Even though Seibert personally disliked Scooby-Doo, he couldn't deny its enduring appeal. © Warner Bros. All rights reserved.

Then I went and became the president of Hanna-Barbera when we closed Fred/Alan. That started me in animation.

JS: How did you come by that job?

FS: While I had Fred/Alan, the then marketing head of Hanna-Barbera approached us about doing some work for some new primetime series they were developing. I had no interest in talking with him about his new series. I had learned that doing advertising for television shows was a lousy business, so I really had no interest in that.

However, two of my three favorite cartoon characters of all time were Hanna-Barbera characters: Huckleberry Hound and The Flintstones.

JS: Who’s number three?

FS: Bugs Bunny. Anyway, I spent the whole meeting quizzing him about the business behind the classic Hanna-Barbera characters — which then was a complete mess. The company was owned at the time by Great American Television and it was a total gang-bang: one person controlled distribution rights, another controlled the characters and the studio had nothing to do with the library — and the guy who ran the studio clearly hated the library.

I walked away with this little blueprint in my head, and I marched right into my clients at Nickelodeon. I told them ‘there is an opportunity we can drive a train through.’ I sketched out a little scenario where I believed Nickelodeon could get Hanna-Barbera library properties for zero money instead of millions of dollars — and participate in a merchandising upside if we did things right. The Nickelodeon people told me ‘we can’t do that.’

I said, "No, no really," and I showed them how to do it. Reluctantly or skeptically they went to negotiate. They said ‘we’ll never get it for nothing’ and I said, ‘well you go in asking for nothing, you’ll get it for half of nothing.’ So they went in using my script and they got seven properties — The Jetsons, Yogi, a bunch of things — for half, and they saved $7 million.

2 Stupid Dogs, the first show Seibert greenlit at Hanna-Barbera was unsuccessful. TM & © 2001 Cartoon Network. An AOL Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

One night I was having dinner with this guy from Turner Broadcasting and he said "What’s that watch?" We were in The Four Seasons where everyone is dressed fancy, and I’m wearing a Hanna-Barbera wristwatch with Fred Flintstone and Scooby and Yogi and Huckleberry Hound on the dial. I told him about the deal I had helped Nickelodeon put together. He said "I didn’t know you knew how to do that," and I said, "Well, now you know."

Fast-forward 18 months later: Turner buys Hanna-Barbera and puts the guy I had dinner with — Scott Sassa — in charge of the studio. Up to that point Scott had had only one conversation with any human being about Hanna-Barbera, and that was with me. He called me one morning and said, "Hey why don’t you come out to L.A. and run Hanna-Barbera for us?’ I looked at my watch — I was wearing the Hanna-Barbera watch again. It was 10:30 and I said "Sure, how about three months from now?" So Alan and I closed our company and that was that.

JS: What was Hanna-Barbera like at the time?

FS: A disaster. At the time I got there, in 1992, they no longer blanketed Saturday morning, and they hadn’t had a hit since The Smurfs in 1983.