JS: And the quality of what they were producing —

FS: The quality issues I always find interesting and debatable. My first interview experience at Hanna-Barbera was very enlightening. Film Threat had started a cartoon magazine. A 25-year old kid comes in and I’m scared to death; I don’t know anything about the cartoon business at that point — nothing. I had a great interest psychically in cartoons but I hadn’t watched them seriously since I was12.

The kid comes in and his first question is ‘Why don’t they make cartoons the way they used to?’ I do have a rap for that and I talked about The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Huckleberry Hound, bababa... He looks at me finally and says ‘I mean the stuff they made in the '80s — why don’t they make good stuff like that any more.’ I realized the issue of cartoon quality is really all in the eye of the beholder. In general, especially for a 25-year old kid, whatever you grew up with was the best stuff.

A lot of people dismiss The Smurfs as a complete piece of junk. I can’t dismiss The Smurfs — people love it. For my age, the beginning of hating cartoons was Scooby-Doo. I couldn’t stand Scooby-Doo, but what I can’t dismiss is its ability to communicate with people as of even today. I have two young kids, five and seven, and they’re totally in love with Scooby-Doo, they think it’s the greatest.

It wasn’t the quality per se of what had happened at Hanna-Barbera, it was the fact that they clearly had lost touch with communicating with human beings and making things that people fell in love with. They didn’t make hits. They had no idea what people wanted anymore.

Seibert learned a lot from John Kricfalusi. Courtesy of Spumco.

JS: Who was hot at that point?

FS: Nickelodeon was new kid on block at that point; they had Rugrats, Doug and Ren & Stimpy.

JS: All three of which had very distinctive looks to them.

FS: Look aside, they were all popular. On Saturday morning FOX was really the winner at that moment. Actually, a Hanna-Barbera show, Tom and Jerry Kids was one of their hits. We had just come out of the Pee-wee Herman phase, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was big, so there was a lot of stuff out there.

JS: But Hanna-Barbera wasn’t involved anymore.

FS: Not at all. They had stuff on the air, but in general, it was a sad state of affairs. They were in piss-poor shape, and Ted [Turner] was always a minute away from closing the place; he bought it for the library.

JS: And you came in swinging the ax?

FS: I guess according to some people. I didn’t really, over the first year or two, let go of lot of people. It was really a painful time for me. In my television career I had never been where there were any people before me. I had always been the first guy in the room building organizations, so I never had to turn one around before. The idea that I had to come into this place of 300, 400 people and reduce the overhead significantly to the point where the place could breathe was really hard. At that point, many of those people had been there for years and were of a certain age. That was unbelievable pain, it was really hard; but it was one of the things it had to be done.

JS: 2 Stupid Dogs came along at this point. [Note: as did SWAT Kats, a show we did not get to explore.]

FS: Actually what happened was I did what I always do. I told people around me, ‘I’m not really good at being a cog in the machine. If the way this place to going to be a machine, a widget producer, they put the wrong guy in the job.’

I told the development people ‘there are two things I’m really interested in seeing personally while you’re doing whatever work you do — because I have no idea what a development department does. But I’m interested in people you think are fantastic. And in this case I’m very interested specifically in animators you think are fantastic with ideas, not writers’ — I had a very specific lack of interest in writers — ‘and I’m obviously interested in properties you’re really thrilled about that you don’t necessarily feel fits the system, whatever the system is.’

One of the first things in was a guy named Donovan Cook with a thing called 2 Stupid Dogs. Depending on how you look at it — either very intelligently or unbelievably stupidly — I greenlit the series on half a storyboard and Donovan’s presence in the room.

It was an unbelievably unsuccessful show.