JS: What else was Frederator doing at time?

FS: We made two animated features for Nickelodeon when they thought they were going to launch a series of original television movies called NickFlicks. One was The Electric Piper, which was a contemporary pied piper story written by Bill Burnett. My log line for it was the piper is Jimi Hendrix.

Fairly OddParents began as an Oh Yeah! short. Courtesy of Nickelodeon.

The second one was directed by John Eng, who is now directing the third Rugrats movie. We took the title Around the World in 80 Days and wrote a new story to it. It wound up being called Globe Hunters, and by the way I think it was the most beautiful animated made for TV movie I’ve ever seen. It’s stunning. Aside from being a good director, John Eng is one of the most amazing stylists you’ve ever seen.

In 1999 and 2000 we greenlit the Fairly OddParents and ChalkZone series. Right around that time I decided to leave L.A. My wife and I had two small children that we wanted to raise in New York. Nickelodeon was gracious enough to allow me to remote control my role in these series.

In addition to being a producer at Nickelodeon, I was also consulting with MTV and VH1, which are all owned by the same parent company, MTV Networks. This was during the online explosion, and at the start of 1999 MTV Networks asked if I’d run their online business for a while. Frederator was still going strong, so I took a step back and became an employee of MTV for a year running their online business. I was wearing two hats.

Luckily, I hire very high-level executors, or in this case creator-executors like Butch, Larry or Bill. At the point we go to series they don’t really need me — or at least we hope they don’t really need me. So it worked out very well that they produced their series and only occasionally do I have to be involved.

In the middle of this the online thing blew up, which is just as well, and I went back fulltime to Frederator.

My Life as a Teenage Robot also grew out of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Courtesy of Nickelodeon.

JS: Any interesting online war stories?

FS: None that I’m going to tell. [Laughs] The most interesting thing for me was that I went from being a head in the sand traditional media guy, to saying there really is a new world, and the world has changed forever with the advent of this interactivity.

In fact, when I went back to Frederator in New York I dragged in a couple of partners, one of whom was Emil Rensing, a top online guy out of AOL who was all of 25 years old. We started developing online businesses and consulting arrangements. We helped Primedia build their team Internet business, we continue to consult with Avon Products, with the Viacom network TNN, so we have a thriving little online operation.