Cars Toons came about when John Lasseter had a group of Pixar story guys come up with story ideas for the Cars characters. All images © Disney/Pixar.

This week marks the premiere of Disney•Pixar's Cars Toons, a new animated short series on Toon Disney, directed by John Lasseter (Cars), chief creative officer of the Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. The first trio of shorts, dubbed "Mater's Tall Tales," focuses on lovable tow truck Mater and his hero fantasies as a firefighter, daredevil and matador in, respectively, Rescue Squad Mater (aired on Monday), Mater the Greater (aired on Tuesday) and El Materdor (airs tonight at 6:57 p.m.). Disney Channel will present all three shorts throughout the day on Nov. 1. ABC Family will present the shorts beginning Dec. 23, during the network's annual "25 Days of Christmas" slot.

AWN went under the hood of Cars Toons, so to speak, with co-directors Victor Navone (animator on Cars, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.) and Rob Gibbs (story artist on Cars, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 2).

Bill Desowitz: So how did Cars Toons come about?

Rob Gibbs: I started on it last summer with a small group of story guys and basically the marching orders from John Lasseter were to come up with some ideas for Cars characters. And out of that one of our animators, Bobby Podesta, pitched the idea of "Mater's Tall Tales," where Mater tells a story of his past. And from the ideas that we had, we incorporated some of those, like the Rescue Squad one -- we had the idea to change Mater to the rescue truck instead of Red. And it grew from there. We had six months for development and we narrowed it down to the three that we produced.

Victor Navone: And we have another dozen or so other ideas. But we thought these were the strongest.

BD: How did the development process work?

RG: We have a Cars collective group here that involves some of the guys that worked on the movie. And we involved them early on and pitched them on direction.

BD: Who are some of the collective?

RG: Early on, besides John Lasseter, [writer] Dan Scanlon, who directed the Mater and the Ghostlight short, [and writer] Steve Purcell pitched in here and there. And then us.

VN: We both have a lot of experience with those characters.

RG: And early this year, when it became clear that this was going to happen, Kori Rae came aboard as producer and put us in the co-directing roles.

Victor Navone (l) and Rob Gibbs.

BD: Let's talk about Lasseter's role.

VN: He's been really great as a mentor for us and definitely comes in and has strong opinions with his notes.

BD: Can you think of a specific contribution?

RG: Early on, when we decided to make these "Mater's Tall Tales," John came in and said, "I want to keep McQueen and Mater together. Let's involve McQueen in the story." So we came up with the old tag line where we always cut back and McQueen says, "Mater, that didn't happen!" And Mater says, "Oh yeah, you were there too." And so that was one of the key structural things.

VN: And that always upped the ante to find a funny way to hurt McQueen or have something happen to him.

BD: Let's talk more about the production.

VN: The production time for all three was about eight or nine months. So probably about a year from first drawing to final render frame to make all three of these. Not as much time as we would've liked, but it turned out pretty good and I'm blessed.

RG: About six months of that was really trying to find out what ideas we were going to do and figuring out the format. And so it wasn't really until early this year around February that we really got started.