Butch Hartman created both Johnny Bravo and Fairly OddParents. On the right Fairly OddParents' new full-length movie, Abra-Catastrophe. Bravo courtesy of Cartoon Network. OddParents courtesy of Nickelodeon.

JS: Who was on it?

FS: David Feiss, Eddie Fitzgerald, a guy named Tom Minton and four or five other guys whose names are escaping me. The only ones I wound up making deals with were Dave and Eddie, and Dave went the distance with Cow and Chicken, which was fantastic.

So I basically started with John, but there were 400 employees at Hanna-Barbera and I started there as well. A lot of the key talent that has gone far with me were people who were already at Hanna-Barbera when I got there.

I hired Larry Huber to be my supervising producer on What A Cartoon! He had supervised Donovan Cook on 2 Stupid Dogs; I said ‘okay, you did such a great job with Donovan — now you’ve got 48 of them to supervise.’ He felt like, ‘is this a promotion?’

I told the Hanna-Barbera staff ‘I know the business you’ve been in has been one where you do management and network bidding. They tell you what to do and you do it. I know you got into this business because you feel like you’re talented and you have something to say. I’m here to make what you want to make.’

At that point in the industry, the business was such that the cartoonists believed that if they did have an idea the studio or network would take it from them and they would get nothing.

JS: Work for hire.

FS: Right. I made a deal with them saying ‘if we do your thing you will get something.’ They had all been complaining to me the first couple of years I’d been there about this stuff.

I prepared for a stampede at the door. No one showed up.

JS: Was everyone there caught in a rut?

FS: I think there was a combination of cynicism, pessimism, disinterest and purely the fact that most people want to do what they’re told and complain about it rather than take the bull by the horns and do something for themselves.

A couple of guys that I actually went after who had expressed interest before said ‘what will you pay me to make a storyboard?’ ‘Well, I’m not going to pay, this is your thing and I’ll be interested in seeing what you have.’ ‘But I’m a professional — I get paid to make a storyboard.’ I said, ‘yeah when you’re doing my work you do that, but when you’re doing your work…’ They completely missed the mark.

After beating the bushes for weeks, one of the kids shows up at the door. At the time he was probably about 25. Larry Huber calls them ‘the fists.’ They were doing props or storyboards or character designs and they do what they’re told — they’re a fist.

One of the fists turns up at the door and said ‘I have an idea, can I pitch you my board with one of my other partners here?’ He pitched it to me — and it wasn’t that good. But because he showed up first, he got a short. It turned out to be the worst short. But before it was even done, he came back again with another one, and it was a lot less worse — in terms of the pitch. He was enthusiastic and he had really learned things from the first, and I said let’s do it — and it turned out to be the second worst short. He ended up doing I think five What A Cartoon! shorts.