Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory and Courage the Cowardly Dog have all been successful and long-running shows for Cartoon Network. TM & © 2001 Cartoon Network. An AOL Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

JS: You must’ve had faith in this guy.

FS: Well, every time out of the box he improved. Most people when they come back to you the second time they’re exactly the same or they go down. But this guy learned something every time out. By the time he was done his last short was probably in the top 25 — but still not the top.

In my first season doing Oh Yeah! Cartoons [for Nickelodeon] I had one last slot to fill. He had been working on Johnny Bravo at the time and his contract was up. He called and said ‘I’m available, I have another project to show you.’ We looked at it and greenlit it, and that was The Fairly OddParents from Butch Hartman.

So the first place I went into was Hanna-Barbera and then I really started scanning the world. We just started putting our tentacles out, we called Ralph Bakshi out of nowhere and said ‘Ralph, do you want to get back to your roots?’ and he did. He’s a character, but he was a very great character for us, he’s larger than life.

JS: Why shouldn’t people who make cartoon characters —

FS: — be characters, exactly.

At the time, if you think about, there were only a couple of well-known animation people and he was one of them. That was a great feather in our cap that looked to people like it was all beginners, to have a couple of well known veterans like Ralph in the mix.

JS: Didn’t Bill [Hanna] or Joe [Barbera] do one as well?

FS: They each did one for just that reason. In fact, Bill’s was wonderful.

JS: They must’ve enjoyed just getting hands-on and making a short again.

FS: Absolutely. Joe, on the other hand, wanted to know why he couldn’t do all 48.

What A Cartoon! gave us Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog — which by the way gave Hanna-Barbera its first Oscar nomination in the studio’s history — the Cow and Chicken spin-off I.M. Weasel, and we had a compilation of the shorts themselves, the ‘What A Cartoon! Show. So we had seven series, any one of which earned enough money for the company to pay for the whole program.

JS: Basically a research and development program.

FS: Then on top of it I reinvigorated the ‘who comes in the studio’ equation. Now talented people wanted to show up. Some 5,000 people pitched us cartoons from all over the world. We got into business with Ralph Bakshi, with Bruno Bozetto; we got into business with a broad range of people who never would’ve given Hanna-Barbera a passing chance. We worked with people who were 70 years old, who were 20 years old. We turned on its head the perception the people in the community had of us. And by the way, we made almost a billion dollars worth of value for the company.