PART V
PART V
Start from the beginning of the interview
Keeper says "Meatballs or Consequences" was originally called "Death or Consequences" but changed at the last minute. When it was in production, did it have this latter title?
Yes, it was originally called "Death or Consequences" (I still have the storyboard somewhere in my attic) ... and it was terrible. It's probably one of the only Animaniacs cartoons I was actually embarrassed to deliver, and when they changed the title, somehow I thought it was because we had done such a poor job on it (at such times the mind isn't terribly rational). It seems like I put all the wrong people on that cartoon.
Keeper also mentions he has the original animation for a "Colin" spot where he comes out of the house having to go to the bathroom really bad (jumping up and down while holding crotch), but it was changed in the actual airing. Do you remember getting a Colin spot recalled, or did they just redub existing animation to replace this one?
Spike Brandt animated that one and it looked pretty good. I suppose WB got cold feet about airing it, and it wouldn't have been too tricky to cut and paste sections from other cartoons and make them work with the existing dialogue. They certainly were smart enough not to tell us we had done the animation for nothing (or to admit they had PAID us to do it)!
Then, of course, there's the
"Jupitep Conspiracy." To refresh your memory:
http://www2.cruzio.com/%7Ekeeper/UAmjohnb.html
It seems odd that an American animation company would make a
mistake like this. Normally, grammar errors and misspellings are
the result of those in Korea who can't read English to begin
with.
I saw that. It's one of
the few mistakes that anyone noticed. When you're cranking out
40-50,000 pieces of artwork (layouts, rough animation drawings,
clean-ups & inbetweens, corresponding cels, backgrounds,
overlays, etc.) in a period of 16 weeks, you're going to make
some mistakes. Sometimes people find these and hyperfocus on
them, which is fun, I suppose.
I saw 'Jupitep' when it came back from Korea where the cels were
painted (the banners in the convention hall were all on one big
held cel). I knew it was wrong ... and most likely it was our
clean-up artist's fault, not the Korean studio's. The guy
probably started the drawing, got up for a cup of coffee or a
smoke, came back, forgot about finishing the R, and put the
drawing away. Of course the Koreans wouldn't have a clue, so we
can't blame them. I was prepared to have it fixed ... but it
never showed up on the reshoot list. And we had too much other
stuff to do to worry about it.
How many retakes did you usually have to do? That's a good question, since with no language barrier, I'd assume it would be less.....
We'd figure on about
15% for painting & camera mistakes, 5% for drawing or
assisting mistakes, and another 5-10% for personal taste. So we
would generally expect 25-30% reshoots.
Of course we fixed those mistakes for free - they aren't paying
for mistakes, they're paying for good footage. But sometimes
(like with 'The Big Candy Store', where they made us add the
tufts to the Warners) when they want things changed that could
never have been anticipated by following the approved storyboard
or whatever, they have to pay for those spur-of-the-moment extra
changes.
However, I've had clients who got a hold of this information and
tried to use it against us. We finished a cartoon for a certain
client who shall remain nameless, and it was REALLY clean, I mean
there were only about 10% legitimate reshoots, so then the client
started rewriting the script and asking for crazy new changes. I
protested, and they said, "Come on, we're not stupid! We
know you guys always allow for 25% reshoots." I had to
explain the facts of life to them.
I guess now is the time to ask about the "hole" in StarToons' history. WB produced absolutely no animation for the 1994 season, because Fox didn't order any, knowing all WB-produced material would soon move to the WB Network. And when Kids WB began, there were no StarToons-animated episodes of Animaniacs that season, for whatever reason. Your work didn't start showing up again until 1997....how did you keep the studio afloat during all that downtime?
The years that followed
(1993-1995) were indeed evil times for StarToons. Obviously we
weren't going to be able to sustain a staff of 40 people any
more, so we had to make some real hard decisions. We stripped the
staff down to about 9 key people: Ron Fleischer (our technical
director), Spike Brandt, Tony Cervone, Jeff Siergey, Dave Pryor
& Lauren Seeley (assistant animators) and Uttam Kumar (our
lead BG painter) ... plus our manager (my brother) & our
receptionist (plus myself). The rest we had to let go, with a
little severance pay, a handshake and best wishes.
This whole development really hit me hard, because I had been so
confident I could avoid having to lay off animators like I did in
Australia when H-B shut down. That layoff back in '87 had been
traumatic for me, seeing so many people losing their jobs, and I
wasn't even employing them. Now, I felt all these people were my
responsibility. And we had been pretty successful. StarToons'
biggest problem could probably be pinpointed as a serious lack of
marketing. We had put too many eggs in the Warner Bros basket. My
plan had been to establish a production track record for
StarToons, and then I figured the Big Boys in Hollywood would
trust us with production of our own properties. The factor I had
never properly anticipated was big money politics. It wasn't
really a well-thought-out business plan.
I think it was Kirk Tingblad (the only director we laid off) who
immediately took his severance pay and flew to LA to start
shopping himself around the west coast. Kirk had a better idea of
his value of having worked on Animaniacs & Tiny Toons than I
did! When people there found out he had all that production
experience, there was a bidding war for his services. When other
ex-employees found that out, they went to LA, too. Eventually I'd
say 60-80% of the people I laid off landed cushy jobs in LA,
working either at Hanna-Barbera (Cartoon Network), Disney,
Klasky-Csupo, or Warner Bros.
Sadly (for me), when Brandt, Cervone, Siergey, and Kumar heard
about this, they left too. These guys were the cream of my crop
... and all of them were snapped up immediately (Kumar by
Universal, the rest by WB). It basically left me with nothing ...
and no future prospects for StarToons. I was very disillusioned;
it was very hard having to lose the likes of them. I drew a
little picture of me standing there with both my arms ripped off,
and the WB shield carrying them off into the sunset; one arm was
labeled 'Spike Brandt' and the other was labeled 'Tony Cervone'.
All of these ex-StarTooners eventually came to be known in the
industry as "The Chicago Mob." They had a great
reputation for hard work, skill, and diligence. Brandt &
Cervone were the only animation people retained by WB when they
sold to AOL in 2000. They have become close associates now,
co-producing the Duck Dodgers series and probably doing something
else new now. Great guys.
Meanwhile back in Chicago, I was pretty depressed, but we had a
few hopes that we could revive. Before they left, Siergey,
Brandt, and Cervone had put together a show idea called 'Fat
Cats.' When we heard about Cartoon Network's 'What-a-Cartoon'
campaign - they were originally looking for 38 brand new cartoons
- we figured, what the hell, let's do it.
We started putting together a pitch for that, and my wife Chris
made the necessary appointments. Fleischer knew a good voice
actor in LA, Ken Hudson Campbell, and we thought he was the
perfect voice for Looie (the lead cat). We never found a good
local talent to do Elmo, so Ken suggested his friend Hank Azaria.
Wow! Hank was (of course) amazingly good. Once we got those voice
tracks laid down, we just started animation production.
In the mean time we landed enough work to justify getting some
new animators. A lot of them were mediocre. Two of the bright
spots were Dave Pryor and T.J. House. Pryor was my next TA (after
Genndy Tartakovsky) when I taught at Columbia College, and he had
just started inbetweening on some of our latter episodes of
Animaniacs. T.J. House was a talented kid from Gary, Indiana. He
worked hard and learned quickly.
I pressed both of them into animation service on 'Fat Cats.'
Neither of them knew exactly what they were doing, but I coached
them along, and in the mean time animated as much of it as I
could.
This went on for a while without getting a firm response from
Cartoon Network. I think we were 3 months into production when
out of the blue, Cartoon Network phoned. They wanted to fly us
out there to pitch 'Fat Cats.' They were expecting storyboards,
which we of course had, but by that time we also had a
significant part of it animated (but not painted). So when we
pitched it, we started with the storyboard and then followed up
by showing the pencil tests (with voices). They were sold; they
loved it. So now we had money to continue.
We also bought a USAnimation DIgital Ink & Paint system at
that time. I had seen it in operation when John Whitney Jr. had
first developed it back in his little office on Labrea, when it
was operating on a huge black Cray computer, and I knew right
away that this was the best digital ink & paint system
available (and still is, I believe). We were one of their first
customers.
The bottom line on 'Fat Cats' is that we finished it, it wasn't
perfect, it had some weak spots, but it had (I thought) a real
down-to-earth charm. Cartoon Network aired it ... but never asked
for another one. According to their market research, it didn't
test well enough. It's likely they just wanted to justify their
own in-house productions ('Johnny Bravo', 'Dexter's Lab', and
'Powerpuff Girls'). The only outside studio who landed a series
contract was Dave Feiss's "Cow & Chicken" (which
incidentally was laid out by my buddy Deane Taylor).
Also during that 'black period' we did some two-bit commercial
productions, plus the odd 'Dudley the Dinosaur' for the ADA, and
also some 'McGee & Me' cartoon sequences for TLC
Entertainment. These direct-to-videos were popular in the
Christian media market, endorsed by Focus On The Family, so they
had a market. Anyway, it kept us out of jail for a while.
At this point, I was so disillusioned with the biz that I decided
to sell StarToons. When it came down to it, however, most people
felt that Jon McClenahan WAS StarToons. Other than a few
contracts, the company had no value outside of my expertise.
Then I got a call from my old BG painter, Uttam Kumar. He wanted
to hire me to help him establish a studio in his native country,
India.
I said, "Sorry, Uttam, right now I'm up for sale. Whoever
buys StarToons is going to own me."
He said, "Let me get back to you, my friend."
So the StarToons studio must have been very different by the time you finally received a new WB assignment (Road Rovers). Did WB forget you or something?
WB did not forget us,
but they had to pull back on production. They went forward with
their plans for the WB network, and when Fox caught wind of it
(which wouldn't have been hard) they put a freeze on their
cartoon order. WB at that point probably felt the additional
investment (to use StarToons) wasn't worth it, so they farmed the
rest out to the cheapest vendors (probably Akom). These are tough
business decisions that have to be made. C'est la vie.
But yes, Uttam got back to me and put together a proposition for
a strategic alliance between StarToons and his enterprise, Heart
Animation & Academy. The necessary agreements were drawn up
and I believe they were finalized in 1997. They would benefit
from our name & expertise; I would benefit by getting the
weight of the organization off my shoulders. My brother Dave left
for Virginia by mutual agreement, and our new manager Terry
Hamilton was very helpful looking out for my best interest. I
almost didn't care myself at that point.
A lot of the agreements were based on us getting more work. And
lo & behold, 'Road Rovers' came from out of the blue. This
was just storyboarding (which I did), key BG design (which Doug
Rice did), ex-sheet timing (which Fleischer did), and prop model
design (which kept some of my mediocre greenhorns busy).
I wasn't crazy about that series, but it came at a crucial time
for us, so in a lot of ways I'm thankful for it. I think the
highlight of that series (for me) was when Colleen used my name
as a karate yell in one of the episodes
("Mac-Klenna-HAN!!!")
Back to Kumar. You now had a partnership, and a very differently organized company that was partly overseas. It's interesting that there was THAT much movement, because personally, I didn't notice any dip or change in animation quality.....
He had some business
partners who came and talked to me and we worked out a deal. It
basically meant that I could get out in 5 years, or else stay if
things were going well. Pretty much everything we were doing
after 1995 was aimed at getting Heart up and running as a school
& studio.
The idea was to start students learning animation production
skills. We carefully designed an 18-month course that would crank
out qualified artists from the Academy and the graduates in turn
would roll into the Studio. We figured by mid-1997 we would have
a large fully trained staff there which would cut down on labor
costs and enable our Chicago operation to survive. A lot of
people in the industry thought we were selling out to overseas
production, and in a way we were - because convincing executives
that they were getting their money's worth from Chicago artists
was too complicated and intangible of an argument (execs have
very short attention spans). But the fact is, what we were doing
was the only way we could see to save the few American jobs we
had left.
We gave them specs for animation tables, camera set-ups, paint
stocks & brushes, painting desks and cel-drying racks, which
pencils & paper to buy, and - for the near future - digital
ink & paint requirements (we used USAnimation). We carefully
designed animation lessons: bouncing balls, head turns, walks,
runs, wild takes, dialogue, the whole nine yards. There were
inbetweening exercises and layout & background painting
instruction and storyboard lessons.
The plan was a pretty good one, actually. Unfortunately we
weren't prepared for one little contingency: Uttam turned out to
be a corrupt, lying, cheating bastard.
I went out to visit with them for their grand opening, and I was
treated like royalty, paraded around in front of cameras and
reporters ... at the time, this was big news for India. Up to
that point, no one had ever tried to open a world-class animation
studio in India.
However by mid-1996 we were starting to get nervous. We sent one
of our talented young animators, Mike Owens, over there to
supervise the teaching efforts. After a few months he started
writing me distressing letters. It turned out nobody was
following our curriculum and they hadn't built any of the desks.
Essentially Uttam had installed himself as India's king of
cartoons and had students acting as his personal servants and
concubines and what not, but he wasn't implementing any of the
plans we had agreed to.
The Indian investors had been concerned at the lack of progress,
but they didn't know enough about animation to know what was
right and what was wrong. They wanted to fire Uttam, but they
were nervous because Uttam had always postured himself as being
Jon's good friend, that Jon would always back him up and without
Uttam in the picture Jon would pull out. Finally in early 1997
they called me up and asked what we needed to do.
I said, "Bullfeathers. Fire his ass."
As a result there was a messy legal battle (Uttam was a major
shareholder) and a few of Uttam's friends revolted, but we were
able to start over and turn the academy and the studio around.
Unfortunately by that time, probably six or seven other
businessmen had started animation studios in India. None of them
had a clue how to do animation, but they had compelling salesmen
who would promise the earth, take orders, and then try to figure
it out later.
As a result several Indian studios got production contracts
before Heart did. The funny thing is, because the other studios
had no clue how to do it, they sent the work to the Philippines
where there was already a well-established animation industry.
Generally they would lose money, but they had their foot in the
door.
So by letting things get totally fouled up, we completely
squandered our advantage in India. Executives in Hollywood
starting realizing the other Indian studios didn't know what they
were doing, so when we would come to them promising to do a good
job, they would just laugh at us, like, "What do you think
we were born yesterday?"
Yowch.