JS: Then if anybody’s responsible for bringing it up from that nadir, you would have to take credit —

FS: I would be very thrilled and flattered to take a piece of that.

JS: You’re entitled to a large piece.

FS: Thank you very much. But there were a lot of other things going on at the same time — the time was right. The reality for me is that the world was in a mood to listen to what I had to say. I said the exact same thing to Nickelodeon a few years earlier, but they didn’t pay much attention. They went their own way and figured out a way to make it great. I was in the right place at the right time.

JS: But you knew what to do there.

FS: I knew how to guess there. I guessed, like Berry Gordy guessed.

JS: Your guesses were right more often than not.

FS: I had a couple of really big wrong ones.

JS: 2 Stupid Dogs and SWAT Kats?

FS: No, those were minor.

JS: Tell me the worst.

The New Jonny Quest almost killed the deal between Turner and Time-Warner. Courtesy of Cartoon Network.

FS: The New Jonny Quest — a disaster. If any human being could have made more bad judgements than me on JONNY QUEST, I don’t know who could’ve. That thing almost scuttled the Turner merger with Time-Warner, it was so bad.

One after the other, after the other, I made bad judgements. I can’t tell you — I won’t tell you — how big a financial disaster that thing was. Leave out the fact that the show was just mediocre. I’m telling you, behind the scenes it was a much larger mess than you could ever imagine — frankly, than I ever could imagine. I was getting an hour of sleep a night for like a year. Suffice it to say it was a disaster, and I’m willing to claim full responsibility for the disaster.

Part 2 continues Joe Strike’s interview with Fred Seibert.

Joe Strike is a New York City television writer/producer with a lifelong interest in animation, and who remembers watching Astroboy when it first aired in the U.S. His work includes numerous promotional campaigns and special events programming for cable outlets including Bravo and the Sci Fi Channel. He interviewed Disney animation director Mark Dindal in the November 2000 Animation World Magazine.