JS: How did you wind up at Universal working on Brer Rabbit?

TS: Tom Ruzicka, the head of Universal Cartoon Studios knew me from Disney Television Animation. Tom was in charge of production in the very first days of the Disney Afternoon. When he left he said, “I want to work with you in the future.” As soon as he heard I was free of Disney he immediately brought me over here for any number of projects. I interviewed for everything from Van Helsing direct-to-video half hours, which John Kafka is producing, Curious George and, finally, Brer Rabbit came up, which obviously fit me.

JS: What’s your specific role on the project?

TS: I’m the producer. I keep watch on the overall tone: I work closely with Byron on the direction. I did the key character designs because I’ve done it before, and other people are following me up. I look over every storyboard. Basically I operate as I did when I had a series with three directors under me.

JS: That’s going to keep you in one place for a while.

TS: It’s an ongoing thing I’ve been doing for a year-and-a-half now. The new way the industry works is you don’t look to stay in any one place anymore. Instead of term contracts, we all work project-to-project, so no matter how much you love a project while you’re working on it, you’re always making phone calls, you’re always talking to other people about projects. There are some other things I have in the hopper that I would love to come to fruition. They may overlap this job, because by design there’s a very slow time when you’re creating a direct-to-video, and that’s when it goes overseas for animation. During that time you make yourself useful. I hope to pitch some projects to Universal and be looking elsewhere too.

Post-Disney, Tad got to work with Stan Winston (above) on Robot Revolt.

Tad, Stan and Revolting Robots
JS: What else have you been doing since The Disney Afternoon wrapped?

TS: My last day at Disney was February 26, 2003. I did one small development project for them that didn’t get too far. Then I did a direct-to-video Scooby-Doo script — Scooby-Doo and the Anime Invasion. I think it needs a title change, because evidently kids loved the concept but moms weren’t sure about it. In the past I’d worked on parts of scripts, or storyboarded parts of my direct-to-videos. This was the first one that I sat down and top to bottom and wrote from blank page to final script. It was a lot of fun to work with those characters.

Then I did some jobs I would normally give to somebody else: some art pitching materials and a half-hour script for a Disney show called Super Robot Monkey Force Go!

Meanwhile I had some interesting opportunities. I think I got to meet everybody in the industry I didn’t know. I met and worked with Stan Winston — that was really neat. Suddenly I’m talking to somebody whose work I’ve always admired. I was sitting in a room with dinosaurs and aliens and the man who made them, and I’m thinking ‘this is pretty darn cool.’ He showed me what were in essence action figures that had no story. Rather than tack on a preconceived idea or something out of a trunk, I looked at everything that was unique about the figures and tried to create a story that explains why they look the way they do. It’s basically written for videogame- age viewers, mid-teens or later. It wasn’t about trying to fit a market; it was about what’s right for these sculptures.

JS: What genre are they?

TS: Actually, they’re on Stan’s Website — look for Robot Revolt and you’ll see the figures. Stan and I developed it and Japan is very interested in it; there’s a studio that’s talking about doing at least a pilot, a toy line and all that. What we gave them was a science-fiction adventure set in the future - the solar system under attack. It’s in the vein of shows like Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 or Star Trek. They may choose to go a different direction, we haven’t gotten a lot of feedback yet. We’ll see what happens.

Back to the Past
JS: Let’s jump in the Time Top and go way back to the beginning. How did you wind up in animation?

TS: I always loved animation, I loved cartoons and comic strips and comic books. I remember being very young and buying the original Bob Thomas Art of Animation book at Disneyland that was all about the making of Sleeping Beauty. It was actually the second edition of the book; in the first edition Walt had kind of an epilog that as I remember was pretty damn depressing: “Well, animation is getting so expensive and now we’re experimenting with audio-animatronics.” It was kind of like how people talk today about CGI replacing 2D animation.

Then the Xerox process was perfected [permitting the animators’ original drawings to be transferred directly onto transparent cels] and suddenly animation was cheaper to do again. Suddenly the epilog was a lot more optimistic. Thankfully I had that edition.

My interest in animation went way back to that and the Walter Foster/Preston Blair book, which was also every animator’s bible. Even in the professional industry I could walk down halls and see the old tattered copies of that.

I got the idea the place you want to work in animation is Disney, but they’ve got their guys and there’s not going to be any work until they die off — which, amazingly, though, was kind of accurate. As far back as Bambi, Roy Disney Sr. was saying, “We’ve done enough of these, we can keep re-releasing them.” There was always this thing, “Are we flooding the market?” There came a time when Walt was very interested in theme parks but he said “No, I started the business with these guys; let’s keep it going for them.”