Director G. Brian Reynolds (standing) and animator Daryl Pyle discuss a scene from Handycat.

During the early days of the studio, Brian and Russ created a concept called Mirthworms featuring a community populated by humanized worms. Russ remembers that, “We worked on A Merry Mirthworm Christmas (Perennial’s first half-hour animated production) beginning in 1981. We worked on it in between commercials and it took us a couple of years. About three-quarters of the way through, our third partner and business manager Mike Ruggiero negotiated a contact for us with a distributor out of New York. Mike and the distributor were able to get us into the Showtime network sometime during the summer. The network said they would take the show if we could get it done by October. It only gave us a couple of months to finish the thing and deliver it, but we did.

Also thanks to Mike we were able to get international distribution. We ended up making three Mirthworm specials and we were funding them ourselves. Looking back on it, we really overproduced and over-animated. We could have done twice as much if we had used limited animation and scaled back. But there was always a market for Christmas specials. A company called Anchor Bay Ent. put up money for seasonal holiday specials and they were really keeping us afloat. We kept the domestic and international television rights to most of those things, which is where our profit came from.” Another fact: both Brian and Russ are talented voice artists who provided many of the voices for Perennial’s productions.”

Brian remembers that, “A friend of ours, Greg Shelton was working on a Christmas special and we figured that if he could do it, we could too. This was in the early 1980s and you could still get an unknown home video product on the shelves. That is, up until some of the bigger home video companies like Disney began putting lots of their own stuff out and crowding the other companies off the shelves.” Christmas specials turned out to be a mainstay and Perennial would eventually make nine of them. One special, Jingle Bell Rap (1991), featured a team of anthropomorphic dogs and was considered for a possible series. It still runs seasonally in Canada and Europe.

Alien’s First Christmas (1991), a Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, shows the influence of Hanna-Barbera on Perennial’s character designs at the time. © Perennial Pictures.

Perennial’s pilot for a series called Alien’s Next Door was picked up by Paragon Ent. in Toronto for TELETOON; the series never materialized but it did spin off yet another holiday special, The Alien’s First Christmas (1991). “It was like a Beverly Hillbillies in reverse,” Russ recalled. “An Earth family, the Peoples, moves to the alien planet Zolognia and has to get used to the customs and life of another civilization.” The last storyboard may not yet be written — Brian still likes the concept and confided that “We just might revisit it.” The artwork for the special clearly shows the influence of Hanna-Barbera on Perennial’s character designs at the time.

Still, Brian and Russ had bigger plans. “We were only making things that ran once a year,” Russ recalled. “We really wanted to go to a series, so we came up with Crawford’s Corner. It’s a series of five-minute educational shorts that are now running in overseas outlets like Discovery U.K. and in Israel, to name a couple.” Brian indicated a colorful poster on one wall featuring Crawford, the star of the series. “We made 13 of them but found out that we really needed 26 instead. So, we’re working on them between other projects. We found out that with a series, the first episode of anything is hell — there’s no precedent. You have to fix, change, go back, revise and it gets expensive. Two through 13 is a lot easier!”

Perennial made noise on the domestic front in 1995 when they successfully pitched a short to Cartoon Network’s World Premiere Cartoons and caught the attention of Fred Seibert, then president of Hanna-Barbera. Russ related that, “one of our friends at Disney said, ‘They’re really doing it (soliciting auteurs to make shorts)! Send a board!’ We pitched, and they greenlit it. We made a short we liked called Rat in a Hot Tin Can featuring a main character named O. Ratz. We were able to get Harvey Korman to do the voice of the lead character and Marvin Kaplan did his sidekick, Dave D. Fly.” Perennial’s cartoon had the distinction of being the first short in the World Premiere Cartoon lineup made outside of the Hanna-Barbera studio.

Fred Seibert, now at Frederator/Nickelodeon, originally contacted Perennial about pitching a short for the project now known as Random Cartoons. At the time, Brian and Russ were working on a children’s book in conjunction with Seibert. Brian recalled that the Handycat concept was actually 10 years old and that he and Russ had gone through some 800 designs of the character over time. Anyone following the production blog at the Frederator website (newtoons.frederator.com/handycat) can see the incremental development of Handycat since work began on the short.