JS: I enjoyed it; it had a sly sense of humor and was a real change of pace from most of what was on at the time.

FS: You’re one of the few.

JS: What about the back-up feature, Super Secret Secret Squirrel? I thought that was a brilliant revival.

FS: I told Donovan we’ll make 26 Stupid Dog shorts, but I’d really like to stick to the old Hanna-Barbera formula of a half-hour with three shorts, and I’d like the middle to be something else. ‘Why don’t we see if there’s a great classic character we can do something with,’ and he came in with the squirrel.

For my future, a very interesting thing happened. I had assigned one of the older veterans at the studio to help Donovan because I knew it was a snakepit, and I didn’t know enough to re-invent the system at that point. Donovan needed a guide to the system. Beyond that, he was not at all capable of handling a series. An animated series is a complex machine. From the outside it doesn’t look complex; then you add on the complications of the Hanna-Barbera machine — and the kid was doomed.

So I gave him an older guy, someone who was 45 and had been in the business since he was 20. He was actually someone else’s recommendation, but I had the sense he could work with young folk without depressing them. We assigned this guy, Larry Huber, to be his supervisor, his handler.

Seibert talked to Bill Hanna (above) and Joe Barbera, not about business, but about cartoons.

It quickly became obvious Donovan was not going to let Larry in on 2 Stupid Dogs too well, and Donovan was going to be too busy to do anything other than set up Super Secret Secret Squirrel. Once Donovan set the stage — he had his people redesign the characters and they made a couple of key creative decisions — after that Larry took it and ran it. Larry showed himself to be something other than what I thought he was at the time, which was a capable line producer. I found out that one, he was an awesome spotter of talent. Two, he was willing to give that talent room to be what they had not been before; he was able to see an artist or director and say ‘maybe they’d be good at story.’ And third, I found out he was a magical film story guy, which is not what those line producer types were known as — he was an unbelievable story guy.

Donovan turned out to be significantly less interesting to me than I thought he was at the time, but he also was fantastic at a couple of things. He was an awesome spotter of talent as well. He brought in a new level of young talent into the system. Because I allowed him something the studio had never allowed before — letting young people be in charge of their own destiny — the crew that he bought in turned out to be incredibly important to my future. When Donovan was no longer with studio, at least a couple of dozen key people from the crew turned out to be the nucleus of the new world order for us.

JS: That led to What A Cartoon!?

FS: Not directly. I was able to populate some of What A Cartoon! from some of 2 Stupid Dogs’ crew.

JS: Where is Donovan now?

FS: Donovan fell eventually into the bowels of the Disney system. He did one show at Disney that fit the Donovan thing, Nightmare Ned, and then went onto to do a lot of TV movie work for them; he directed that Peter Pan sequel Return to Neverland.

JS: So you’re at Hanna-Barbera now, you’ve turned this awesome…

FS: I hadn’t done anything at that point. Not near. Ever hear the phrase ‘turning a battleship around in a bathtub'? Well I was in the bathtub with the battleship and we were still moving forward. 2 Stupid Dogs as far as all those people were concerned was a complete aberration.

JS: The old-timers?

FS: Even the new-timers, everyone. I hadn’t even made a dent into the system at that point. It was just like ‘oh, here’s another new guy in charge of wasting our money.’ That was really all that had happened there.

The next big step was What A Cartoon! A lot of business stuff was going on in the meantime. We had to carve through lot of very complicated things to get Hanna-Barbera on a footing that would allow us to do anything.