In the mid '80s before I went to Hanna-Barbera, both Disney and Warner Bros. got into the television animation business by raiding the company — and they raided the cream. All the people left at Hanna-Barbera thought they were the cream, but that wasn’t the case. They were talented people, but the top people went elsewhere and they made the Tiny Toons, the Disney Afternoon shows and so forth.

So here I am, I know that no first-level creative person would ever come to Hanna-Barbera, and I knew I needed system to attract them, and where I could try out as many people as possible — and figure out who had the goods and who didn’t.

Oh Yeah! Cartoons! was a collection of brand new shows created for Nickelodeon by Seibert. Courtesy of Nickelodeon.

I had this idea I’d given Nickelodeon that they didn’t execute the way I thought they should’ve. I’d met John Kricfalusi in the meantime, who was very skeptical of Hanna-Barbera, but very envious simultaneously. We became very good friends. He told me lots of stuff — and I listened very carefully, I was a great student.

Then I had a sister company that was starting a cartoon network. Corporate politics being what they are, they didn’t want to do anything with Hanna-Barbera — other than use the library. But they found out they had to, which no one likes. They came to me and they said ‘I suppose we have to do original series with you.’

So being a dope, or acting like a dope I go, ‘what do you need original programming for, you have this great library?’ They said what I knew they would say, but I wanted to know. ‘We’re a new network, and advertisers and cable operators respect original programming, they don’t respect library. If we’re going to get distributors and advertisers we’ve got to do new stuff.’

I actually don’t have many talents, but I’m a good analyst, and I never do anything unless I know why I’m doing it. If I fail, it’s because I didn’t know why I was doing it to begin with. I said, ‘why do you want to do original series?’ Now I knew where I was going with this, but they didn’t. They said ‘because that’s what you do on television.’

I said ‘let’s look at it. If it’s about publicity, when are we going to get publicity on an original series? The day we announce we’re doing one; the week we launch we’ll get some; maybe if we’re on air for years and we’re a phenomenon, we’ll get some more.’

I had just made two series — 2 Stupid Dogs and SWAT Kats — for 10 million bucks, and they failed within a week. So we’re going to do all this stuff to get these two publicity hits, spend all this money and fail, because in showbiz that’s the odds.

I said ‘I have an idea how we can get publicity for 48 weeks — every single week for almost 2 years.’ They said ‘really?’ I said ‘yeah — Let’s make a new show every week — but I can do it for $10 million. ‘How do you do that?’ ‘Let’s make it like Looney Tunes.’

I had had my tutorial from John, I had spent a long time talking to Bill and Joe, not about Hanna-Barbera, but about Tom and Jerry and how they produced cartoons. I talked to Friz Freleng and a bunch of other people — and they taught me how they made those shorts.

So I said ‘we’ll make a short cartoon every week. It’ll be a new character every week, and you’ll run it at your most popular time: primetime Sunday evenings just before a cartoon movie. We’ll do it just like the old days, we’ll run the cartoon just before the movie, and every other week for two years you’ll be able to get some publicity out of it. All of a sudden people will think ‘every other week? They must be doing a lot of stuff!’’

Lo and behold, Cartoon Network bought it. So I called John and asked him ‘who should I know?’ John gave me my first list.