doing was directly for television.
John Dunn was responsible for most of the stories.
John was our head writer. He and I worked very close together. I was involved with the so-called literary end of animation while Friz was involved with the actual drawing part so I worked very close with John Dunn and he, probably, was the best creative mind, story-wise, that I had ever worked with. He was responsible for the success of the Pink Panther and it was one of his original ideas that we keep the Panther as a pantomime character. As you probably know, up until more recently the Panther never had a voice. This was a conscience decision that I made with along with John Dunn early on in the process.
At start, the directors were Hawley Pratt, Gerry Chiniquy, and Bob McKimson.
That is correct. Pratt, as I said earlier, was a layout artist and we promoted to directing once the Pink Panthers got underway [...] he was mostly the director on the Pink Panther for many years.
Warner Bros. eventually decided to re-open the studio in the late '60s.
I didn't really have anything to do with that. At this point in time our lease on the Warner studio has expired and in about 1970-71, DePatie-Freleng moved into its own studio away from the Warner lot. There was a period where the Warner Bros. was still dormant but they made the decision to get back into business and we had nothing to do with that.
Bob McKimson would briefly leave the studio to work at the new Warner studio.
Well, I don't remember that being accurate. If it was, it was a very short-period of time because he was working at DePatie-Freleng up until the day he died. And that's my recollection, I don't recall him working back to Warner's. If he did, that was a very short period of time. [ed. note: McKimson retired from animation in 1969, but went back to work in early 1970s to direct on the television series, where he stayed until his death in 1977]
Well, he only directed half-a-dozen cartoons there, so yes, it was short.
He would've been the only one available of the original Warner directors because Chuck Jones was off on his own and of course Friz was with me, so McKimson was it.
Art Davis would eventually become director.
Artie was an animator and eventually the production grew in volume and we needed an additional director and Artie was it.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
All images © MGM/UA
Continue to Part 3
Sunday, December 19, 2010
David H. DePatie interview, part 1
David H. DePatie was the last manager of the original Warner Bros. Animation Studio before its shut down in 1963. This led to forming his own studio with Friz Freleng where they produced many cartoons including the Pink Panther, the Dr. Seuss specials, and numerous other shorts and series.
I interviewed DePatie on December 14 by phone. The following is part 1 of the conversation.
You were the producer of the Warner Bros. Animation Dept.
I was the last manager of the Warner Bros. Cartoon Division before we closed it down. I was the head of that division for three years prior to the decision being made by Warner Bros. to get out of the cartoon business.
Who was the previous manager before you?
His name was John Burton.
The cameraman?
John Burton the cameraman was his son, and it was his father who was the previous head of the cartoon division before I took over.
And one of the films made under your watch was a live-action/animation hybrid Philbert.
Philbert was a pilot television show that was made for ABC Television Network. It was a combination of live and animation. Unfortunately it did not sell and the pilot was the only film we ever made.
And also at this time there was the The Bugs Bunny Show.
The Bugs Bunny Show was a combination of many of the old Warner Bros. cartoons involving most all of their characters and for half-hour television we took three of these cartoon shorts and put them together with new animated bridging material to form a half-hour show for television. And again, this was for the ABC network.
And Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng were mostly in charge of that show.
Well, there were all three of them involved. There was Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, and Bob McKimson.
They would take turns directing the bridging materials?
That is correct. That's how it worked.
When did Warner Bros. shut down their animation division?
Well I'm going to say it was approximately 1960. I received a call from management telling me to come to New York for a board of directors meeting. I flew into New York and attended this meeting of the Warner Bros. board and was told at the time that a decision was made to close the studio and get out of the cartoon business. As I recall, it was around 1960, '61, in that era.
And that led you forming your own studio with Friz?
Yes. It was a painful process, having to notify everybody that they were going to be out of work. But it took a year, a year in a half, to actually close the studio down because we had shows that were in production and we also were in the middle of an animated/live-action feature called Mr. Limpit, starring Don Knotts. [...] As I said earlier it took probably a year-in-a-half to close the studio down and it was over this period of time that personnel were gradually let go until we finished all of the production.
How did DePatie-Freleng Enterprise begin business?
I was offered a job to go up into the Warner Bros. Television division. At the time Warners was just getting started in television with shows like Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip, and I was offered a position up there to work as an executive producer. So I was not going to be out-of-work, but thought occured to me that I would like to go into business for myself. The Hanna-Barbera studio was just getting started at the time and I thought it would be a good time to get into this business. So I needed to have an animation director to work with me and during my years at the Warner Bros. Cartoon Division I had developed a very good rapport and friendship with Friz Freleng, so I offered Friz the opportunity to go into business with me to form an animation company and he accepted the offer and that that's when DePatie-Freleng Enterprises was born.
In the beginning, it was mostly commercials with Charlie Tuna.
I had a quite a good rapport with a number of advertising agencies that we had made commercials for when we were still at Warner Bros and they really helped us get started. That was how our initial work in the new studio was, television commercials. And you're right, Charlie the Tuna was one of the them, "Put a Tiger in your tank" [was] another one, Post Cereals. There were a number of animated commercials that really kept up going in the early stages of the company.
How many animators did you have on staff at the time?
When we started out, Friz and I were very fortunate because we literally had our pick of the best because people that had been laid off at Warner Bros. we picked up. I think we probably started out with four animators and four assistant animators, probably two or three layout people, a background artist, and a certain number of the ink-and-paint girls as well as John Burton Jr., who became our cameraman. To back up a little bit, I had been able to negotiate a deal with Warner Bros. management to take over the cartoon studio because obviously they had nothing to do with it, it was empty, and I was able to negotiate a very favorable lease on the studio, including all of the equipment and everything. That's where DePatie-Freleng was originally housed, in the existing Warner Bros. Animation Division building.
And the new studio would eventually make new Looney Tunes.
It's quite ironic. Friz and I had been in business for probably a little over a year, and we had already started with the Pink Panther. I got a call from the Warner management saying that because of the needs of television that they wanted more shows and we did produce for about 26 to 30 six-minute shorts with Daffy, Road Runner, some Bugs, Tweety. We did do some work for them initially.
Why Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, mostly?
I don't know that it was mostly but Warner Bros., they were of course catering ABC network and I suppose that it was the ABC Network Programming people that really specified what characters they wanted in these new cartoons.
And some of the Road Runners were contracted out to Format Films.
There was a gentleman by the name of Herb Klynn who had been a director at one time or another at Warner Bros and Herb had this company called Format. We were, of course, very very busy at that time with the Pink Panther production and we really didn't have the personnel to do all of the Warner work in-house. Yes, some of it was indeed farmed out to Format Films under the direction of Herb Klynn.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
Philbert, Looney Tunes characters © Warner Bros.
Charlie the Tuna © StarKist Co.
Continue to Part 2
I interviewed DePatie on December 14 by phone. The following is part 1 of the conversation.
You were the producer of the Warner Bros. Animation Dept.
I was the last manager of the Warner Bros. Cartoon Division before we closed it down. I was the head of that division for three years prior to the decision being made by Warner Bros. to get out of the cartoon business.
Who was the previous manager before you?
His name was John Burton.
The cameraman?
John Burton the cameraman was his son, and it was his father who was the previous head of the cartoon division before I took over.
And one of the films made under your watch was a live-action/animation hybrid Philbert.
Philbert was a pilot television show that was made for ABC Television Network. It was a combination of live and animation. Unfortunately it did not sell and the pilot was the only film we ever made.
And also at this time there was the The Bugs Bunny Show.
The Bugs Bunny Show was a combination of many of the old Warner Bros. cartoons involving most all of their characters and for half-hour television we took three of these cartoon shorts and put them together with new animated bridging material to form a half-hour show for television. And again, this was for the ABC network.
And Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng were mostly in charge of that show.
Well, there were all three of them involved. There was Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, and Bob McKimson.
They would take turns directing the bridging materials?
That is correct. That's how it worked.
When did Warner Bros. shut down their animation division?
Well I'm going to say it was approximately 1960. I received a call from management telling me to come to New York for a board of directors meeting. I flew into New York and attended this meeting of the Warner Bros. board and was told at the time that a decision was made to close the studio and get out of the cartoon business. As I recall, it was around 1960, '61, in that era.
And that led you forming your own studio with Friz?
Yes. It was a painful process, having to notify everybody that they were going to be out of work. But it took a year, a year in a half, to actually close the studio down because we had shows that were in production and we also were in the middle of an animated/live-action feature called Mr. Limpit, starring Don Knotts. [...] As I said earlier it took probably a year-in-a-half to close the studio down and it was over this period of time that personnel were gradually let go until we finished all of the production.
How did DePatie-Freleng Enterprise begin business?
I was offered a job to go up into the Warner Bros. Television division. At the time Warners was just getting started in television with shows like Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip, and I was offered a position up there to work as an executive producer. So I was not going to be out-of-work, but thought occured to me that I would like to go into business for myself. The Hanna-Barbera studio was just getting started at the time and I thought it would be a good time to get into this business. So I needed to have an animation director to work with me and during my years at the Warner Bros. Cartoon Division I had developed a very good rapport and friendship with Friz Freleng, so I offered Friz the opportunity to go into business with me to form an animation company and he accepted the offer and that that's when DePatie-Freleng Enterprises was born.
In the beginning, it was mostly commercials with Charlie Tuna.
I had a quite a good rapport with a number of advertising agencies that we had made commercials for when we were still at Warner Bros and they really helped us get started. That was how our initial work in the new studio was, television commercials. And you're right, Charlie the Tuna was one of the them, "Put a Tiger in your tank" [was] another one, Post Cereals. There were a number of animated commercials that really kept up going in the early stages of the company.
How many animators did you have on staff at the time?
When we started out, Friz and I were very fortunate because we literally had our pick of the best because people that had been laid off at Warner Bros. we picked up. I think we probably started out with four animators and four assistant animators, probably two or three layout people, a background artist, and a certain number of the ink-and-paint girls as well as John Burton Jr., who became our cameraman. To back up a little bit, I had been able to negotiate a deal with Warner Bros. management to take over the cartoon studio because obviously they had nothing to do with it, it was empty, and I was able to negotiate a very favorable lease on the studio, including all of the equipment and everything. That's where DePatie-Freleng was originally housed, in the existing Warner Bros. Animation Division building.
And the new studio would eventually make new Looney Tunes.
It's quite ironic. Friz and I had been in business for probably a little over a year, and we had already started with the Pink Panther. I got a call from the Warner management saying that because of the needs of television that they wanted more shows and we did produce for about 26 to 30 six-minute shorts with Daffy, Road Runner, some Bugs, Tweety. We did do some work for them initially.
Why Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales, mostly?
I don't know that it was mostly but Warner Bros., they were of course catering ABC network and I suppose that it was the ABC Network Programming people that really specified what characters they wanted in these new cartoons.
And some of the Road Runners were contracted out to Format Films.
There was a gentleman by the name of Herb Klynn who had been a director at one time or another at Warner Bros and Herb had this company called Format. We were, of course, very very busy at that time with the Pink Panther production and we really didn't have the personnel to do all of the Warner work in-house. Yes, some of it was indeed farmed out to Format Films under the direction of Herb Klynn.
Interview © Charles Brubaker
Philbert, Looney Tunes characters © Warner Bros.
Charlie the Tuna © StarKist Co.
Continue to Part 2
Monday, August 31, 2009
Exit interview with C.H. Greenblatt
Carl Greenblatt (37) has a dirty secret: he's the creator of a hit cartoon Chowder, which currently has new episodes airing at Cartoon Network on Thursday, 7:30 8:00 pm E/P. CN has decided to pull the plug on the show after only 2 years, with the final episode scheduled to air at the end of the year.
Mr. Greenblatt agreed for an exit interview, regarding the show and what's coming up.
What was the process of the making of an episode, from story to final editing?
It takes about nine months to create an 11-minute episode. Each week we’d start a new episode, and they’d all be overlapping like a big assembly line, with some coming in as others were going out.
Chowder © Cartoon Network
Mr. Greenblatt agreed for an exit interview, regarding the show and what's coming up.
What was the process of the making of an episode, from story to final editing?
It takes about nine months to create an 11-minute episode. Each week we’d start a new episode, and they’d all be overlapping like a big assembly line, with some coming in as others were going out.
We start with the outline. Either one of the writers will come to me with an idea or we’ll brainstorm one in the writers’ room. The outline is under two pages long and covers the main beats and motivations of the story. Then once the network approves it, we hand it off to the storyboard artist. Here is where the real meat of the episode is written: all the dialogue, jokes, and details. In fact, the beats would often change as the story was worked out. The storyboard artist gets six weeks to finish the board. Usually about halfway in, they would pitch it to me and Bill Reiss (the creative director) so we could make sure the story was clear.
Once the board is turned in, Bill would take a few days to add any jokes or tweaks needed. Then I would take a pass to do the same, sometimes reworking a scene if needed. Then the network made their notes. Once all the revisions were finished, we’d record the episode. With the voice track we’d build an animatic of the storyboard, like a slideshow, to be used for timing. Usually the episodes were a bit long, so we’d sadly have to cut a lot.
Then it entered the design and timing process. The designers drew and colored all the new characters and costumes and all the new backgrounds. The directors timed out all the action. Then everything was shipped to China for about three months.
We’d get the footage back as digital files and post-production would begin. First we do retakes, fixing animation that came back incorrectly or need tweaking. A lot of our retakes happen because we have to make the image fit both 4:3 and 16:9 fielding. So everything has to fit in 4:3, which means there’s lots of unused space on the right and left of the screen in 16:9. Once we have all the retakes, we being editing. We ship the episode at up to 12:30 in length, but have to cut it down to 11 minutes for airing. After it’s cut, I sit with the composers and sound effects editor to decide where and what kind of music cues and effects we should use. Two weeks later we mix all the sound. Then we do a final pass to make sure all the final visuals are correct before we deliver it to the network.
When Chowder got picked up for second season, did you make any changes, either in the show or behind the scenes?
The changes happened naturally. When you draw the characters hundreds of times, they start to fall into a simpler design and the proportions sort of lock into shape. So I made some model tweaks based off that.
The hardest part about starting a new show is getting the writing to sync up with your vision of it. So first season I spent a lot of time re-working scenes to make them more “Chowdery.” By second season, everyone had a better sense of what the show would be, so I eased off control, giving more creative freedom to the board artists.
Were there any episodes that required more work than usual?
Both Flibber Flabber Diet and Elemelons were tough. Pretty much any story with Truffles was hard at first. She can be so abrasive that we had to be a little more sensitive about finding her softer side. Eventually we realized that a little Truffles goes a long way and we decided she’d be like Oscar the Grouch, mostly hang out in her room and only showing up for a little at a time.
Truffles
Is it hard coming up with stories related to cooking?
We often have a ton of interesting food ideas, but figuring out what the emotional drive attached to that story is the challenge. Each story usually involves food in some way, but they aren’t all about cooking. For instance, Chowder’s Girlfriend has them at the farmer’s market, we see the grabbles, and he bakes a cake at the end, but the story is Chowder dealing with Panini’s affection.
The funny part is when I first pitched the show, the network was afraid that every episode would be about cooking a different recipe each week. I had to convince them that is was a show about people who cook, not cooking itself. Sort of like how ER is about the people who work in a hospital, not the ins and outs of being a doctor. The pilot was The Froggy Apple Crumple Thumpkin. After that, I wrote Mahjongg Nite. It involves Chowder’s quest for mevilled eggs but it’s about him not being allowed in the kitchen. Then I wrote The Heavy Sleeper to show more of the city. These were all done before the show was even greenlit.
You wrote that Panini (then known as Borlotti) and Endive went through major changes during development. Did any other characters go through similar changes?
They didn’t change so much during as after. In development, they were just ideas. Once we started writing them, they became who they are now. As far as development goes, I was insanely lucky. Nothing major changed from the day I pitched it through series. The show ended up exactly as I had wanted. Any changes that happened occurred naturally, from bringing the characters to life and letting them grow.
You also wrote that the finale will have Chowder as an adult with his own apprentice. What will it be about (that you can tell us, at least)?
The title of it is “Chowder Grows Up,” so that should give you a pretty good idea. I had always wanted to do a Dragonball Z, where the series jumps a few years ahead but keeps on going as a normal series. So knowing we were finishing up, I figured it’d be nice to end there. It was really important to me that the fans get to see Chowder achieve his goal.
The story focuses on Chowder’s refusal to let go of his role as Mung’s apprentice. By not becoming the chef he was meant to be, his future negatively impacts the lives of everyone he cares about, like in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Ultimately he has to decide if he’s ready to take up that mantle. His new apprentice, Scraps, is introduced in the story, but the focus is still very much on Chowder. I would liked to have done some more stories with the two of them. They have a good chemistry.
Did your writers take turn writing those puppet sequences that appear in the closing credits?
Yeah, each season different writers wrote the puppet skits. I think we learned a lot as we went on; mainly that 30 seconds is hardly any time and the idea must stay very, very simple.
I'd figure I'd ask. Was the scene of Chowder moon walking in "Paint the Town" a last minute addition as a tribute or was it just good (bad?) timing?
It was done way in advance. Not only are we writing these much earlier than you’re seeing them, we have been delivering the final episodes to the network months before they air. So the timing was just a coincidence.
Are you optimistic about the future of creator-driven cartoons (or cartoons in general)?
I actually think that creator driven-cartoons have a great future ahead of them. And luckily, most executives at other networks I’ve talked to genuinely believe that the best shows come from that process. There’s a lot of good opportunity out there now, and I think we’ll see some good stuff coming out in the next few years.
What's your favorite moment in the show?
I’m going to cop out on this one and say there’s at least something in every episode that I love. Some of the best surprises for me are when I first see the stop motion footage. I love seeing those.
From what I can gather you're a big anime fan. Were there any anime influences that you deliberately included in the show?
Akira Toriyama is a big, big influence. I love his work, especially the early Dragonballs when Goku was small and cute. And one of our character designers, Serapio Calm, is also a Toriyama nut. If you look at his blog, you can see how much his designs are influenced by him.
One of Carl's influences.
Gankutsuo was another influence. I had the pattern-fill idea before I saw it but seeing it in motion solidified the fact that I could pull it off. I used it as reference to show the network and the overseas animation studio how it would look.
Anything about "Chowder" that nobody knows about?
Chowder’s a robot. Oh wait, we already revealed that. But this is actually true. In one of the conversations I had with the new regime at CN, they told me that while Chowder may be my baby, they technically paid for the parts that made it. So in effect, it’s a cyborg baby. This exact phrase was said to me. Now I know this is technically true, it’s their show, but when this person says this to justify pointless notes that go against everything you’ve been doing on a show for the previous year, its not the kind of thing that warms your heart. And it’s not the kind of thing that was ever said at CN before.
I don’t know if most people know that we did a different oven opening for almost every single half hour. There are a few in second that are repeats, but the rest are unique. The network doesn’t always run them because of the way they break up the shows.
Now that Chowder is finished, what's in store from you?
There are new ideas I’m working on that I’m very excited about. Some are very different from anything I’ve done before, and I like those kinds of challenges. So right now I’m just about to start the pitching process to other networks, and hopefully someone will let me make a new pilot.
My time at CN is definitely over for now. I’ll only be there until the end of the year when I deliver the last Chowder episode. After that I’ll be joining my friends over at Disney for a while.
So what can we expect from the remaining episodes yet to air?
I think we hit a really nice stride at the end of the second season into the third season. Hopefully the fans will enjoy the end of the run. We’ve got stories about: Shnitzel’s mysterious past, a new girl makes Panini jealous, they drive an explosive delivery around the world, Chowder becomes a musical star, Mung’s tongue gets ruined, a demonic turkey possess Chowder, Shnitzel falls in love, Endive kills Mung, the kids go scouting, everyone switches bodies, and Gazpacho gets his own episode.
Who would win in a fight between Truffles and Gazpacho's mother?
Gazpacho’s mother for sure. Truffles would fight dirty, but Gazpacho’s mom is huge and mean and would ultimately sit on her.
Any final comments?
Chowder really is a love letter to the cartoons I grew up on, and I’m glad the response has been so overwhelmingly positive. We still have many more to air so I hope everyone enjoys watching the end of the run as much as we enjoyed making it.
Chowder © Cartoon Network
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