No one has that freedom anymore, because now there are plenty of people saying, "Mmm, invisible Eskimo, not so much. Let's try another story."

JS: That reminds me of what I've heard about Termite Terrace: those guys were left alone to make whatever came into their heads and wound up creating classics.

Stones is optimistic that studios are giving more creative freedom to artists like Cartoon Network did with Samurai Jack. © Cartoon Network.

TS: What I heard about Samurai Jack was that they trusted Genndy Tartakovsky with an idea that was really unusual, they liked what they saw and let him do it. They certainly gave notes but they didn't try to take his idea and say, "Yeah, okay, but we need more gags, and he needs a pet." In the Atlantis series we had to put in a pet. They wanted a dog or a cat, and we put in a reptilian beast, but it was one of those moments where I had to choose my battles.

My battle was I wanted a Lovecraftian squid creature eating people. If I had to put in a reptilian pet, not a problem, because I'm getting to do this story where the creature is being fed people to keep it appeased. You don't necessarily see it on the screen, but if you logically think it through you go, "ewww!" And even then, I still had to hold back from what I would've liked to have experimented with. The studio chose to go chose not to go with the original ending which I really loved and was much creepier, and replaced it with some much tamer. This was in the first third of the direct-to-video that we eventually made.

JS: Again, talking about the change where you now work project-to-project instead of being on staff. That reminds me of when the movie studios lost their theater chains in the 1950s and closed down their animation units as a result. Did something similar happen to change the paradigm in TV animation?

TS: You could look at TV right now and say this is a golden age — there's never been this much animation. But because there's no longer just three networks paying for it, the ad dollars are spread very, very thin. You no longer have the money to bankroll more ambitious projects. Syndication changed things drastically when Masters of the Universe, and then later on Duck Tales came along — suddenly you had this undiscovered territory, this time in the afternoon where it's like, "Look at all this money these things are making - we can sell more cereal!"

Disney now uses the Disney Channel as a testing zone before moving a series over to sister network, ABC. © Disney Television.

Then they started creating Fox Kids and all these other networks. Suddenly syndication was dead, because all the strong stations were now owned by networks. They weren't looking to buy from you; they were looking to buy from their own company, or looking to get out of animation entirely. Suddenly you didn't quite have the market and then budgets started coming down because the only reason why the networks are showing animation is they're required to by the FCC as long as the animation has educational or social value — and you can argue how well they do that. NBC would not have animation on right now otherwise. The WB is like the only broadcast network is capable of buying something first-run and putting it on. They'll take something that isn't based on a movie, like Xiaolin Showdown. That's an original concept they created and put on.

It used to be that ABC got the first choice and we would run a few episodes on the Disney Channel as like a favor to them. Now the Disney Channel is the central thing, and after they've run a season, Kim Possible then shifts to ABC broadcast. So the cable channel is the go-to place for the new stuff and then they share the wealth with ABC. The economics just work out that way.

Yet Still One More Darkwing Duck Question

JS: Talking about all these direct-to-video features, when are we going to see Darkwing Duck: The Movie?

TS: A new group of executives came into TV animation, and it was like the era before "One Saturday Morning" [a Disney-produced umbrella series that ABC ran from 1997-2000] didn't exist. That was seen as old-fashioned Disney. You don't see a lot of funny animal shows, in the Carl Barks sensibility, on TV anymore. All their series have to have that FCC social commentary in them, which is very restricting on its own.