JS: Like getting the library back?

FS: That was the least of it. How they paid for things, how they accounted for things, what employees were necessary and what weren’t, characters that had been licensed out in perpetuity to sweetheart companies, we had union issues…there was an amazing amount of complexity to issues that had nothing to do with cartoons. It was a nightmare.

I said to friends at the time ‘it’s like boulders from here to the horizon, and if you lift every boulder there’s a snake underneath.’

Cow & Chicken was a success for the newly named Cartoon Network. Courtesy of Cartoon Network.

JS: And all the boulders needed to be moved.

FS: [in a whisper]: Oh God, yeah.

JS: It must’ve been painful to focus energy your energy on that as opposed to the creative.

FS: It was, but luckily I had a number-two man, Jed Simmons, who spent an enormous amount of selfless hours fixing it, so it worked out really nicely.

So, the next big thing was What A Cartoon! I had been a consultant to Nickelodeon for many years before going to Hanna-Barbera. In 1989, the Nickelodeon programming and business team came to me and said ‘we really need to get into the [original production] cartoon business —how do we do it?’

I had never really done anything in cartoons. I was really just a neophyte, an interested media person, but I knew about the way Looney Tunes, theatrical cartoons had been made. I said, ‘it seems to me that what they did was make a six-minute cartoon, run it before a movie and, if people liked it, they made another one [featuring the same character]. If they didn’t like it they stopped making it.

‘Why don’t we do a system like that, where we make these little containable things? Everything I know about the [TV] cartoon business is they go right to 13 episodes on everything, and they don’t believe they can pilot.’

I suggested a system that I thought made some kind of sense, but I had no idea how to execute it, because I knew nothing about cartoons. As usual when you’re a consultant, they took pieces of my idea and threw out the rest. The piece that they took, that turned out to be valuable for a couple of years at Nickelodeon, was that they made pilots, which was radically different from the way that Hollywood made cartoons for kids. And that’s when you got Ren and Stimpy.

So when I got to Hanna-Barbera, I knew they hadn’t done the system the way I wanted to do it because I didn’t think pilots were the thing. To me, pilots are things that you’ll never show anybody and they’re messy, they’re all over the place, they’re not disciplined. Every one Nickelodeon did was a different length.

I thought why don’t you make things with some discipline, and then you can actually show it and make a dollar from it? Why make something you’re just going to throw into the soup? Because they made a lot of pilots at Nickelodeon back then, and you’ve never heard of the other ones because they were unairable.

My model for everything I’ve done successfully in the media business, no matter what medium I’ve been in, whether I was a record producer or in radio was Berry Gordy’s Motown. I loved the idea that they were all in a house and the recording studio was here, and the writing studios were here and the promotion department was here, and quality control — Berry Gordy’s office — was up here, and when they needed an extra singer they went to the receptionist and said, ‘do you sing?’ — I love that.

When I started doing promotion for MTV, I’d never done television promotion, so I built a system like Motown. On Monday you wrote, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays you did audio, on Thursdays and Fridays you did video, and then next week you started again. That’s how we got spots out.

I always loved the idea of a factory system where the goal of the factory was unique creative work; where you could discipline the execution process so that it didn’t get out of control. I always thought you could get more good, interesting work out of that kind of creative system. My love of going to Hanna-Barbera was I always had the sense they had that system in the old days — and they had lost sight of it.

So I arrive, knowing I want to make these short cartoons like Looney Tunes used to be done. I want to try lots and lots of talent even before I walked through the door because I knew Hanna-Barbera was not a place that talented people felt they belonged. Hanna-Barbera was a place for three kinds of people: people getting their first job, people on their last job or filling in between jobs, and people who really had a tough time getting jobs elsewhere.