Of Mice and Magic was really Leonard’s book, and I was his research assistant. I spent a couple of years in the ‘70s working on it and researching animation history, writing for Mindrot, that sort of thing. I derailed my plans to become an animator, and for a full-time job in New York City, I ended up working at United Artists for the next six years. That was a fortuitous thing for a lot of reasons. They had the Warner Bros. library, the pre-1948 Looney Tunes, the MGM cartoons, the Popeye and also the DePatie-Freleng cartoons. I ended up going to the 16mm rental division, and I got to watch pretty much the entire library. That’s where I learned film distribution, and, from that point on I was in the film business.

After meeting Don Bluth (left) and Gary Goldman, Beck became a friend and cheerleader for The Secret of NIMH. Courtesy of Don Bluth’s Toon Talk (right) and © 2000 Twentieth Century Fox.

It was around that time that Don Bluth formed his studio, and United Artists picked up The Secret of NIMH. Our department needed images for Banjo the Woodpile Cat, which we had also picked up. I asked if I could have contact with the Bluth studio, and my bosses were really nice. They said, “Hey, we’re calling up the Bluth studio! Want to talk to somebody there?” So here I am on the phone with Gary Goldman; I told him I was a fan and that I thought what they were doing was great. They invited me out, when I was in L.A., to visit the studio. I did, and wound up becoming good friends with Don, Gary and John Pomeroy while they were working on NIMH. I became a booster and would go to Comic Cons and promote the film for them. UA also released, or rather didn’t release, Rock and Rule around that time, so I got to meet Michael Hirsch and the people at Nelvana. Some of my best relationships started around that period.

Anyway, during the early ‘80s, with Of Mice and Magic published and me writing articles, I felt the path I was taking was historian. When we were working on Of Mice and Magic, Will Friedwald was assisting me. Now, I thought that Of Mice and Magic was going to be like The Great Movie Shorts, except that it would be about cartoons. I figured that after the chapter on Warner Bros. there would be a filmography, not all bunched up at the back like it was, and each film would include a one-line plot synopsis to tell you what that film was about. When Will and I were working on the filmography, we actually went a little nutty and started to add all the synopses we could. Leonard thought it was too much; he didn’t think we could do a filmography. At the time, that stuff, that information just wasn’t out there; it wasn’t compiled.

So, Will and I had done something no one had done before; we compiled these filmographies. Leonard just didn’t think we could do it. It was kind of like a dare! It seemed impossible then, and Leonard thought that even if we could come up with all of them, it would fill up too much of the book. Here, Will and I had a filmography, with all this extra information included. After Of Mice and Magic went to press, Will and I thought, well, let’s use what we’ve got here and take at least one of the studios. Let’s do Warners, since that’s our favorite, and see if we can get it published somewhere. I was happy that people liked The Warner Bros. Cartoons, the original book we put out through Scarecrow Press, but I was never happy with it. In my opinion, it was unpolished and raw.

Beck co-authored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with his former assistant Will Friedwald.

In 1989, we came out with the book I wanted to do, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. It took between 1981 and 1989 to finally get the revised version done. What I didn’t like about the new edition was that it was very dry. Warner Bros did not want us to say anything negative about the cartoons; they just wanted to see a reference book. Since they were giving us permission to use illustrations, and access to their cartoon prints, I felt kind of obligated to go with that. Luckily, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett Friz Freleng — they were all still around in those days, really liked the Scarecrow Press book and went to bat for us with Warner Bros.

(I can only imagine being backed by Jones, Clampett, and Freleng! This must be something like batting ahead of Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds. Could it get better than that?)

In the meantime, I moved to L.A. and got involved with animation distribution with Expanded Ent. While I was there, I was involved with the creation of Animation Magazine, worked on animation festivals, and just became immersed in animation. That’s also when I started to do more books, like I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat and The 50 Greatest Cartoons. I co-created Streamline Pictures in the late 1980s, distributing anime. At Streamline, we did everything; we dubbed animation, distributed the movies, made the posters, did the trailers. We did everything a major studio does, only with a small staff, so I gained a lot of experience in the film business. My partner at Streamline was the infamous Carl Macek. Carl and I would operate Streamline during the day and do freelance work at night. In my case, that meant writing box copy for the collections of MGM/UA VHS cartoon tapes. That job really paid my bills during that time. Carl was also working on a number of projects, one of which was teaming up with my friend John Kricfalusi. That was the beginning of Spumco. Believe it or not, Streamline and Spumco originally shared an office space on Melrose Avenue. While they were literally designing Ren & Stimpy in the same office, I was on the phone trying to convince theaters to play Akira. After Ren & Stimpy got going, Carl and John K broke up their partnership, but I stayed friendly with everybody and used to hang out at their offices. During the Ren & Stimpy period I thought, “If I could only be an animator and do what these guys do!” I’ve always seemed to have friends in the business among the artists and animators. So I rooted for them. I’ve always felt that animators need friends up in the executive suite, people like Linda Simensky and Heather Kenyon who know something about animation. Most executives don’t.

(Heather Kenyon was my original editor at AWN, and I can tell you that Jerry is perfectly right. It would be hard to find an animation executive with more knowledge and passion than Heather. Thanks to her, my experience at AWN was as much an education as a wonderful experience.)