Rob Renzetti is a respected veteran of TV animation whose credits include The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Family Guy, Whatever Happened to Robot Jones, and Oh Yeah! Cartoons!. When not coming up with incredibly creative ideas, Rob likes to snuggle up with a large bowl of Clustard and catch a few Buffy reruns.

Rob Renzetti. Photo credit: Chris Polk/Filmmagic.

Dr. Toon: Rob, how early on in your life did you decide on a career in animation, and what helped to influence that?

Rob Renzetti: Well, like most people who end up in the business, I guess my influence was just watching cartoons. I saw a lot of old Popeye cartoons and the little bit of Warner Bros. that was available on those old UHF channels in Chicago. I fell in love with those cartoons and decided that’s what I wanted to do, and I would guess that I decided on a career in animation probably as early as age seven. But by the time I was in high school in the ‘80s, it didn’t look like even Disney was going to be doing any more animation.

Then, when I was halfway through college, Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out and it seemed like there was new hope! Even though I had gone to college for art history, what I decided I really wanted to do was try to get into the animation industry, since it looked like there really might be one. I found out about Cal Arts right about the same time so I applied there and, luckily, I got in.

DT: You moved from Chicago to L.A. in the early 1990s. Wasn’t your first job working with Donovan Cook on 2 Stupid Dogs?

RR: It was my first job in Los Angeles, but I actually went to Spain directly out of Cal Arts. I worked over there as an animator for just a few months on the original run of Batman: The Animated Series. It was being farmed out all over the world, and this small company in Madrid got three or four episodes to do. They needed some extra animators, so a handful of Americans went over there and worked very briefly on it. Then I came back to L.A. and got hired on 2 Stupid Dogs.

Renzetti’s first professional animation job in Los Angeles was on 2 Stupid Dogs. ™ & © 2001 Cartoon Network. An AOL Time Warner Co. All rights reserved.

DT: You have either directed or worked on five different animated series that feature sci-fi and/or robot themes. You must be a serious science fiction fan, is that right?

RR: I am a sci-fan, but not a super-serious one. I’m not as well read as I probably should be. I kind of zeroed in on Isaac Asimov as a kid and devoured just about everything he wrote. Then I read the Hitchhiker’s (Guide to the Galaxy) books somewhere in the middle years, and some of Ursula K. LeGuin as well as a few other random authors.

I read a little Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 (A Space Odyssey), and some other obscure stuff, and I love Star Trek and most other sci-fi shows to a greater or lesser degree. I just wish I was more well-read; at this point I’m kind of overwhelmed by how much there is out there. I’d say science fiction and horror are probably my favorite genres as far as movies and books go.

DT: Nickelodeon’s Oh Yeah! Cartoons! was like an animation laboratory for all sorts of entertaining ideas, many of which you worked on. You were involved with short films like F-Tales, Baxter and Bananas and Hubbykins vs. Sweetiepie. How did that kind of experience influence your later work?

RR: Oh Yeah! was a great place to experiment because the stakes were relatively low in that you’re just doing one short. I did a number of different ideas, and there are some that you’d probably think are more applicable to a series than others. I certainly have my favorites among the ones that I did by myself, but the nice thing was, you could stretch your legs a little bit and do stuff that maybe wasn’t quite as obvious a choice for a “series,” at least to start with. I think I could probably see “series” in all my ideas. There were some that could have been developed more easily than others, but it was a great place to try out new stuff and see what works and what doesn’t. When I came to Oh Yeah!, I had a lot of ideas stored up, so it was a great time for me to spread my creative wings.