JS: Does Hanna-Barbera still make cartoons?

FS: No. It morphed into what is now the Cartoon Network Studios. Some of the original Hanna-Barbera team continues to exist at Warner Bros. doing classic character things, primarily Scooby-Doo movies. What I’ll call the new classic team — the post-Dexter, Cow and Chicken, and all those things are at the Cartoon Network Studios, but with a lot of veterans there.

One of the key directors on all the Cartoon Network stuff is a guy who had already been there 20 years when I got there, a guy named Robert Alvarez, a fantastic director. So it isn’t all like a new crew, but primarily a new crew. The name Hanna-Barbera is basically relegated to exploitation of the classic characters – which is a shame, but that’s life.

JS: That was basically the whole first period of post-theatrical animation.

FS: There could’ve been more, but that was Hanna's and Barbera’s fault, which we can get into as a side issue.

JS: Which really set back the development of American animation.

FS: You could also make the argument it saved American animation. I get the whole thing. A lot of people think that the entire output of the Hanna-Barbera studio was shit. What happened was that the dialog on cartoons was not controlled by Hanna-Barbera. It was controlled by theatrical people: the Disneys, the Warner Bros. What people said was the Hanna-Barbera stuff was simple, limited animation — you saw characters running past the same tree over and over — it was garbage.

My point is that Hanna and Barbera were not entrepreneurs — they were animation people. They started the studio out of desperation to work, unlike Walt Disney who wanted to start a business. At MGM, when somebody said lousy things about Tom and Jerry, the studio publicity person answered it. They didn’t control the dialog — they didn’t speak up themselves. And over the years at Hanna-Barbera, when people said shitty things, they just seethed on their own, but they let people say shitty things.

JS: Do you think there was a bit of a guilt complex going on there?

FS: No — not at all. They weren’t guilty at all. Zero. You ask Bill Hanna the day he died. At one point he made a bargain-basement pilot for NBC where you could see the animator’s hands visibly moving the drawings.

JS: Was that a ‘fuck you’ to NBC?

FS: No. Bill Hanna’s mission in life was how to make it cheaper — that was it. Remember, they started the studio when they were 48 years old. Their mission in life was to make a living. They have no guilt at all — and by the way, I don’t think they have any reason to have any guilt.

The fact that they did a lot of stupid things was because they weren’t business guys. They weren’t driven to build a business on a legacy like Walt Disney was — they just wanted to work. They were working guys who happened to run a place — who by the way happened between the two of them to be brilliantly talented — and it worked. They were unbelievably competitive guys.

JS: Between each other or versus the industry?

FS: Everything. With each other, with everyone — they just wanted to get across the finish line. So you could say that they started the decline.

JS: Well it was when they started to self-plagiarize —

FS: They were plagiarists from the beginning. The Flintstones was The Honeymooners in stone-age drag. But when they started Hanna-Barbera, they and every one of their friends in '56 was out of work. So how can you say they were the beginning of the decline? They were the saviors. They figured out how to do it and keep it going. The fact that American animation had hit a peak in the late '40s early '50s — all that meant was eventually it was going to come down.