JS: He’s going to get a swelled head when he reads this.

FS: He has one already, it’s okay. Larry put together a real creative team, which very rarely do the shorts makers do. Usually the shorts makers do it single-handedly — a one-man show. What Larry did after 30 years in the trenches of running teams is, even on the creation side, he put together a team — which is very smart.

JS: Carlos just walked through the door on his own?

FS: Dan Smith, one of our old development guys from Hanna-Barbera who was then at Disney, met Carlos and realized there was no room for him at Disney. He is a real stylist — not merely a fist — he had a thing. Dan understood we were the only shop in town where people with a thing had a chance.

Seibert and Larry Huber assembled a talented team for ChalkZone. Courtesy of Nickelodeon.

JS: Is Oh Yeah! Cartoons the Frederator version of What A Cartoon!?

FS: Exactly the same. I just brought the ‘system’ across the street. And the first pool of talent for Oh Yeah! came from What A Cartoon! and Hanna-Barbera. Then I put the word out in the community and people started coming in. But then the next place, which is the most obvious, was our own crew.

When we give something to a creator we say, ‘Here are the people that are in our shop right now’ — and we started with five people — ‘here are the five we have, do you want to work with any of them or who do you want to bring in?’

So, one by one, as we signed creators, they started bringing in people. Within that team we already had they saw the opportunity and now the crew started coming in and pitching shorts.

JS: The opposite of your experience at Hanna-Barbera.

FS: Well by that point, Dexter’s, Johnny Bravo and Cow & Chicken were on the air. We now have three hit examples of what could happen. So it was no longer an experiment and like, ‘Who is this guy?’ It was now like, ‘Ohmigod, if I can get into this thing, I could go to the top.’

JS: Where and when did Oh Yeah! Cartoons run?

FS: Nickelodeon scheduled Oh Yeah! on Friday nights in an hour block with another anthology show, Kablaam! Kablaam! was basically what I think of as the indie version of Oh Yeah! Bob Mittenthal, Kablaam!’s producer worked with a lot of independent animators, people outside of the Hollywood mainstream, and had a much more writer-driven approach than I did.

Kablaam! had a different mission, although the mission for both of us was to find hits for Nickelodeon. The two shows complemented one another: Kablaam! gave Nickelodeon the cream of the indie crowd, and we gave them the cream of the commercial filmmaking world, the people who have come to Hollywood to make cartoons, not animation. I’m a cartoon maker, I’m interested in cartoons and I have a distinctive view of them as different from animated films.

JS: What successes came out of Oh Yeah!?

FS: We made 51 shorts, 51 original Oh Yeah!s, plus another 49 or 50 sequels of the best ones. Someone would come in, Larry Huber would come in with ChalkZone, and once we saw the film, we said ‘why don’t we make six more?’ Or a guy named Dave Wasson — who went on to do Time Squad for Cartoon Network — would come in and make The Goose Lady, which was basically like a Fractured Fairy Tale, and we said, ‘Why don’t you make three more?’

So far — and I don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of this process — Fairly OddParents and ChalkZone began as Oh Yeah! shorts. The ChalkZone series launched with the highest debut ratings in Nickelodeon history. My Life as a Teenage Robot was an Oh Yeah! short. We made seven or eight Super Santa shorts. That project has skipped animation for the time being, and is being developed as a live-action feature with its creator Mike Bell.

I think there’s more to come. We’re talking Nickelodeon into taking a second look at a few others, because if that’s four out of 51, you still have 47 to look at closely. We started in January of ‘97 and here we are in March of 2003 and we’ve only gotten four into series. We created more original characters for air in three years than almost everyone else combined in a five-year period. It takes a while to absorb that. We’re not producing any new character shorts at the moment, which I’m fine with.

JS: In and of itself, Oh Yeah! didn’t make as much of a splash as What A Cartoon!

FS: First of all, it was only promoted to Nickelodeon audiences, and we didn’t do a lot of ‘hey look at this’ promotion when we launched it.

JS: Like What A Cartoon!

FS: Well, I ran that studio at the time so I got to control the publicity. Nickelodeon had other things on their mind. When they’re launching a show, they’re watching it for ratings, and an anthology show is always going to do attenuated ratings. It’s historically always the case — we want characters we can watch all the time and fall in love with.