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Disney Afternoon Part 2
The Disney Afternoon Pt 2
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0:00:00 Speaker 1: The Disney Afternoon hit an unexpected hiccup a few years earlier that was finally starting to rear its ugly head. Eisner and Katzenberg would try to strong-arm their former boss Barry Diller, which would lead to unexpected new competition. In 1988, Eisner bought a television station in Los Angeles that eventually became KCAL. With his new station, he obviously wanted to air Disney product. There was a problem. They were already airing the Disney Afternoon on Fox affiliates, Barry Diller's network.
0:00:32 S1: According to DisneyWar, Eisner had Katzenberg call Diller. In Diller's recounting of the discussion, Katzenberg said, "We want to renegotiate the Disney Afternoon, and we're taking away the LA market." Diller was shocked. They had a contract. "That's not fair," he protested. "I know you bought an LA station, but give us two or three years to replace this. Let's be reasonable." Diller called Eisner, who refused. "We were there for you when you needed us," Diller reminded him, pointing out that he'd bought the original programming for Disney Afternoon. Eisner still refused. "Okay then, we're out of business," Diller said. Fox promptly dropped the Disney Afternoon from all of its wholly owned stations and encouraged its affiliates to do the same. Still, that wasn't what put Diller over the edge. Even though he felt Eisner had betrayed him, it was when Disney sued Fox on antitrust grounds claiming Fox was trying to monopolize children's programming and then complained to the FCC that Fox was a morally unfit broadcaster with programming like the Simpsons.
0:01:35 S1: When Disney lawyers approached Diller about a possible settlement, Diller said the only settlement he'd consider was an apology. Disney ended up dropping the suit in 1992, but Diller told David Geffen, "I'm never going to speak to him, Eisner, again." Fox would launch its own kids programming in 1990, which would eventually cut into Disney's ratings with the cultural phenomenon Power Rangers, not to mention Batman, the animated series, and Animaniacs. Power Rangers was a show that no one wanted. It was turned down by everyone, and then became the show everyone wanted and wanted to replicate. Premiering in August of 1993, by December it was the biggest kid show by far. According to the Baltimore Sun, it was averaging a 12.5 on weekends with kids two to 11. Fox's X-Men was doing a 10.0. And it was first on weekdays. It was doing a 7.5 rating. Second was Fox's Animaniacs with a 5.6, and the highest rated non-Fox show on weekdays was Bonkers with a 4.5. Also in 1994, Power Ranger toy sales would reach nearly a billion dollars. At their highest height, Ninja Turtles had done only $450 million in sales.
0:02:50 S1: The butterfly effect was now spreading its wings, and the Disney Afternoon would take a hit, as did the future of syndication as networks realized they should be promoting their own IPs instead of other companies. It would even happen to Fox when Warner Brothers would take its popular hits, Batman and Animaniacs, and put it on their own WB network. And it wasn't just network competitors anymore, cable had entered the market as well. Nickelodeon had popped into the world of animation and their first three cartoons, Ren and Stimpy, Doug, and Rugrats had all been big successes. The syndication window was closing in the not too distant future, but for now Disney Television Animation was about to change with the times.
[music]
0:03:43 S1: Greg Weisman, creator Gargoyles.
0:03:46 Greg Weisman: The pitch for Aladdin, that I pitched to Eisner, it was just one poster shot of Aladdin and the Genie and three words, "Aladdin the series". He's like, "Sold." That was it. And I knew that. In other words, going in, it was like I could have given this whole pitch on Aladdin, but I thought anything I say would only give him a reason to say no. Aladdin's this huge movie. Let him imagine what the show is.
0:04:11 S1: Tad Stones, creator of Darkwing Duck.
0:04:14 Tad Stones: At the end of Darkwing, I said, "Okay, now Darkwing worked much closer." I think I can get even closer with my next show, which was going to be a science fiction show. Again, a comedy. The staff loved it, but the boss did not. I never got to pitch it to Michael and Jeffrey. You know, had a meeting, I said, "Oh, I'm gonna get a chance to do it." And it was like, "No." They wanted me to do Aladdin. Now, Aladdin was done by Ron Clements, John Musker. I said, "I used to room with... In the same office as Ron Clements." I mean I was literally four feet away from him. "Let me talk to those guys." With Aladdin there was the other thing that I did the first direct to home video, Return of Jafar. And all I was trying to do was keep our budgets up. And I thought, if there's one more source of revenue that comes in from our shows, this would be the excuse to not cut budgets or give us the money we need to pull off some of this stuff. I called up Home Video and said, "Technically, when I do this four part episode pilot to set up the show, technically it's the sequel to Aladdin. Are you interested?" And the guy took it to the higher ups and they were not.
0:05:25 TS: Then they put out Aladdin on video. Again, it broke records. They made a huge amount of money, and I called the guy back and again restated what I was doing. And this time he took it to the top and they were very interested. And we had a story meeting with my boss where he gave all sorts of notes. And I said, "Well, we got... That's a lot to pull off. We have to do that by March 14th or whatever the date was." He said, "Why?" I said, "Well, Home Video was willing to put this out on literally video at that time." And he said, "That's gravy. Do these notes and if you get them done in time, that's fine." And I had to be told this later by people who were in the room 'cause I had forgotten that I had said, "Okay we have to take those notes, but it also has to be done by this date so I can get it to Home Video."
0:06:11 TS: We did. And Return of Jafar was made for $3.5 million and it made something between $180 and $200 million domestic out on video. This may be apocryphal, but I was told that it was the first quarter where the company wouldn't have grown. Well, I don't know what, ten percent or whatever the number was, and I guess a bunch of executives had bonuses tied into profit growth. Evidently that was the first quarter that there wouldn't be bonuses, and then suddenly everybody got a bonus, and it was because of Return of Jafar, that out of nowhere this thing came in and making all this money. And that started the whole direct to video thing.
0:06:53 TS: All I was trying to do was to keep our budgets up. The stories involving the bonuses, they tried to do things like Lucas had with Star Wars had given everybody involved points or some sort of bonus, so they had X amount of money and they divided it up so everybody got something. And what that led to is whoever was last in line, some of the lower level people, got a bonus, a check of $50 or $100, whatever. People who basically were in the department who didn't work on the show, and all that did was piss them off 'cause they knew how much the movie had made. I got $14,000 and I told that to Ron and John. Now I was not an idiot. I knew that the only reason why the movie made that much money is because they had done an incredible Aladdin, and I remember telling that to them and their reaction was, "You got ripped off." And I realized, yeah, in live action terms, if you do a crappy spinoff of something that made a lot of money and your crappy spinoff makes a ton of money, you get a five picture deal and a new car in your driveway as a present from the studio. In animation, I was happy to get the bonus. But get a pat on the back and then you move on, do something else for us.
0:08:09 S1: Jymn Magon, writer.
0:08:11 Jymn Magon: Disney's had a definite style there for a while, of... I think we cornered the market in the comedy adventure genre. When Disney execs felt like they needed to branch out, I felt like the formula fell by the wayside. And it's like, "Hey, look what John Kricfalusi is doing on Ren and Stimpy. Let's do something like that. Hey, look what Warner Brothers is doing with superheroes. Let's do something like that." And I felt like, "Oh, this is interesting." Obviously, we're branching out, trying new things. But it felt weird to me that where we had before had been sort of chopping our way through the jungle, creating our own path. Now we were sort of following other people's paths, copying them. And that always seemed odd to me. But anyway, department does what the department does over the years, and the changes, and the new policy, and it gets worse or it gets better. And is it Disney? Yes, because it's Disney TV Animation. They're Disney and this is the show they're doing. It becomes part of the canon, you know.
0:09:15 S1: In 1994, Variety reported that Disney was spending $50 million to boost its afternoon, which resulted in two new series, Shnookums and Meat, and Gargoyles. Gargoyles, Aladdin, and Shnookums helped cut into the lead of Fox, but there was a larger problem that television animation was about to encounter. Disney's syndication contract with networks ran only through 1997, meaning that other networks could produce their own shows and make more money. This would leave Disney Animation without a home because Disney didn't own a network. In fact, earlier in the year, they had tried to buy NBC but failed. Total viewership was also in decline during this period, which had to do with VCRs, computers, and video games offering alternatives to television. And to add to the uncertainty of 1994, Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company and he left because he was fired by Michael Eisner.
0:10:12 S1: In a walk in Aspen together, according to Katzenberg, Eisner promised him that if anything happened to Frank Wells, Katzenberg would take over Wells's role as president. Eisner would later say that Katzenberg misunderstood this conversation. Unfortunately, something did happen to Wells. He was killed in a tragic helicopter crash on April 3, 1994. But business stops for no man, and Eisner went back on his word and did not put Katzenberg in Wells's position as president, nor did he name him as his successor. To make matters worse, in a white glove slap to the face to Katzenberg, Eisner took on the role of president himself. This led to a further deterioration of their relationship and Eisner gave Katzenberg his walking papers. Eventually Eisner also refused Katzenberg part of his contract, which stated Katzenberg would get two percent of all profits from any of the projects he had worked on at Disney.
0:11:08 S1: So, like all great Hollywood love stories, they went to court. At one point it came out that Eisner had said he hated that midget, referring to Katzenberg. The case could have been settled for $90 million at one point, but instead it was eventually settled for $280 million in Katzenberg's favor. And then to further complicate matters, Katzenberg went on to form DreamWorks with Spielberg and David Geffen. In the midst of all that, Shnookums and Meat, a funny cartoon show, was being made. Bill Kopp, animator.
0:11:40 Bill Kopp: And then I got a call from Disney Television, which I had never heard of. I didn't even know they had it. And Gary Krisel and Bruce Cranston made me an offer. They said, "Hey, we need some new funny stuff and we really think your eat show is funny, and can you come and do a funny show?" And I was like, "Well, like what?" And they were like, "Whatever you want." Seriously. I didn't have to pitch anything. They were just like, "Just come over and we'll do whatever comes out of your head." It was incredible. So I had a sketchbook full of stuff, and I just came in. And they said, "Well, how about a cat and a dog?" I said, "Okay." We started with that, and that must have been 1992 or 1993, something like that. I forget. Pitching at Disney now. I'm not saying [0:12:22] ____. I mean, it's legendarily hard. It's like running a gauntlet. There's all these people in these giant buildings and you just got to carve your way through. And then once you do get into development, you're gonna be there for a year or two just trying to get it through. My experience was, we had lunch and the next week I was there with a contract.
0:12:40 BK: There was no feeling of pressure or ever like, "Oh my God, the wheels are coming off." It never was like that. And we had a saying that Disney [0:12:49] ____. It's like, "Well, if something's... If something crashes, well, I'll just throw money at it." You know. Nobody bothered us. When they said, "You can do whatever you want," they never brought it up. I remember sitting in the editor room with Gary Krisel, who was a great guy, and he'd look at some of the rough animation coming back. He'd look at me and he'd go, "Is that funny?" And we're like, "Yeah, that's funny." He just trusted us, and it was awesome. Now, Jeffie came over one day, as he frequently did, while we were kicking it around. And I said, "The cat's kind of abrasive. So let's give him the opposite kind of name," you know, Shnookum, 'cause he was kind of a dick. And then we were just like, "What the fuck are we gonna call this dog?" We had no clue. Just nothing. And Jeffie came up with the name, and I think we were actually barbecuing something, which we also frequently did. And I think he just said, "Meat." And we had the design already. And I said, "Fuck, that's it."
0:13:40 BK: Shnookums and Meat. A little confusion came when they made the SpaghettiOs though. I had a can of them around here, they finally just deteriorated. I had to get rid of it, it was gonna explode. And it said, "Shnookums and Meat." It was like SpaghettiOs. The lawyers were like, "No, no, no, man. You gotta say that it's not meat. It's not a meat product."
0:13:58 Shnookums: Hey, what happened to your head?
0:14:00 Meat: Hey, what happened to your head?
[music]
0:14:07 Shnookums: Oh my gosh, my brain's gone.
0:14:10 Meat: Oh no, mine is to. What we gonna do Shnookums, what we gonna do? We don't have any brains.
0:14:21 Shnookums: Now, let's stay calm. I don't think you have too much to worry about, but I know I do. They couldn't have gone far.
0:14:27 BK: Right after the first two shorts went on to [0:14:29] ____ said, "Okay, let's make it a whole half hour. What else do you got?" And I just pulled out the Pith Possum, and the Tex Tinstar bit was gonna be a space serial called Guy Guy and the Space Vigilantes. We were all set to go, and then I got a call from John Kricfalusi, and I had Fontanelli there, you know, all of Kricfalusi's guys, [0:14:47] ____ was there. A couple... Eddie Fitzgerald. And John called me. He goes, "Hey man, I heard you're expanding your show, but can you maybe not do a space thing?" Actually, it was like getting a call from the Godfather. He was like, "Yeah, don't do a space thing." And I was like, I go, "Why?" And he goes, "Well, 'cause I'm working on one. I've been working on it for a while." Actually, Fontanelli brought that up to me too. So I just turned it into a western, which was easy because I was happy to accommodate. But I guess he never sold his space thing.
[music]
0:15:14 Speaker 8: Pith Possum. At one time an ordinary laboratory possum. He was changed forever by an experiment gone wrong, an experiment that endowed him with ultra possum-like abilities, turning him into Pith Possum, super dynamic possum of tomorrow. Maintaining his secret identity by cleverly disguising himself as Peter Possum, copy boy for a great metropolitan tabloid. He defends truth, justice, and the forest critter way for the good citizens of Possum City.
[music]
0:15:56 Speaker 9: Let me just grab what I have in store for you. The rope that holds you up Tinstar, will soon be burned through by that candle. When you fall, you'll land head first on this trampoline, which will send you flying into the pen full of rabid badgers. As you go down the ramp inside the pen, this torch will be knocked over, igniting the trail of gunpowder burning toward that cannon. Your barrel will roll toward that cannon and your head will become stuck. The gunpowder will burn the cannon's fuse and the cannon will fire. The blast will ignite the waterproof fuses on the dynamite surrounding your head. The cannon will shoot you through the roof of the barn, and then down into this giant tank full of man-eating sharks. The sharks will eat you. Then the dynamite will explode. The whole mess will be blown skyward and your remains will fall into this envelope, which I will place on a boat bound for Tunisia. So long, Tinstar.
0:16:48 BK: Anyway, and that was Shnookums and Meat, but again, that was so busy and I was the only writer. I wrote all 39 of those because I didn't know any better. After the show was on the air and we were done, Jeffie and I sat around. I went to Hawaii for six weeks to recuperate. I came back and they were just like, "Well, we don't know about the second season." And I mean, Shnookums and Meat was not... It was amazing that they let us do it 'cause it's not Disney, really. Well, it's not out of line, but it's weird. So we were just sitting there waiting to get the word, and I mean the writing was on the wall. I was like, "Yeah okay, there goes that. What are we gonna do next?" And I was there still getting paid. I developed other stuff. Jeffie and I were like, "This is gonna crack, man. What are we gonna fucking do now?"
0:17:34 BK: We didn't have a plan. And then, what happened was they said, "Oh, sorry boys. You're through." And we were like, "Ah fuck, okay well, at least we got that out." I mean that was three in one, dude. You got Pith and Tex, and Shnookum and Meat was actually our weakest link in the thing. And that was the only part that was foisted on us. But right after they canceled it, that was when Gary Krisel and Bruce Cranston left to go to Dreamworks, and we were like, "Ah." And it was like a sad goodbye and stuff.
0:18:06 BK: A new executive moved in, and we just weren't part of their plan. Because... And rightfully... They didn't know what to do with us. We were like a weird thing that, they were like, "Huh? Now what with these guys?" But we had a good time. I think we sort of knew in the back of our heads, it was like, "Wow, this will never last here." It isn't Disney material. The real story of that time was they were trying to keep up with Margaret and Fox Kids, and they were right to try crazy things. To their credit, they really, they stuck right by it. And then they... And Gary and Bruce did the same for us at DreamWorks when we went to do Toonsylvania.
0:18:42 S1: Greg Weisman, creator Gargoyles.
0:18:44 GW: We had the Disney Afternoon, which we viewed as sort of like the dragon that you had to feed a virgin to every six months. So every six months, we'd go up in front of Michael Eisner. In those days, Michael personally chose the shows. And we would pitch him six or seven shows. And he knew he always had to pick one to put into production. He could pick more than one, but he had to always pick at least one.
0:19:10 S1: Jymn Magon.
0:19:11 JM: Yeah, what we would do is every week, we would have this writer's meeting that I think it was Wednesday mornings, and it was like any new writers out there, any new talent, any new ideas, it was always looking for what are we gonna pitch? What's the next big thing? And of course, like everything in Hollywood, it was basically, what was the most recent hit film? With Star Wars, Indiana Jones, whatever. But people would come in and they'd pitch all kinds of things. And the things that were noteworthy would get... I'm not sure we did artwork on all of it, but at least we had a list of shows that we would take to the meetings with Eisner and Katzenberg and say, "Okay, this is called Wonder Weenie. It's about a guy in a hot dog suit that gets kidnapped and taken to another planet, where they think he's a hero 'cause of his television commercials." And it was like, Gong. [chuckle] "No, next." And we would just do that. We would come up with these sort of one, two sentence pitches and they would go, "Nah, or yeah."
0:20:13 S1: Greg Weisman.
0:20:14 GW: We were all sort of keeping an eye on Batman, and sort of seeing was this going to be a success or not? It was a serious drama on cartoon, and would that work? Because the conventional wisdom is it always has to be comedy, and often it's a pendulum and that conventional wisdom swings back into the forefront all the time. But Batman was working, it was working so well they tried it in prime time, and then it didn't work in prime time. And so the desire for us to do something along those lines sort of waxed and waned, often with Batman's ratings. And we didn't have superheroes in our camp so to speak, so we didn't wanna do Batman, we didn't wanna copy that, but we wanted to try and do something different. But that's not how Gargoyles came about at all. Those are almost two separate discussions that dovetailed later.
0:21:08 GW: Gargoyles was initially developed as a comedy adventure, very much inspired by and along the lines of Gummi Bears, Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, which was a show we were really proud of, created by a guy named Jymn Magon. We thought was great. It had this very rich backstory and we thought it didn't get enough respect, and we thought that the main reason for that was because there was brand confusion with Care Bears. Care Bears was a sort of sacchariney sweet, kinda awful show, from my point of anyway. But the brand confusion was understandable because both shows featured cute, cuddly, multi-colored bears. Gummi Bears wasn't that. It was an adventure show. It was funny. It was exciting. It had a great comedic villain in Duke Igthorn and great sidekick in [0:21:54] ____, and great characters, and just a lot of fun. So we set out very consciously to create a show in that vein with the same sort of rich backstory, but that would get more respect. So everything in the 90s, the sort of buzz word was everything had to be edgy. Instead of doing cute, cuddly, multi-colored bears, we did cute, cuddly, multi-colored gargoyles. Gargoyles having been something that fascinated me since I was in high school.
0:22:23 GW: And we thought that's edgier. And instead of setting it in medieval times, we'd have this rich medieval backstory, but we'd set it in the present. We'd have gargoyles have a spell cast on them and they'd wake up in the 20th century, and that seemed edgier too. And so we thought, we can do this kind of show and have this fun comedy adventure with Gargoyles. So we put together a pitch, and we pitched it to Michael Eisner, and he passed. But we really liked the show and my bosses, Bruce and Gary, both really liked it. And they were like, "Well, take another pass at it." So I showed it to a number of people, just the original comedy pitch, to try and get some feedback and see what else I might do with it. One of the people I showed it to was Tad Stones.
0:23:06 TS: Gargoyles had a long history of things that are in a direct line that ended up with Gargoyles. And some of them didn't involve Gargoyles at all. They were gremlins, or whatever. The last thing I'd been playing with I think was a Three Musketeers version of these gargoyles. I had just seen the rough cut of Beauty and the Beast. So again, I'm instrumental. I'm not a genius, at least not in that meeting. Greg had asked me in just to talk about things and be in the discussion with his assistants basically. Again, he was an executive. And I said, "What if he was the last of the gargoyles? This could be your Beauty and the Beast 'cause you've already got the female there." He is one of the fastest thinkers I've ever seen. While he's watching a movie, he is analyzing, dissecting it. And walking out of a movie he'll have all sorts of comments, where I'm going, "Well, I thought the colors were nice." Anyway, he was on to something, he kind of said to his assistant, "Okay, you follow up on the Three Musketeers angle. I wanna work on this."
0:24:07 GW: And that really clicked for me. And so I created the character of Goliath with the artist Greg Guler, and we took the whole show, the whole comedy development and put it through the prism of Goliath and came out the other side fundamentally with the show that made it on the air. And we were so enthusiastic about it, we came up with all these concepts for villains and adventures and stories and put together this huge long pitch and pitched it to Eisner six months after we'd pitched it the first time. And he passed, killed it. And so I thought it was done. We tried. It wasn't the first time I'd pitched a show and it had gotten killed. And the next day we had what we called a postmortem meeting. In those days, Jeffrey Katzenberg was... And Michael ran the whole company, but Jeffrey Katzenberg was head of the studio. And so Jeffrey had been in the meeting with Gary and Bruce and I, and we were having this postmortem meeting where we were discussing actually the shows that Michael had said yes to and what the next steps would be. And so after having this discussion about the yes shows, we all got up to go. And as I'm about to go, Jeffrey said to me, "Oh, and you're gonna work on Gargoyles some more, right?"
0:25:20 GW: And Bruce and I sort of looked at each other, and I was like, "Well no, Michael killed it. He killed it as a comedy. He killed it as a drama. I don't know what else we'd do with it." And Jeffrey said, "Oh, Michael didn't kill it, he just thought it needed more work." Now I had been there the day before, and I knew that he had killed it. But what this was telling me was that Michael may not have liked it, but Jeffrey liked it. And in those days Jeffrey wasn't gonna contradict what Michael had said, but he still felt it was worth pursuing. I also found out later that Gary had talked to Jeffrey about the need to diversify the Disney Afternoon from the standpoint of all we had in those days were very similar, funny animal comedy adventure cartoons, and that if we just kept doing that over and over again, eventually the audience would get bored with those kind of cartoons. No matter how good they were, they'd just get bored with them. And we had to bring other types of things in, which led to shows like Goof Troop, which was really more sitcom than comedy adventure. Shows like Shnookums and Meat, which was more sort of Tex Avery short cartoons, and Gargoyles.
0:26:36 GW: And so we went back to the drawing board for a third time to try and figure out how we were gonna pitch Gargoyles for a third time. And we looked at the show that we had, and we thought, "Nope, this is the show. We don't wanna change the show at all." So the problem isn't the show, the problem is the pitch. And what you realize is that we had just put way too much into the pitch. It had diffused it all and gotten confusing and we hadn't been crisp and clear. So we just pulled things out, things that we eventually did use in the show, but we pulled all these elements out and really narrowed it down to the key idea, which frankly, was the Beauty and the Beast idea.
0:27:16 GW: It was this relationship between Goliath, the lead gargoyle, and Elisa, the cop, who befriends him in the 20th century after he wakes up. And we very much played it like Beauty and the Beast, which actually was a movie that had done very well for Disney recently. So six months later, we pitched it to Michael a third time, and this time they bought it. We had added nothing to this pitch, we just subtracted. I'd reordered a few things. We may have redrawn a card or two just to clarify an idea, but there was nothing new, it was just shorter. Jeffrey turned to me and said, "You added a lot to that pitch didn't you?" And I said, "Yes, I did." And that was history. We went on and made the show.
0:28:03 Speaker 10: One thousand years ago superstition in the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness, it was a world of fear, it was the age of Gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night. We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken and we live again. We are defenders of the night. We are Gargoyles!
0:29:01 GW: And so, yes, relative to Goof Troop it's dark, but I don't think of it as dark. There's tons of humor in that show. The color palette is rich, full of blues and purples and magentas and neon. It's not a dark show either visually or thematically. It's fundamentally a show about a guy, Goliath, who's an optimist, who believes that the world can be a better place, that bad things happen but they can be fixed, that the next generation can do better or that we can make it better. And so it's got a fundamentally optimistic tone to it. In terms of supervision, the advantage there was that I'd been the executive at Disney for five years when we went into production. I often compare it to a lunatic asylum, TV animation, in that there are inmates and then there are trustees, and the trustees are actually also inmates, but they're considered by management to be less crazy.
0:30:07 GW: So they give the trustee a stick, a baton to keep the other lunatics in line. And so that's how I sort of see my role on Gargoyles. I was the lunatic most trusted. So because of what was going on, both in the larger company and at TV Animation, there were a lot of shows in crisis for various reasons. And because of that and because I was in charge of Gargoyles, which I produced with Frank Paur, we were both producers, but from an executive standpoint it was still me. I was the lunatic most trusted at Disney TV Animation, so they kinda left us alone. And I remember at one point, Frank and I had lunch with Gary during season two and Gary said, "I wanna apologize to you guys. I have not been paying attention to Gargoyles at all. We've had other things going on. How is it going? What's going on? How's it going on the show?"
0:30:54 GW: And we said, "Well, it's going pretty good. Schedule's tough, but we're managing and we're happy with how things are turning out." He's like, "Great. What kind of stories are you doing?" So we started telling him about that and at one point we told him about Xanatos and Fox getting married and having a baby. And he goes, "Whoa, whoa. I wouldn't do that. You can't have the bad guy have a baby. You can't have the bad guy raising a kid. You gonna take the kid away from him? That'll be bad. And if you don't take the kid away from him then you got a villain raising a kid. Don't do that one."
0:31:23 GW: And we were like looking at each other and then I say to him, "Well, we already did it." So there was this long pause. And Frank and I are both sort of like what's gonna happen here? Is he gonna still reject it and force us to sort of tear the whole show apart and start over? And you could sort of tell he's thinking the same thing, like he doesn't like this idea at all. But on the other hand, this was the one show that was going smoothly, and if he rips it all apart, then he's gotta get another show in crisis. So after this long pause, he says to us, "Well, don't dwell on it." I said, "Okay, we won't dwell on it." Whatever the hell that meant, but so we didn't. I mean we didn't do it, we didn't change anything, but that was the kind of thing, we had very little supervision because of where I had come from. We pretty much made the show that Frank and I wanted to make and had almost no interference whatsoever.
0:32:25 GW: Gargoyles was sort of superheroes done without flagging that they're superheroes. No tights, no capes. For all intents and purposes that was the genre we were doing. A year or so later, I was in a meeting with Eisner where he announced his desire to buy Marvel, and I watched his corporate strategic guys talk him out of it and say, "Marvel's a disaster. They've got their rights sold all over the place. So you'd buy the company and then find out you can't make a movie about Spiderman because they've tripled sold the rights to three different companies. And Fantastic Four is being held by this company. And blah, blah, blah, blah."
0:33:05 GW: Now of course, years later Bob Iger just bought it anyway, and yeah, couldn't do X-Men, couldn't do Fantastic Four, couldn't do Spiderman, at least not at first, bought it anyway. Of course, it's been a huge success for Disney. But Eisner was talked out of it that day. So he turned to us, to Gary and Bruce and myself and says, "Can we use Gargoyles to start a Disney superhero universe?" And I said, "Yeah." And we began developing spinoffs, which we would do backdoor pilots for during season two of the show. But by the time those things got on the air, Jeffrey had left the company. Rich Frank had left the company. Frank Wells had died. Bruce had left the company. All the main supporters of Gargoyles had gone, and so that notion of using Gargoyles to launch Disney's own superhero universe sort of fell away.
0:34:01 GW: But for, I don't know, three or four months, it was like this is what we've got to do 'cause we can't buy Marvel, and Warner Brothers has DC. And on one level, and I don't think we even appreciated it at the time, but the great thing about Michael himself picking the shows was that everyone in every division got on board or got out of the way. In the years that followed, when Michael stopped picking the shows personally, those decisions began being made by committee. You found you had to get literally unanimous vote in order to sell a show. You needed not just one important person to say yes, or two or three, but literally you needed something like eight or nine people to say yes. And if even one said no, the others would jump off the show. And it became much harder to sell. So Michael was sort of the last of the moguls from my point of view, and we didn't appreciate it at the time 'cause there were so many shows he passed on that we thought were great, but what we didn't get was yeah, that may have been so but the shows he picked we got to just make. And that hasn't been the same in most places since then.
0:35:12 GW: I think what happened was, is that over time, there was this sort of sense within the corporation that Michael was micromanaging, not from us per se. I don't think it had anything to do with TV Animation, but just in general. And there was this sense that he had to start giving some things up. One of the things he gave up was choosing the animated series, but he didn't invest that power in another individual. Again, sort of became a decision by committee, a committee where any one person could derail something.
0:35:40 Speaker 11: Five-eights today to close at 42 and five-eights, one day after the company announced the resignation of Disney studio's chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. While rumors run rampant about where Katzenberg will end up, Disney chairman Michael Eisner said today, the company will likely produce fewer films.
0:35:57 GW: Jeffrey left. Rich Frank left. A lot of this was in the wake of Frank Wells's death, which was a tragedy in it's own right, but also destabilized the company. Roy Disney was not happy with Jeffrey. Ultimately, not happy with Michael either. So ultimately, both departed and Gary had at least a couple job offers that I know about, maybe more. I think Jeffrey wanted him at DreamWorks and had an offer out to him, and then when Bruce Cranston left to go to Dreamworks, Gary decided that DreamWorks would be a good place to sort of work with Bruce again and reform that team. So Gary also picked DreamWorks. So you had Jeffrey, Gary, and Bruce all at DreamWorks. Those were the three guys who I'd worked with. So at Disney, everyone sort of assumed that I'd be going to DreamWorks.
0:36:50 GW: When my deal was up at the end of the second season of Gargoyles, that I'd leave and go to DreamWorks. And I didn't actually want to. I wanted to stay and do a third season of Gargoyles. But it became this self-fulfilling prophesy. They were so sure I was gonna go to DreamWorks that they stopped inviting me to meetings, 'cause they thought of me as I was already spying for DreamWorks or something. It was kind of ridiculous. But they didn't make a job offer to me until a week before I was leaving, at which point, I did end up going to DreamWorks because I didn't have any other job offers. A week out they finally made an offer to me too late. So I went. And they really kind of made it clear that I wasn't welcome there anymore.
0:37:36 GW: In November of 1995, I wanna say, they came to me, and said they wanted me to do the third season of Gargoyles but they were offering me a demotion from producer to story editor. They said the show was going to be animated at Deak, but Deak had a very bad track record in those days in terms of the look of the thing, and that it would be pre-produced there as well. And they gave me a schedule in November of 1995, where the first script was due in October of 1995. And I looked at the schedule. I said, "Well, do you have a time machine? Because I don't know how I'm supposed to go back and deliver a script in October when it's already November and we haven't started." And they're like, "Well, we know that schedule's gotta be adjusted, but we wanted you to see where it had to end so you'd have to catch up. Not instantaneously, but by the end of the season you'd have to catch up." And so it felt to me like they were asking me to preside over the demise of the show. That they were reducing the budget, reducing the quality of the animation, reducing the quality of all the preproduction, giving us an impossible schedule, and then asking me on top of all that, to take it to motion.
0:38:57 GW: And we didn't even talk about money. That... We didn't even get to that. I just said, "Look, I need the weekend to think about this." And they said, "Great. Take the weekend." And then I came in Monday and they had hired my replacement already. And I said, "What the hell?" And they said, "Oh well, you can still say yes. You're a... We just figured we needed someone in case you said no." Which basically said they were trying to get me to say no. They were trying to make the deal so horrible that I'd say no. So I just said, "Fine, I'll walk away." And so I winded up going to DreamWorks, and they all sort of patted themselves on the back and said, "See, we knew he was gonna go to DreamWorks." But of course they're the reason I went to DreamWorks 'cause they basically kicked me out. Not literally, but basically.
0:39:44 GW: I ended up writing the first episode for them, which they gave to other people to add it into whatever. So the version that got on TV was, I thought, a mess, but still better than the other 12, which were done by good people, but good people who didn't know the show and didn't have time to familiarize themselves with the show. And so those last, that last season of Gargoyles, the fans and I just don't even count it as canon to the series. And we look at the comic book series that I did years later as the sort of true third season. I watched the third season. I watched every episode exactly once. That's not quite true, I watched the one that I wrote more than once, not a lot, but the other 12 I watched exactly once each and made myself do it. I don't know why, but I did. It was very painful for me on a lot of levels, not just again, not just because I didn't think they were very good, which I didn't, even though I know a lot of good people worked on them, but characters were just behaving out of character. And the stories just weren't up to our standards. And it was just a different show.
0:40:57 S1: The original Mighty Ducks movie was made because Eisner's kids liked hockey. So it got a green light. And based on the success of the movie, which the company termed market research, Eisner bought an expansion NHL team and promptly named them the Mighty Ducks. And with that purchase came an addition to the television line up. The Mighty Ducks, the Animated Series, premiered in September 1996, and Joe Barruso, and animation veteran, served as a director and supervising producer.
0:41:27 Joe Barruso: The reason I was able get a job at Disney, and went from Deak to Disney I think had more to do with the fact that the show that I had directed and produced, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego, had won an Emmy in '95 as the best children's animated program. And it was one of the first shows that they called edutainment because it had this emphasis on providing real information, whether it was historical or science, in combination with an entertaining story. It was a detective-type story where a couple of younger kids were pursuing Carmen Sandiego. It was based on a computer game that was very popular at that time. They were looking for someone specifically for Mighty Ducks at the time. They needed a producer and director. And so yeah, I went and interviewed specifically for that project.
0:42:20 JB: In the initial meetings they showed me what they had done to that point and it wasn't a lot. It's funny, thinking back on it, it had started because Friends was very popular at that time, hugely successful at that time, so they wanted something like Friends. I remember them pitching it to me that way, and I thought, "Oh well, that's interesting." In the development that I'd seen to that point, when it was the Friend's concept, it was like we had in the show ultimately, it was human characters with duck heads, so it was sort of breaking with Disney tradition in terms of DuckTales and things that were clearly Donald Duck type characters. This was a new twist on the ducks for them. And that wasn't tremendously interesting to me, but then I can't recall at what point it shifted and became more sci-fi based, you know heroes in the image of sort of Ninja Turtles. And that's when David Wise, the editor, came on board.
0:43:22 JB: It was clear it was gonna go that direction. He had had a great deal of experience with Ninja Turtles, editing those shows, so he brought all that thinking and that expertise in terms of that particular genre, in going in that direction. He bought all that. That's when I was excited about... Sci-fi had always been a big interest for me and then anime was just getting really a lot of attention at that time. It really caught my interest, so that when we started talking that way, I was like, "Oh well, this will be great. We can use anime influences on this." But yeah, I think the old school that was there, because it was ducks, was a little uncomfortable. But our character designer, Greg Guler, he had had a longstanding relationship with Disney TV, and so he had done it all. He really knew it inside out. At the same time he had a great interest in superheroes. His background, he had originally come from comic books, so his first love was superheroes. So here he had a chance to combine Disney ducks with superheroes, so it was really a perfect opportunity for him. He was just a fantastic artist. So it all sort of came together.
0:44:32 JB: I was relieved that it was moving away from sort of a Friends sitcom to something more sci-fi and hero based. All our influences in terms of doing the art were harder edged. We never really got to go as far in that sci-fi direction as we would have liked to, but the way it's done is in terms of the development and art direction, it's sort of a consensus. So you have to put it in front of a whole bunch of people. And that included at the time, that included Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz. We had meetings where they reviewed the artwork, and so they would have their input. I was kind of reaching for one end of the spectrum, and them pulling us back to something that was a little more comfortable. I was pleased that we were able to go as far as we did, given what they had done with ducks to that point.
0:45:24 Speaker 13: Six hockey playing ducks appear out of nowhere and suddenly six vigilantes in comic book get-up start showing up whenever there's trouble. Spill it. Where are they from? Another planet?
0:45:36 Speaker 14: Not another planet babe. A whole 'nother universe.
0:45:40 S1: And in this universe, there's a planet inhabited entirely by ducks.
0:45:45 Speaker 15: They called it Puckworld in honor of their greatest hero, the legendary hockey player, Drake DuCaine. He was the ultimate team captain. He saved Puckworld from a horde of conquering aliens, called the Saurian Overlords, hundreds of years ago.
0:46:00 JB: Michael Eisner, he was excited about it because he was excited about the hockey team. So here was just an opportunity to promote it.
0:46:07 Speaker 16: Well, this is sad news indeed for Duck fans. It looks like the Mighty Ducks season long winning streak may be coming to an end. They're tied with the Maine Quahogs with forty seconds remaining at Quahog Center. John Luke [0:46:20] ____ is aiming to score again. Oh, a spectacular save by the Mighty Ducks goalie, Wildwing. You know, not only are these ducks mighty, they're really ducks.
0:46:36 JB: Interesting thing that we did, which was sort of unconventional, was after the shows would come back animated, we would of course assemble them. It was decided that they were not funny enough. I would spend large amounts of time each day sitting with two comedy writers who would rewrite the shows. And rewrite jokes into the shows. And we would sit and we would have to make sure, because the shows were already animated, we would have to make sure that the new lines would work with the mouths that we already had. So, it was a grueling exercise of... They're trying to be funny, trying to... Coming up with jokes, but we had to make sure that they could work in the animation, as it was already completed. That was different, yeah, maybe one in ten were actually worth all the time and energy.
0:47:29 S1: So these hockey playing ducks were attacked by a dinosaur named Dragaunus. Am I hearing you right?
0:47:36 S1: You're bright, you got it babe.
0:47:38 S1: Beautiful. I could have stayed home watching sci-fi chiller theater, but this is much funnier. All right, what happened next?
0:47:48 JB: It was kind of disappointing that it went away just after 26 episodes 'cause there really was a big push behind it. The Disney marketing machine and merchandising machine was behind it entirely. And Mattel was on board entirely for the toy line. And I guess it was the second largest toy line in Canada, second only to Star Wars at that time, which makes sense 'cause it was hockey. And I know for a fact that Mattel was disappointed that it went away 'cause they had planned years of it. It never did horribly, but some weeks it would be just average, but other weeks it would be doing really well, so it was a surprise when we didn't get more episodes. I had worked my whole life towards the point of having the opportunity to do the traditional look, and a big thrill for me was to finally be at Disney, which was a personal goal. And so I was happy that I was able to do Mighty Ducks and sort of kick it up a notch in terms of duck properties.
0:48:47 S1: Jymn Magon. The last show the Disney Afternoon would produce was Quack Pack, a descendant of DuckTales, but with the nephews as teenagers and Donald as the parental figure instead of Uncle Scrooge. It should have been a perfect ending to Disney's run, but some things are not meant to be.
0:49:04 JM: I did move after the Goofy Movie into development on Duck Days, which eventually became Quack Pack. By that time, the whole mindset of the studio was changing. People that were valuable before were being sort of pushed aside and people that weren't valuable were being elevated and there was a lot more what I call baby suits showing up, middle management who were making decisions, creative decisions about things, people who had never made a single frame of film were making decisions. And it just got very strained, and it got so strained that I eventually said I need more money or I'm gonna go somewhere else, which was very, very difficult for me because I loved Disney. I thought I would retire from Disney, and it just didn't happen.
0:49:58 JM: From then on it was just like, I can't even follow what they're doing anymore. Well, it was part of the deal breaker. We were trying something new. We said, "How are we gonna do a series with Donald Duck when nobody can really understand Donald?" He's fine in a short where he goes, "Oh brother," or, "What's the big idea?" That kind of stuff. But to do dialogue is crazy. To try and hang a show on someone that you can't understand was gonna be very difficult. And we had some radical ideas and management looked down their noses at us. And I remember at one point our producer on the show, Larry Latham, was listening to management spouting about something or another. He looked over at me and he just, he did the throat cut, like cut, I'm out here.
0:50:51 JM: And shortly after that Carl Gears and I, who were the executive producers on the show, we just said, "We're happy to continue working on this, but we can't be running the show because management doesn't believe in it." And management said, "Okay fine." They never even called us and said, "What's wrong?" Accepted our statement and, which was basically a big, you know, forget you. And it was like, "Well, they don't care about us anymore." Like I said, that was sort of a turning point, for me anyway. I think it was a turning point for the department as well. But anyway, and I left shortly after that. We had a terrific run, and then just things felt... Started to get weird, that's all.
0:51:36 JM: And again, I can't put my finger on it, but to me, it had a lot to do with we stopped doing what we were good at and started following other people's leads. Every show we did was like number one in its slot, and so it wasn't like, "Oh ratings are slipping, let's do something different." To me, that genre, that style of Disney comedy adventure could still be going as far as I know. But it was like, "No, let's do Shnookums and Meat, and let's do Gargoyles. Let's do things that look like other studios." It just felt wrong to me. But again, I'm not in charge, I don't make those calls, I just, I'm a stupid ass show developer and story editor. I don't get to make the big decisions.
0:52:18 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.
0:52:20 Dean Stefan: And then of course Quack Pack was originally called Duck Days. The way I hear it, and I don't know, 'cause you know. It could be not exactly true, but I think it's true. Jymn Magon and, I think, Carl Gears were set to develop it, and much like Tad Stones was locked in his office for about six months or so when I first started, coming up with Darkwing Duck and all the artwork or whatever. Jymn and Carl were figuring out the show for Duck Days or Quack Pack. And at the time, Home Improvement was a big hit for Disney ABC, and they got the idea that Donald would be like the Tim Allen character. And he would have Huey, Louie, and Dewey, much like Tim Allen was the harried dad of the three kids. And the conceit was gonna be 'cause Donald couldn't really, he didn't have that many phrases he could say that... Disney actually had a list from the 30s they would hand to us, say, "These are the phrases that are recognizable, that Donald said." Because there just weren't that many words that you could make out, the way he talked.
0:53:26 DS: So their conceit was that he would have been a tailgunner in some kind of war and nobody could understand his instructions, so the military sent him to allocution school. And he would learn to speak clearer so that now he could do the sit-comy stuff with the kids and they can interact and stuff like that. So they had this whole thing worked out based upon the harried dad interacting with... And the way I hear it, they went to pitch to Katzenberg and the whole table of Disney suits. And they said, "Okay so, in this Donald, he went to allocution school because nobody could understand him in the military. Now he can speak a lot clearer." And that's about as far as they got.
0:54:07 DS: And Katzenberg says, "Wait, you wanna change the duck? You're gonna change the way Donald Duck talks?" And that was pretty much the end of the pitch, so that was it. So six months of work down the drain, 'cause without that they didn't really have a show. So then it became just really harried and it became Daisy Duck would be a roving reporter, and the kids would be tagalongs and Donald would almost be comic relief. You'd cut to him in the hammock doing gags and stuff like that. And it was a weird time at Disney 'cause we were between shows. And I think I wrote the Bible for Quack Pack, but I guess the show was okay. I'm not sure how it did in relation to the other ones. I don't think of it as one of the great ones.
0:54:49 S1: Jim Peterson, writer.
0:54:51 Jim Peterson: The origin of it is kind of muddled a little bit 'cause it kinda went through a whole bunch of different creative hands. So there was, I think it was originally Jymn Magon's project, and then he ended up leaving Disney. And Carl Gears took over. And then Carl got taken off the project and it was turned over to Kevin Hopps, who was our original story editor on Darkwing. And on the artistic side, Toby Shelton was running it, and they had kind of very different views of just between the two of them, how they wanted the series to run. And Toby really loved classic Donald Duck cartoons, and he kinda wanted to take it that way. And Kevin was more, it seemed, more on the sit-comy kind of stuff. We came in. There had already been a couple scripts written, but we ended up rewriting on what would become essentially the first episode, which was where Donald Duck gets drafted back into the Navy, of course, for some bizarre reason.
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0:56:14 JP: The one that came out, kind of was still watchable was an episode called "The really Mighty Ducks". In it Huey, Dewey, and Louie become superheroes and Donald becomes a super villain called the Duck of Doom. And the whole battle is just about Donald trying to get the boys to clean their room, and they're doing everything humanly possible to, or duckly possible I suppose, to avoid cleaning their room.
0:56:41 Donald Duck: Clean this room or else.
0:56:47 Speaker 20: Clean our room? The nerve of some people.
0:56:50 Speaker 21: We're much too busy.
0:56:52 Speaker 22: We got a million things to do.
0:56:55 S?: We got nothing to do.
0:56:57 JP: And when Duck Days was winding up, it was an era where Disney was letting go of all of their staff writers. During the Bonkers run, they were also doing a couple other series at the time. So there were like 51 staff writers at that point, at Disney TV Animation. And when we finally left at the end of Duck Days, there were less than ten. So part of the reason was that Disney lost their market when Fox acquired the rights to the NFL. And a lot of stations that were independent and carrying the Disney Afternoon, signed up with Fox and had to drop the Disney Afternoon for the Fox cartoons. But at the time, that was our perception on the executive explanations for why the affiliates were dropping the Disney Afternoon. So that and also, at the same time, Turner acquiring Hanna-Barbara. Then he let go of all of the staff writers and decided to go freelance, and Disney kind of followed suit on that 'cause there were a bunch of writers available on the freelance market that didn't used to be available.
0:58:01 S1: In 1997 Disney purchased ABC, which was the final nail in the coffin for what had been known as the Disney Afternoon. Not only was that over, syndication was basically over as well. With their new network, Disney went full Nickelodeon, even bringing in Geraldine Laybourne who headed the Nickelodeon network. And Disney Television Animation changed quickly in response.
0:58:24 S1: In an attempt that the press called The Nickelodeonization of Disney, they bought Doug out from under Viacom and brought in Joe Ansolabehere who helped develop Hey Arnold! And Paul Germain who co-created Rugrats, to launch Recess, which became the flagship show of Disney's One Saturday Morning. With One Saturday Morning, Disney would retake the title of the number one kids block. The shows were far different than what had been done in the past, and the familiar faces that had transformed television animation like Gary Krisel, Greg Weisman, Mark Zaslove, and Jymn Magon, no longer wandered the halls. But a few were still there. Tad Stones.
0:59:02 TS: They had a luncheon at the rotunda restaurant where they invited the key people in the department, key creative people in the department were all there for the executives to introduce themselves. And Jerry Laborne, [0:59:17] ____ that she's talking about her direction. And she says, and obviously they had worked this out before. Says, "Dean, I hate ducks." And then that was Dean Valentine, and he replied. "I hate ducks too." Which was basically crapping on 80 percent of the people in the room, to say nothing of you would not have been offered a job because there would be no job to be had if it wasn't for those shows that you're currently crapping on. I was luckily on vacation during that luncheon. I don't know how I would have reacted. I wouldn't have said anything, but I might have walked out, which would've had the same effect. But it was totally disrespectful.
1:00:00 TS: You can certainly say, "You guys have done a fantastic job. And now the market's changing, we want to do something entirely different and we're looking for new ideas, and here's the ideas we're starting with." It's like, "Why do you have to piss on something to move forward?" So that was, again, this... They had a pitch, they had a strategy. Upper upper managment had signed off on it. So it's just basically, here's our show runners and some of you are gonna be working on these shows and some of you are not. So it's just a management thing. It's not like a slow evolution. It is just, "Hey, this is what we're doing now." And it's like, "Okay, are we doing any more of that?" "No, we're not gonna do any more of that, but we're still gonna do those feature spin-offs 'cause they're still doing well."
1:00:45 TS: That's that, you know.
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Disney Afternoon History Part 1
Disney Afternoon Part 1
Transcript of: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2
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0:00:06 Speaker 1: Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, The Fonz, was the pinnacle of cool for a generation. The leather jacket, the jukebox and "Ayyy". And in 1981, he hit the cultural height of fame with his own Saturday morning cartoon show. Unlike, say, Mork & Mindy in which Robin Williams was limited by the constraints of reality, there's nothing inherently animated about Happy Days, but that wasn't a deterrent for the Academy Award winning studio Hanna-Barbera, when they created this.
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0:01:19 S1: The animated Fonz didn't just jump the shark, he time traveled so he could ride a brontosaurus. Jumping the shark seemed baked into the premise of many of the cartoons from this period, because they started as a gimmick and only kept gimmicking. Besides a big hit with The Smurfs, this period, for Hanna-Barbera, was littered with Scooby-Doo knockoffs.
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0:01:49 S1: The studio that once produced The Flintstones, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, Snagglepuss and The Jetsons was producing uninspired paint by numbers replicas. The parity was at its peak when the animated Fonz had a supporting role in Laverne & Shirley in the Army. The cartoons essentially amounted to barely animated fan fiction. For years, art and commerce clashed on Saturday mornings and commerce had a far better record. And yet, only four years later, a cartoon would raise the artistic bar for the medium, and strangely, it would be based on the currency of kid commerce, candy.
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0:02:34 S1: Animated television started in 1949, as it should, a talking rabbit wearing a suit of armour, riding a horse toward camera. It was the spectacular opening of Crusader Rabbit, whose other animation wasn't nearly as good as the opening. It was designed, with little to no movement, by Alex Anderson, who was inspired by Baby Weems, from Disney's behind the curtain feature, The Reluctant Dragon. In the Baby Weems segment, there are story boards with a tiny bit of motion included to keep it from being entirely static. There are quick cuts, camera movements, and narration to carry the short all the way to the end. After seeing this, Anderson believed he could use this barebones style to have notoriously expensive animation make financial sense for television. He partnered with Jay Ward and the two created The Crusader Rabbit shorts for NBC. The shorts were successful and ran for several years, which sparked Anderson and Ward to create the cartoons that they were famous for, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Despite their massive success, their partnership didn't end well. In fact, it got worse, even though Ward was already dead. Alex Anderson, animator.
0:03:45 Speaker 2: I was surprised that... To discover that my 50% equity in the characters had disappeared and was not being honored. Yeah, I went to court, sued, got them to acknowledge that I was the creator. I learned about it at his funeral, when I was doing a eulogy and the names of several of us who were doing a eulogy were indicated, and it said Alex Anderson, creator of Bullwinkle and Rocky. And somebody had scratched it out and said, "An artist who worked for Jay Ward." And I thought, "Well, what's this? Why is this in?" Then I started checking and I found that, indeed, Jay had registered the characters in his name.
0:04:31 S1: The show's limited animation technique was taken by Hanna-Barbera and updated with better animation to produce several hits like Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, and eventually the Flintstones, a primetime hit for ABC in 1960. Hanna-Barbera went on to an unprecedented run of hits and non-hits, but when it came to television animation, Hanna-Barbera was in a class of their own. However, things fell off in the 1980s. In those years, The Smurfs were their only big hit. This left a gaping hole in the market that was filled by cartoons based on toys, like GI Joe and He-Man. But their ratings were drooping as well. And then something happened that had never happened before. During the entire history of television animation, from 1949 to 1984, the most famous animation company in the world never produced a single animated television cartoon. That was about to change with a single brunch, but the events leading up to that brunch showed an American titan in peril.
0:05:36 S1: Walt Disney was dead, to begin with, he died in 1966. But he was still running the company from his grave. After all the company's internal motto was, "What would Walt do?" But hypothesizing about what a genius would do is not the same as having the genius actually there. Because when it came to the question of "What would Walt do?" the company wasn't guessing correctly. Even though it was 1984, its last motion picture hit had been The Love Bug, in 1968. And so, because the company no longer had Walt, it figured the next best thing was Ron Miller, an ex Ram quarterback and Walt's son-in-law, who became CEO in 1978.
0:06:16 S1: The best quote to describe Miller's tenure was his own, "Because of Walt, because of his influence, I second-guess myself all the time." Miller wasn't only contending with Walt's legacy, he was also dueling with E. Cardon Walker, who was the chairman of the board. Walker had been one of Walt's right-hand men. He was in charge of advertising and public relations. And in his tenure, Walker launched the Disney Channel, opened Epcot and Disneyland Tokyo, but he also had peccadilloes that were killing the company. Walker was not in favor of a $1 parking fee. "The parking lot is the first thing the guests see. We have to keep our prices low." And despite having been in charge of advertising, Walker did not believe in advertising or marketing. The Disney parks did not run ads or commercials. For some perspective, the first American newspaper advertisement was in 1704. In 1922, Queensboro Corp buys airtime from AT&T to create the first radio commercials in advertising history. The first TV ad was aired for Bulova watches in 1941, which cost $9. Advertising was not new, and yet, E. Cardon Walker wouldn't do it.
0:07:26 S1: In fact, Walker was even stingy on advertising when it came to the motion picture division. Budgets for advertising were growing since the big blockbuster Jaws. ET had cost $10 million in ads alone, but when Disney's TRON came out, they gave it such a minuscule advertising budget that no one knew the film was even out. The film took a $17 million write-down. While all this was going on, there was another heir to the Disney throne who was dubbed the idiot nephew by Uncle Walt himself, who once said, "My nephew will never amount to anything." Thanks to Walt-think inside the studio, Roy Disney was considered the village idiot. It didn't help that he wasn't the most charismatic individual. John Sanford, director, Home On The Range.
0:08:11 Speaker 3: He had this legacy kinda handed to him, and I think he really took it seriously. But on the other hand, he was just a normal guy who happened to have a ton of money. We were in La Verne, California, I think it was, at this movie theater. Doing a preview for Home On The Range, and there was a Bed Bath & Beyond, and Patty suddenly turns to Roy and says, "Oh, Roy, they've got glasses on sale. Do you mind if I go looking?" "Eh, go ahead, Patty." And Patty runs into the Bed Bath & Beyond and he says, "You know, we need to get new glasses. You know, you've got kids and they break all the glasses. And suddenly, it's 20 years later, and you don't have one glass that matches. So Patty wants new glasses." And he's just talking very frankly like that. And I said, "Yeah, I know that. I know how that goes." And then Patty comes running up. "Oh, Roy. They've got a wonderful set of glasses that are on sale. Let's go in and get them." And Roy goes, "Well, I don't wanna carry them all over the goddamn mall." And she goes, "Okay. I guess we'll get them later." [chuckle] It was just fun to watch them, 'cause it was like... Reminded me of watching my grandparents bicker.
0:09:12 S1: Roy didn't like his role at the company, nor constantly being at odds with Miller, so Roy left in 1977, but remained on the board. From afar, he watched the animation division go to hell, which was once the company's crown jewel. On Miller's watch, the Fox and the Hound was almost torpedoed, when soon-to-be-legendary animator Don Bluth left the studio after run-ins with Miller and the executives, and Bluth didn't leave alone, he took 15 animators with him. At the time, Ed Hansen, the head of the animation department, said this, "The whole animation department could have gone under at that time. As it was, we made it, but the release of the film has been delayed, and we lost half of our creative staff." Bluth had his own thoughts. "The thing that would help Disney the most is to have a living profit, not a committee. They need somebody who knows and cares about animation. They won't roll up their sleeves and plunge in like Walt did. They wanna hire somebody to do it. It just doesn't work that way. I think they've found that out now. It was a matter of constantly bumping up against Ron Miller and the older guys, people who wouldn't relinquish authority and who wouldn't make a decision except by committee. It just doesn't work that way. They had some of the best talent in the world there. But if a production head doesn't have talent or push, you won't make it."
0:10:29 S1: In spite of everything, the company did have some good news. Miller had gone against the Disney Brain Trust and was making adult fare with his newly-created Touchstone Pictures, and he had a huge hit on his hands with Ron Howard's Splash, on March 9th, 1984. It just also happened to be the same day that Roy Disney decided to resign from the board. Roy Disney's resignation set off a chain reaction. Corporate raiders tried to take over the company. Miller was forced out. Walker retired. Roy took a vice-chairman and chairman of animation role. Michael Eisner became CEO and Chairman of the Board. Frank Wells became President, and Jeffrey Katzenberg took the role of Walt Disney Studios chairman, and the corporate raiders were turned away. Eisner and Katzenberg had blazed a trail at Paramount and became the talk of the town for their track record and by throwing their names into the press as much as humanly possible. Meanwhile, Frank Wells had been vice chairman of Warner Brothers. They set about using their industry experience to transform a company that was run like a mom-and-pop shop.
0:11:33 S1: The fourth member of their team was assets, and there were assets galore that Disney simply wasn't utilizing to their full potential, or at all. The Walt Disney Company was like the drowning man in the flood who doesn't accept help from a rowboat, motorboat, or helicopter because he believes God will save him. The man dies, and he meets God and asks, "Why didn't you come to my rescue?" God says, "I sent you a rowboat, motorboat and a helicopter. What do you want from me?" Now, Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg would take the rowboat, motorboat and helicopter to the promised land. Under their leadership, the company began advertising its parks. Attendance rose 10%. They raised the price of admission, which led to hundreds of millions of dollars into the company's coffers. Eisner releases Disney classics on home video. It was initially sacrilegious in the company, but money talks. Cinderella alone made $180 million in revenue. Animation was losing money, so they thought about shutting it down. But Eisner didn't wanna piss off Roy, so they kept it around. It was a smart choice because Roy was a little bit more cunning than he seemed. He was no Richard III but he'd just usurped his own brother-in-law. And because Eisner would later fail to keep him happy, Roy would take out Eisner decades later. Roy might have been treated like Fredo, but he was secretly Michael Corleone.
0:12:57 S1: But that was a long way off, now Eisner was simply basking in his good fortune. "Such a bounty has fallen in my lap. Every day a new asset falls out of the sky. The real estate is just gravy, there are 40 unused acres next to Disneyland planted in strawberries." To re-emphasize his life on easy street, he was drinking a milkshake when he said that. And of course, there was another blue-ocean opportunity for Eisner to slurp up, animated television. On Eisner's first day at the studio, he announced he wanted to have a Disney TV cartoon on the air in 10 months.
[music]
0:13:35 S1: Willie Ito, animator.
0:13:41 Speaker 4: We knew internally at Disney that things are gonna start happening. And so, one day, they had all of the Burbank employees meet in the backstage set, we had a big open set area and everyone from the studio was there. And Michael Eisner was introduced and the whole bit. Then he gave us the overall picture as to what to expect in the future now that the new regime is here. And one of the things he commented on was we're going to alt Hanna-Barbera, Hanna-Barbera.
0:14:20 S1: According to the New York Times, he asked someone to find them the six most creative people at Disney to figure out how to make Disney TV animation work, which leads to the aforementioned brunch that started it all. One of the creatives brought to the table was Jymn Magon. Magon had produced story records for Disney music for eight years. Why bring a record producer, with no animation experience, to the table?
0:14:41 Speaker 5: I ask myself that every morning when I wake up, [chuckle] it's a bit amazing. Well, one of the things that Michael Eisner did before he was at Paramount was... I think he was head of ABC children's programming, I think he told me that he was the guy who actually bought the Scooby-Doo franchise from Hanna-Barbera, which of course, is still running after all these years. So, that was very successful, and I think he always had a soft spot for TV animation, and so when he took over the company in '84, one of the first things he wanted to do was to start a TV animation department. So, being new to the company, I think he just looked at different departments and said, 'I wanna meet some of the bright people that are doing things here at the company.' And we had just made a lot of money off of Mickey Mouse disco and a lot of projects that were new at the time in the record business. And so Gary Krisel, who was the president of Disneyland records, and myself, were invited over to Michael Eisner's house on a Sunday morning. Michael Eisner invited a bunch of people... Not a lot, I think there were about 12, in all, that were at this meeting in his living room on a Sunday morning in Bel-Air. And I had never been to Bel-Air, never been invited to someone's house up there, [chuckle] so, it was very fancy-shmancy for me.
0:16:01 S1: And there was also Tad Stones, who began his work at Disney in 1974. He was an uncredited animator on the Fox and the Hound as late as 1981. Now, he too was at the brunch.
0:16:13 Speaker 6: I was in Features, I eventually moved into Story, went to Imagineering and help design rides for Epcot Center, and back in charge of some Epcot Center documentaries that then never happened. Eventually ended up back in Features, I'm not sure they knew what to do with me. And that's about the time management changed, with Michael Eisner coming in and Jeffrey Katzenberg and those guys. And I was... Along my trials through the company, I had done some animation development for the guys over in the merchandising side of things 'cause they felt like the only way to really sell toys is to have some cartoons on TV. You can't wait for these features that come out every four years, or so, 'cause that's what it was at the time. Anyway, those same guys were pitching TV animation to Michael Eisner. I was actually on vacation, but I got a call that said, "We know you're on vacation, we know it's gonna be Sunday, but would you mind coming to Michael Eisner's house to talk about television animation?" So I was like "Yeah [chuckle], I think I can make time." Went there with like 10 people. These were the guys who basically I had worked with before and they were impressed with what I had done. And from the beginning, Michael Eisner felt like Disney is the top in animation, and it should be in every area that animation is in, it doesn't mean that television animation is going to look like feature animation, but it should be the best TV shows in animation on TV.
0:17:39 S1: Jymn Magon.
0:17:40 Speaker 7: Michael revealed that he wanted to start this new department, he wanted us to come up with some ideas and whatnot, and he actually came up with an idea himself, which was his kids who were in the other room eating cereal in the kitchen, in their pajamas [chuckle] on Sunday morning, had just come back from camp and I guess they had told him that they were eating these really cool candies called Gummi bears. And he said, "I just like the sound of that." And he looked at me, which was really weird, 'cause he didn't know me at all, and he said, "Make me a show called Gummi Bears." And I thought, "Why'd he pick me out?" [laughter] And I said, "Oh yeah, cool, great."
0:18:20 S6: So I pitched an old project, Mickey and the Space Pirates, they liked it a lot, but then they said, "No Mickey... We wanna make sure we can pull this off. Mickey is too precious." So there was a lot of respect there going in. No one was prepared to actually pitch shows. I had that artwork left over from stuff I had pitched to the merchandising guys, who were in the room, but it was kind of more feeling what Eisner wanted.
0:18:43 S7: But Tad was at that meeting, and he didn't come over for probably a full season to TV animation, but he eventually did, and thank God he did, because we worked on so many shows over there. But yeah, he was at that initial meeting, and he had a lot of great ideas. But he didn't come join us right away. And afterwards, we all met at a coffee shop, in Brentwood, and I remember us all kind of looking at each other, like, "This guy's crazy. Who wants to do a show about characters that get eaten every week?" [chuckle]
0:19:15 S6: And I remember saying, "Well, he seemed pretty sharp and respectful of animation, except for that idea about Gummi bears, that's like doing pepperoni people, or something. I don't know how to do that".
0:19:25 S7: So I think we all kind of felt like, "He's a busy man. This will all go away". It was about two weeks later I got a call, "So where's my show?" "Well, I'm writing it now", [chuckle] and I typed up something and it was horrendous, but it was the beginnings of development. And so I ended up, at one point, doing two jobs, I was still doing my record producing, but I was also developing two shows, both Wuzzles and Gummi Bears for Disney. And we didn't even have offices for the department back then. I remember we went over to a fellow named Lenny Ripps. Lenny Ripps was responsible for creating Full House and he was under contract at Disney for the time, and Lenny said, "Come on over, let's talk about this." And so there was Gary Krisel, who was going to be the president of the new division. So he was doing double duty at the same time, with records and TV animation. And Michael Webster turned out to be our office manager, and there was me. And that was the four of us sitting there around a card table in Lenny's office kicking ideas around. And that's how that department started, very bizarre and very humble.
0:20:47 S7: I remember having to take pitches from people and we were discouraged from doing that, because Disney became a big company and had deep pockets, and of course, people would come in and pitch, and then say, "You stole my ideas." And so pretty much kept to ourselves and almost all the development was from inside, from people on staff. So we didn't... It was in the time of [0:21:10] ____ and other people pitching their ideas from outside. There was a travel office for Disney across the street from the studio in Buena Vista and it was just a crummy old office building. And I think that's where we put Art Vitello when they brought him in to run Gummi Bears. And they were just sort of makeshift offices, they put some of the artists on the back lots, above the tea room. We were just spread all over. So we all became sort of bastard children.
0:21:41 Speaker 8: This is the great book of Gummi.
0:21:45 Speaker 9: What's in it?
0:21:46 S8: Well, we really don't know.
0:21:49 S6: Well, they actually developed Gummi bears kind of on a candy basis with a villain called Licorice Whip, I think. And they were actually gonna have the Gummi bears give dental hygiene messages at the end of every show. That went nowhere, and they threw it all out and came up with what was on the air.
0:22:06 S1: Instead of candy, the show got a complicated 500-year-old plus mythos. The Gummi bears were descendants of the great gummies, tasked with protecting all things Gummi from human greed and exploitation.
0:22:18 S7: I was very fortune that I got to work with two of my childhood heroes, which were Rocky and Bullwinkle. I found myself staring at Bill Scott a lot because besides doing all the voices of George of the Jungle and Tom Slick and Bullwinkle, he was a fantastic writer, and he had written all of these commercials for Quaker Oats, Quisp and Quake and Cap'n Crunch, and stuff like that. He once said to me, "You know the old story, Jymn, about how do you make a statue of an elephant? Well, you start with a block of granite and you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant". He says, but writing a script is different. You start with nothing, and you chip away until you have a story. [chuckle] And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. You don't even have the rock to work with." [laughter] And I just thought he was a delight. He died after the first season of Gummi Bears and that was just devastating for us.
0:23:16 Speaker 10: Welcome to the land of Wuz, where nobody is like anybody you've seen before. The people who live in Wuz are called Wuzzle, naturally. And as you've probably guessed, Wuzzles are a little bit, you know, different.
0:23:33 S7: I didn't stay on Wuzzles. Once we got the two shows sold, I stayed exclusively on Gummi Bears. But in the early days, we were trying to put together these shows to pitch to the networks. And we had a show called Jumble Isle, the idea was that there were these animals that were jumbled up, and there were two of each animal. And, lo and behold, it turns out Hasbro has... Already has a project called The Wuzzles, which they had plush animals at the time. And, again, I don't know the ins and outs of the business side, but it was decided, "Well, why create these things when they already exist and let's just do a deal with Hasbro to take our development and put it with their characters." which I'm not even sure they had much of a back story. But once the deal was made, then we'd develop them into talking, breathing, and living characters. [chuckle] And so what happened was that Wuzzles then went on to have its own production department, just like Gummi Bears had, but like I said, my involvement at that point, I had dropped out after it sold to CBS.
0:24:39 S1: Besides Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, Disney television animation had one more venture in its early years. Fluppy Dogs was the first animated Disney feature for television. The show revolved around the Fluppy Dogs going through an interdimensional portal to Earth. It got a 5.3 rating on November 27th, 1986. The numbers were so low that it killed off the idea for a television series based on the special, and with that, Fluppy Dogs was over before it even really got started.
0:25:08 S7: Fluppy Dogs was sort of the... I kinda call it the albatross around the neck. [chuckle] It was a cross to bear. And I think everybody in the department worked on it at one time or another. And so what happened was that we were gonna do this Fluppy special and it was going to be the kickoff for a series and it just never took off, it never... It just never happened, and I think we were all kind of glad it didn't go any further. I mean, they were cute, but I just remember it being like, "Oh crap, I don't wanna go on another meeting about Fluppy Dogs." [chuckle]
0:25:49 Speaker 11: We've been to so many worlds. I don't know how long it's been since I've seen my family.
0:25:55 Speaker 12: You can talk!
0:25:56 S1: I wish you wouldn't keep saying that, I've been talking since I was 3.
0:26:00 S1: I'm sorry, but I mean, talking dog? Fluppy, and doorways to other worlds? I just wanna find one world, my world.
0:26:12 S1: Disney was going in cheap in terms of the price for pristine Disney Animation. Disney knew they couldn't afford movie quality animation and expect to make a profit. But Disney still spent $285,000 on each episode of Wuzzles. That was double what Hanna-Barbera would spend. It was so much, in fact, that it was $35,000 more than it was being paid by CBS. Why spend so much? The reasoning was simple, if it looked better than everything else on TV, then the characters could become part of the parks, and because of the success rate of their recent films, Disney needed characters more than ever. Willie Ito, animator.
0:26:51 S4: When I was at Hanna-Barbera, Michael Eisner was the VP of Children Programming at ABC. So when we were doing presentations and they would fly out here to review what we were working on, Joe would ask us to come in on a Saturday, sit at our desk as if we're busy bees and then bring Michael Eisner and his people through, and says, "Hey, here, look, they're all working on the new show idea," and then see the presentation. So I knew of Michael Eisner. And so, when he says he's gonna hop Hanna-Barbera Hanna-Barbera, I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I came back to Disney to get away from this rat race, and I hope we're not gonna be all caught up in the middle of it." Well, to make a long story short, a few months later, a fellow named Michael Webster, who I worked with in animation, was hired on to be production coordinator for the newly forming Disney TV Animation. Michael got with me and says, "How would you like to come back to animation?" I said, "Michael. No, please don't, don't do this to me. I'm perfectly happy. I'm actually in my new career back at Disney." And he says, "Well, we're gonna have a little boutique operation. All we're gonna do is be responsible for the scripts and we'll do story boards and maybe character design, but otherwise, everything is going to be farmed off to a production house. So we're just gonna have a little boutique operation and let me dangle this carrot in front of their view."
0:28:29 S4: What it was is, he says, "I know you used to make a lot of trips to Japan and Asia, and you know a lot of the production houses over there. So I wanna send you there and meet with these different companies and talk business." And he says, "Well, we'll be sending you first class. You'd stay at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo." And then all that. How could I resist? Plus, the fact that there was a handsome increase because of my position, would be like an executive thing. "Michael, I'm gonna give you three months. That's what I could promise you." So, "Okay, that's a deal." I did the pilot storyboard for a two-minute pilot. The soundtrack was recorded. They cut the exposure sheets, and the whole bit, and with those two copies under my arm, I flew to Tokyo. As I was registering, this American gentleman approaches me, "So are you Mr Ito?" I say, "Yeah." And he says, "Oh, hey. I understand you're here to make pilot films for your fledging Disney TV animation." I said, "Yeah, I am. You could talk to me initially, but the decision will be Michael Webster, who will be arriving here in about half an hour."
0:29:50 S4: So we sat in the lobby, having a cocktail, and then Michael shows up and he's at the desk and I said, "Well, there's Michael now." So, well, we flag him over and he says... The fellow talking to us says, "What we wanna do is we wanna throw our hat in the ring. I understand you're gonna be talking to people at Toei Animation in Tokyo, then you're gonna be flying to Korea, and you're gonna be meeting with Steve Hahn at the Korean studio." I said, "Well, we only have two sets of soundtrack, exposure sheets and copies of the layouts and storyboards." He said, "No problem, they can make copies of all that." "So, okay, what do you think, Michael?" And Michael said, "Yeah, sure, why not?" So we awarded them to also do a pilot. Three months later, the three studios submitted their two-minute pilot. So the three pilots came in. We all go in the sweat box, all the executives are there, I think even Roy Disney Jr was sitting in on it, and all of the newly-appointed executives of the newly-formed Disney TV Animation.
0:31:02 S4: So we sit there and, number one, okay, number two, then number three, then the lights go on, and then now we have to say which one we liked, and it was unanimous. We liked this one, say, number two. Well, it turned out that that was produced by a company named Tokyo Movie Shinsha. It had nothing to do with the other two that we submitted, but this one had the rich, full animation and all that. So they got the contracts. So TMS is the producing company. TMS, they later did the Little Nemo in Slumberland feature also, and so they had access to a lot of young Disney animators with full animation training to work on their project. As a matter of fact, even that two-minute pilot, they sort of farmed out some of the animation to Disney animators, that's why it showed such quality and it beat out the Koreans and the Japanese studio.
0:32:08 S4: They cheated, but, in essence, they... Disney kept striving to get the utmost in animation quality, which is good, because that was one of my concerns. If Disney gets into TV animation, are they gonna lose their integrity by just schlocking it on, doing limited animation, and all that, but the quality is there.
0:32:34 S1: Jymn Magon.
0:32:35 S7: I remember we did a lot of tests with other studios. We ended up with... At least for Gummi Bears, we ended up with TMS, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, and I had to remember, when I was really used to looking at hamburger sort of animation, which is you move across the proscenium left to right, the background that keeps repeating, and that's sort of what we grew up with and were used to. And I remember the first episode of Gummi Bears, I saw Sir Tuxford ride his horse into camera. The horse came to camera, he did a full turn around, which you'd never saw in TV animation, it was like, "Holy cow! Look at what just happened!" And it was a real leap in the animation quality, and I remember talking to Karl Geurs, who was working over at, I think he was at FilmNation at the time, and he eventually came over to Disney to do the Winnie the Pooh show. And he said everyone in other studios was talking about, "Did you see what Disney did on Saturday morning? Oh, my God!"
0:33:38 S7: So the quality really raised the bar. Now, true, it wasn't feature animation, but it was a big jump in quality. Finally, they put us all together over at the Cahuenga Building, which was on Cahuenga, near Universal Studios, and it just got bigger and bigger as we added more and more people. So, on the one hand, we weren't on the lot anymore. The sort of good news was, nobody was looking over our shoulders, so that department started and grew and made its success sort of off by itself. Nobody was actually sitting down reading, our scripts, and saying, "Gee, I don't think this is very Disney, or I don't think... " There just wasn't any interference because they had other and bigger fish to fry. We went off and sold our first two shows, Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, to CBS and NBC respectively. And it just took off from there.
0:34:29 S1: Willie Ito.
0:34:30 S4: We had our own growing pains within the studio, getting people together, finding a crew, a good animator, story, bit people. And before that three months was up, I could see the frenetic pace. We were moving from office to office because it was like we move in and then they say, "You know, it's not enough room because we're expanding our staff." And I'm thinking, "What happened to the boutique operation? Now we're gonna have a whole staff. And then am I gonna have to do what I did at Sanrio, is manage this crew of people and all that." So I started feeling the pressure of that position, but in the meanwhile, I went back to Carson. And Carson van Osten, who was my boss in consumer products, and I said, "Oh, Jesus, it's the same old thing. Before I get too caught up into it, can I come back?" So he said, "Oh, yeah, there's always an opening for you to come back." So I came back to consumer products, but I stayed with the Disney TV, as far as merchandise and by-products and whatever else, but I was now out of the production rat race.
0:35:55 S1: Tad Stones.
0:35:56 S6: Anyway, I went back to Features, and pitched some stuff, and actually was considering leaving the company, and maybe just freelancing and then going into more, actually, science fiction short stories and novels. I met one of the guys who was then the head of the TV department that was just starting, and mentioned, "Hey, do you have any freelance opportunities?" And he said, "Oh, I don't know if you wanna do that, why don't you come and visit?" And I came to visit their very small building and he introduced me around, he said, "Yeah, Tad may be coming over here." Actually, he said, "Tad would be coming over here." And I just was quiet. I didn't know what he was talking about, but they ultimately brought me over to be the creative manager of the department, in which I was supposed to take pitches and come up with stories, and actually, I was supposed to take pitches more than come up with stuff, but I wasn't geared that way.
0:36:50 S6: And we had a gong show coming up with Michael and Jeffrey, which is you do like a two cents description of a show and they either like it or not. And I think we pitched 22 ideas. I think 18 of them were mine. And it's not like they were fully developed, it was like, "Hey, Trojan Birds and Legionnaire Cats, the city of Troy is up in trees, like Roadrunner and Coyote," and they gong. Anyway, Gummi Bears had been through two seasons, it was run by Art Vitello and created by Art Vitello and Jymn Magon. And Jymn had had no animation experience before that, Disney just said, "Hey, if you want the show, this is the guy who's gonna do it." So there was always a contentious relationship there. And by the third season, NBC said, "We want to change," and they tapped me and Jymn went on to, I think, DuckTales development at that point. Anyway, so that's how I got to Gummi Bears, it was just kind of like, "Hey, you, over here". And that started me story editing and producing.
0:37:51 S1: Willie Ito.
0:37:52 S4: But the question always was, "Well, how come Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, when Disney has such a stable of great characters that they could work from?" But I think initially, they says, "Well, we're gonna be making cartoons for Saturday morning, and that's a lesser market quality-wise, and we don't want to ruin Disney's image by turning out the limited animation with Mickey Mouse and all that, so let's go with new characters." But then the shows were a hit and it started to see that Disney TV was getting some recognition, and so Roy Disney said, "Well, come on, let's... Let's use some of our own characters, that way the market and the kids will gravitate to it knowing it's a known Disney character." So we did DuckTales.
0:38:52 S1: Jymn Magon.
0:38:53 S7: After two seasons of Gummi Bears, I moved over to work on DuckTales, which was a big deal at the time, we were doing this as a syndicated program as opposed to a network program, and it had already been developed, Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron were always creating episodes.
0:39:10 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti, writers.
0:39:14 Speaker 13: My career in writing really started when I met my future husband, Tedd.
0:39:19 Speaker 14: That would be me.
0:39:20 S1: I was 18 and I auditioned for Walt Disney's new Mickey Mouse Club as a performer, and Tedd was a writer for Walt Disney and chose me at an audition, and I appeared on the new Mickey Mouse Club singing and performing sign language, and then I fell madly in love with him, Tedd, and started writing him love letters...
0:39:42 S1: Didn't spell my name right, though. So, during a union break, I'm sitting on a bench back when I did smoke cigarettes and the guy from the mail room comes by and goes, "Is your name Ashy?" I went, "No, no, it's Anasti." He goes, "Well, I think somebody's been writing you a bunch of letters, we've got in the mail room, didn't know where to deliver them." I discovered that she has an interest in me.
0:40:08 S1: Yeah, and he said... When he called me, he said, "You're really funny." He thought my love letters were funny, and he said, "I think you could be a writer." And Tedd showed me Micky Mouse Club scripts and taught me how to write scripts, and then I moved up here to Los Angeles and my first job was a freelance for Hanna-Barbera on a show called Casper and the Space Angels, and I freelanced for a couple of years and then became a staff writer on The Smurfs, and I was the first woman staff writer at Hanna-Barbera, as well as their youngest at the time at age 23. And then a little bit later, Tedd started writing for The Smurfs and we became story editors together. Margaret Lush, who approved my very first cartoon episode on Casper and the Space Angels, Margaret Lush, noticed that we had fun together when we wrote, not knowing we were dating or anything. And Margaret, she teamed us up as story editors on The Smurfs and then Tedd and I wrote on The Smurfs for three years, in which it won one Emmy. And then the next show that we did was DuckTales for Walt Disney.
0:41:16 S1: DuckTales was based on the Carl Barks comic book stories about the world adventurer ducks of Duckburg, Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. The comics were a hit back in the 1940s and '50s, and their comic adventure styling seemed a perfect fit for what Disney envisioned for its television programs. Barks was never really consulted, said Tom Ruzicka, associate producer on DuckTales. He continued, "Although the show was initially based on the concept of doing Scrooge McDuck and the nephews, we discovered that a lot of stuff that made wonderful comics wouldn't translate into the '80s, or into animation. So we started evolving new characters and other things to contemporize the show. As we did that, the stories got further and further away from the comics, although a few episodes are lifted right out of them."
0:42:03 S1: We had a meeting with Gary Krisel, where he showed us two projects, DuckTales and a special called Fluppy Dogs, and we chose DuckTales. That was a good choice.
0:42:16 S1: They hired us because they knew it would be a big show with lots of episodes. We got known as people who could do 65 half hours in a season and stuff like that.
0:42:25 S1: Or 90 minutes on The Smurfs. Our first year as story editors, we'd never story-edited before, it was 90 minutes, because it was such a hit, or on DuckTales, it was 65 half hours. People would say, "How come you're not freaking out?" Well, I just knew we would get it done, but Tedd, his energy and his dedication, I credit a lot of it to him.
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0:43:18 S1: They were definitely based on the Carl Barks books, but the main thing we had to do was, again, bring the heart, bring heart out.
0:43:26 S1: Well, one day, certain executives said, "You're not following the books very closely." And we said, "We have 65 episodes to do and Carl Barks only wrote 16, and they're not that different from one another."
0:43:41 S1: Jymn Magon.
0:43:42 S7: The idea came up, "Why don't we do a mini-series that we can cut into a movie we can then show as a pilot, a kick off to the series?" So what was really fascinating, for me, anyway, was, even though the show was already in production, was to do the episodes that set the tone for the series. So the first thing that the public was gonna see was this five-parter, and we just had so much fun putting that together, because they had to work as five separate episodes, but it had to work as an overarching big story as well, so that it could be shown as a movie. And I have a picture of Mark Zaslove and Bruce Talkington and I standing in front of this chalkboard, we have this gigantic story outline in front of it of all five episodes. It was like, "Are we gonna be able to do that?" And it turned out spectacular, I was very happy with it.
0:44:32 S1: A lot of the episode went to Japan, the earlier ones, and the animation was just exquisite. It was so exciting to have the films come back, especially the earliest episodes. Wow, dazzling animation, like A-team animation. They had a party and they showed one of the fully realized episodes, it was called Duckman of Alcatraz, it was really, really sensational. But I remember even Tedd saying, "I didn't really realize how good this was." I think that no one really understood that, I don't think I did until the episodes started to come back with all the music, fully-animated, everything, and then when it debuted, it was a really, really big smash.
0:45:16 S1: Meanwhile, the LA Times' Charles Solomon was not impressed by DuckTales. In fact, he found it rather distasteful. "Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney cartoon stars owe their popularity and longevity to the fact that they were so well-animated, they ceased to exist as drawings on screen and emerged as clearly recognizable characters. By breaking with that tradition in DuckTales, the new management at Disney Studio is risking far more than the $20 million it has invested into the series. At stake is a name that has been synonymous with the best in animation for 60 years." But the risk of ruining their name in animation was well worth it, because the show was gigantic. DuckTales was big, really big. The series was in 56 countries and seen by 25 million kids each day. It went so far that it doubled the ratings of kids shows that it was in competition with. Even though each episode cost $275,000, Disney more than made its money back, and Disney television animation had finally truly arrived. Tad Stones.
0:46:20 S6: Well, DuckTales was a huge thing, because a Saturday morning show is just... Your first order is 13, and then maybe 10 the second season, and eight, and eight, and then you're lucky if you're still on. DuckTales, suddenly, it was like, "No, we're doing 65 episodes." George Lucas told us once that DuckTales was to syndication as Star Wars was to movies, I mean, it was huge.
0:46:43 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti.
0:46:46 S1: We finished DuckTales and they didn't pick up our contract. The figured, find somebody cheaper, I guess, I don't know.
0:46:53 S1: Well, actually no, let me... I would like to differ with that. It was a smash and that was a wonderful thing for our career. They offered us Aladdin, actually, and we... I think we had always wanted to develop, like kind of be in developing new shows, and when Nelvana offered us vice president of development, we took that, and they were just starting out, kind of, they had done some things, but Beetlejuice really was their first big blockbuster. So I think they did offer us Aladdin after that, and then later, The Little Mermaid.
0:47:28 S1: I was sitting in a restaurant and here are the guys from Disney, the executives, end up sitting behind us, and we were with ABC at the time. When the girls from ABC went to the ladies room, the guys from Disney leaned over and said, "We need you back. We need you back on our show 'cause we can't get anybody that's doing a good job." So we went back and...
0:47:49 S1: Yeah, we spent three years on The Little Mermaid, which was, again, a very, very wonderful experience.
0:47:55 S1: They wanted us for five years, but we said, "Well, maybe just one year at a time." So we stayed there for 14 years, just one year at a time.
0:48:02 S1: Jymn Magon.
0:48:03 S7: I know that I was a big Carl Barks fan growing up, just as a kid, reading the comic book, and so we owed so much to Carl Barks, creating the Beagle Boys and Gyro Gearloose and Magica de Spell, and all these characters. And I felt bad that he never got any credit on the series. So one of the episodes I wrote was based on one of his comic book stories, I actually gave him credit as "Story by Carl Barks, script by Jymn Magon." Because I wanted his name in there somewhere on the series. There were two things that were key to DuckTales. One was Scrooge McDuck was torn between the cold, hard cash and the warmth of his heart for his family, his nephews, that's what was always driving the series, was this man caught between the cold and the heat. The second thing was, young children don't understand money, it's just like the coins, built different sizes, and paper, and they honestly don't have a concept of how money works. But Carl Barks was a genius when it came to, "Well, what do kids understand?" Well, they understand the tactile quality of coins. And so to have a money bin full of coins that you were able to dive into and just swim through like a porpoise, just that's what kids could understand and appreciate. And the fact that he gave Scrooge McDuck that childlike quality to be able to enjoy his money in a very tactile way, I think, was a real breakthrough for the character.
0:49:31 S1: Carl Barks, an except from The Duck Man, an interview with Carl Barks, 1975.
0:49:37 Speaker 15: The office, I think, wanted me to do a Christmas story and so I'm casting around for Christmas stories. I began to think of the great Dickens Christmas story, about Scrooge. It is the classic of all Christmas story. All I did was just peep enough to sort of steal some of the idea and have a rich uncle for Donald. Well, he had turned out to be kind of an interesting character in that first story, and so I began thinking of how to use him again. I guess the fact that he was rich was the thing that triggered all further developments, is just how rich, and the showing of his wealth. I found that that was quite a fascinating subject, just piles of money. It seemed to appeal to a lot of people.
0:50:33 S1: And I just gradually made him richer and richer and then I had to develop a place where he could store the money and all the time, there were the Beagle Boys trying to steal it from him. Those things just grew like building brick walls, you just lay one brick on top of another, and finally, you've got a whole thing built. You can't dive into a pile of money like you would into a snowdrift, so he had to have a trick by which he did. And I don't explain that trick because I don't understand it myself. And he can go out in the desert, and he can smell the presence of gold. Other prospectors would have to dig mountains of dirt before they could find any nuggets, but he can smell them. I think he represents something that nearly everybody wishes they could be, some time in their life, just a little bit too rich.
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0:51:25 S1: Disney had another project that was budding at ABC. Disney had a long, strange history with this character, with lawsuit after lawsuit, but the character was about to become part of Saturday mornings in 1988, with an unlikely candidate to help lead it. Mark Zaslove, writer.
0:51:53 Speaker 16: What happened was I went to Cal Berkeley as a eventually theoretical astrophysics person, but I was also writing at the time, and I had a buddy, we were doing live action. So every summer, he was in UCLA, I was at Cal, we'd come back and we'd write a script or something. And then I wrote my first novel over there, and then it was like, "Well, what am I gonna do also for money?" I was doing magazine work, I worked for Larry Flynt for about seven months, meteoric rise and fall on Hustler and a couple of magazines like that, which was fun.
0:52:25 S1: I used to say, though, I was karmically balanced 'cause I did Pooh and Hustler. By the time anybody even asked about it, it was never a big deal, no one cared, I mean, it wasn't like I was posing or anything, or it was gonna come back and bite them. Not that I couldn't have. Oh, sorry. [chuckle] And I got my first gig in animation while I was there as well. But basically, I went, "I got to make some money." It's like, "Oh, yeah, animation. They need writers." My dad said, "Yeah, maybe try that." And it's like... So I went in, not thinking anything of it, really, and it was very easy to do, and so I was doing some freelance work and I had sent in something... Oh, GoBot, a GoBot script to Jymn Magon, and he went, "Oh, my God, it's the only funny GoBot script I ever read." So I went in, and he'd probably tell you better.
0:53:12 S1: I just had this sort of full of himself attitude, not in a bad way, according to him, but I just look back and it was just kind of funny, 'cause he saw it and he went, "This is really good writing." And I was kind of like, "Well, yeah, of course it is." It was like, "Well, it's animation." I never thought much about it. I learned to very much respect it. I always liked the product, but I was never like a fan of animation because I grew up around it, so it was always the discipline. But you have to understand, my dad was an animator/producer/director, so when I was growing up, animators were guys who were drunk on my living room floor. So I get to Disney and they're all teetotallers, except for a few people. I'm like, "You're not animators. I know what animators look like, and none of you are animators." I had gotten some bad raps there that I didn't do, I was always upset later when people say blah, blah, blah, and you were being blah, blah, blah, and I went, "I didn't do that. If I'd just known, I would have done that." I would have been much more obnoxious. I would have actually caused these problems.
0:54:10 S1: I think I could rub certain people the wrong way, although everybody could. But there was one day where, I don't know why, it was just one of those things where maybe we'd been working too hard, too long, and you're near the end of something, and I started taking tape and I started taping across the hallway. And then somebody threw something on it. It became like a giant spiderweb that stopped the hallway up. And then people started throwing items onto it, so it stuck. And so suddenly there's this whole blockade hallway, and people have thrown knickknacks and this and that. And suddenly, Michael Webster or Tom Ruzicka came by and they just look at me, like, "This is your doing, right?" It's like, "Ah, leave it." And then they walked off, 'cause they knew it was a way to blow off steam. But it was one of those almost MASH moments where you start off doing something silly, and the next thing, the entire place is sort of doing it. But I got nailed for things that other people did a lot. Where they were nicer, and I was more like, "Ah, whatever." I was certainly tolerant.
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0:55:08 S1: And I think ABC wanted a Disney show. And then it became, "What do we give them?" And then Pooh, because they had mechanical rights, I guess, was a safe thing to do. So it was above my pay grade, but I remember that it was ABC wanting, but I think the machinations were, "What can we do that's very Disney that we have?" And then it became Pooh, and then it came down to us. It was funny. I knew it could be really good if we didn't screw it up, and they didn't think I should do it, 'cause I was young and I wore long leather jackets before Matrix. I was, theoretically, a dark character. And so they were questioning me. And I remember sitting at a table. I had to do the entire Bible premise pitch in a three-day weekend, and then go have lunch with Gary Krisel and some other people and explain why this show would be great.
0:55:53 S1: I remember going, "Look, I will bet you a year's salary," and fortunately, they didn't do it. "We will win our time slot, be number one, we'll win an Emmy, I guarantee it. I bet you my whole year's salary." And we did. We were the only show to do that at that time. But it was one of those where you just go, "If you don't screw it up, how can you miss?" The designs are good, great characters. Just don't be stupid. Write really well, and it'll be a good show. I never used anything from the books, because it wouldn't have worked for me. It was always, "How can I become Mill?" And then, "How do I expand that?" For whatever reason, they previewed it on the Disney Channel and then it went to ABC. And then ABC changed their order from 13 to 20-something for the first season. So we were all kinda cranking. That was actually a lot of fun. I loved that show.
0:56:41 Speaker 17: Why thank you, Piglet. It's perfect. What is it?
0:56:47 S1: That was the first time I was in charge of anything, and actually had to have responsibility, and scheduling everything. And Karl Geurs, he was very much pro-what I was bringing to the table. And that was a great learning experience. And it was about professionalism, and a way of looking at things that Karl had without being blighted or too jaded about it. Karl was Winnie The Pooh, just had that sort of attitude. As much as people used to say that he'd walk by and we'd be shouting at each other, I don't think we were ever ever ever angry. We were just loud. We'd circle, "What about this? No, this!" And then suddenly, I guess our voices went up. And people would go, "We walk by Karl's office," and it'd be like, "We hear you guys shouting. Is everything okay?" And I'm like, "Yeah, why? What's going on?" But you couldn't ask for a better person to take you in on your first day. We fell through the cracks at that time. They didn't know we were there, really, 'cause DuckTales was getting up to speed, and I remember, Karl telling me vividly, he goes, "You know, if we're a hit, they're gonna suddenly start caring about what we do, and give us all sorts of terrible notes".
0:57:49 S1: And he was right. Suddenly everybody wanted a finger in it the second season, and we got a ton more notes. "Well, we gotta do this. Is this good? Should we do that? We don't understand this." Anytime you try to do something, whether it's cutting edge, or just very truthful, and I thought the Pooh characters we handled extremely truthfully, they weren't just saying gag-lines. They were saying a line because that's what Pooh would say, or that's what Tigger would say, which is the essence of any kind of good writing, is, "Are you telling the truth?" And so we get people who wouldn't necessarily understand that, so we get notes, and then you'd have to explain it. And then that wouldn't necessarily work. And then it would be weird. I always had a really good relationship with standards and practices, but I remember I wanted Gopher to have a huge cask of black powder, 'cause he's a miner, and he digs, and I wanted to blow the side off of a mountain.
0:58:44 S1: And of course, ABC standards and practices says, "No, you can't do that." And I try to explain why, it's like this, and then kids'll do that. And I go, "I don't think they can get all the dynamite, or black powder." And they're like, "Well, you can do it in fire." And so I thought for a while, and just as a joke, I said, "Well, could you use a thermonuclear device?" And they thought for a while, and they go, "Yeah, that's okay." And so then I brought it to Karl, and Karl thought for a while. And he went, "You know we can't make the bomb look Pooh-ish, so we can't use it." But at least I feel like, "Okay, I got a thermonuclear device approved of for Winnie The Pooh."
0:59:15 S1: There's only one thing left to do.
0:59:18 Speaker 18: You mean?
0:59:20 S1: Yes, Rabbit. We must give Piglet a "staying inside" party. It's like a going away party, only different.
0:59:31 S1: While Pooh was doing well at ABC, DuckTales remained the number one kids show for two years. Luckily for Disney, when the show was finally toppled, it was by Disney's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
0:59:44 S5: We didn't know this at the time, but I think in Eisner's mind, or whoever was in charge of that, felt like, "Let's see how the department goes first, before we start putting our flagship characters on the television." Because when you look at characters like Mickey, and Donald, and Pluto, and Chip and Dale, and whatnot, they were always on the big screen. So to suddenly take them and put them on the small screen, I think it's, you know, "Woah, we've got a big star. Let's not put them on TV, let's put them in movies," kind of thing. So yeah, we needed papal dispensation just to put Donald into DuckTales as a cameo to explain why he wasn't in the series, [chuckle] because he went off to join the Navy and left the nephews with his uncle. I remember we had to get permission to put him in to explain that.
1:00:29 S1: Tad Stones.
1:00:30 S6: I pitched Miami Mice 'cause Miami Vice was on the air. They liked that a lot because of the name. We called it Metro Mice and did a script for it, never went past that, although the villain of the script was a character called Fat Cat. We brought back and the idea of mice detectives came back as Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.
1:00:49 S5: We had two characters, two little mice called Kit Colby and Colt Chedderson. They were the original rescue rangers. And every time we would meet with Eisner and Katzenberg, they'd say, "That just is not a home run yet."
1:01:01 S6: And then later on, it was like, "Okay. DuckTales is a huge success. Are there any other Disney classic characters that we should be developing for?" And Mickey was still too precious. Donald made an appearance in DuckTales, he's very hard to animate. Goofy, yes, Goofy has always been the every man, definitely develop a bunch of things for Goofy." And then when they got to Chip 'n Dale, it was Michael Eisner who said, "Put those guys in that show," and Jeffrey said, "Home run." And that was Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers.
1:01:29 S5: And that sort of broke the ice for, "Oh, now we can start to put other characters."
1:01:35 Speaker 19: I guess there's only one thing to say then. Rescue Rangers, away!
1:01:41 S6: I felt like, on Rescue Rangers, we lost a lot from script to screen because, one, we were working way too fast, throwing things together and not being able to follow up on stuff. The schedule was the same. The problem was, on the story side, there was just two of us editing. I literally was working 13, 14-hour days, except for Saturday, it was an eight-hour day, and then Sunday, my day off, was four hours. Those hours were at the studio. It wasn't like working at home.
1:02:10 S6: There was this particular point of contention that when it came time to do the multi-part pilot, we were told that we had slipped the schedule in some way, that we had less time to do the four episodes that were supposed to kick off the show than doing any given four episodes, which made no sense to me. It means we were rushing through the most important thing. So we took our shot at it, and we did what we could. And then they took me off the show and I said, "You know what? That's fine. There's only 15 episodes to go. I got to do the pilot, to set things up, so that's good." But then it turned out they were having people rework the pilot, rewrite it, and they were being given more time to rewrite the pilot than we were given to write it the first time, and that was too much for me, and I was out the door. [chuckle] Disney had certain landmarks in your career, give you a plaque or a ring or a statue. And the two statues I really wanted were Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Tinkerbell. And Mickey was at... Hold on, I have it right here... I wanna say 15 years. Yes, I was about to get that. I was two months away from it, and it was like, that was somehow stupidly enough to make me calm down, and went back to work.
1:03:29 S1: Jymn Magon.
1:03:30 S7: It was a very strange time. I was busy trying to develop TaleSpin and we got this call that Buena Vista Television wanted someone to look at the pilot show that he had done. I think it was a four or five parter, just like what we'd done on DuckTales. I think they wanted someone to come in with fresh eyes and punch it up or do whatever, and it was like, "Well, I'm in the middle of doing TaleSpin and whatnot." Okay. So I said to Mark, "Look, I'm not gonna be here to help with TaleSpin. This'll go a lot faster if you help me." So he and I both jumped in and kinda reedited the pilot movie. And then I think we edited a couple of individual episodes that had been in the works during that time. And finally, just threw our hands up and said, "Look, we gotta get back on our project." And I think it went to Ken Koonce and David Wiemers next. So our time on Rescue Rangers was very brief. But, again, I never understood why Tad didn't follow through on that. I think it was some decision high above our heads, and I'm not sure why, so it was just like, shrug, "Okay."
1:04:32 S1: By the year 1990, Disney had invested $150 million in television animation, and by 1995, had plans to invest $400 million more. At this point, the output of television animation was prolific. Katzenberg was quoted as saying, "Each year, we are now producing as much animation as was done in the years 1920-1950 when all the classic Disney cartoons were made." These television animation shows had 22,000 full-painted cels per episode. Other shows at the time, of good quality, were averaging 15,000. Once Chip 'n Dale was another bona fide hit, Disney put plans in motion for television domination. And that plan was simple. It would have a two-hour block of cartoons when kids got home from school. Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, and their newest offering, TaleSpin. The shows were expensive, and yet, Disney wasn't even charging the networks for the shows. Instead, the deal was that Disney would retain the six minutes of advertisements to sell themselves. And this worked like Gang Busters. Despite the cost of production and advertising, the Disney Afternoon earned the company $40 million a year for a period of time. But this incredible run almost didn't happen because of one pitch. Jymn Magon.
1:05:46 S7: It didn't last long, but we had a process by which Tad would be developing a show and I'd be producing the show. And then I'd be done, so I'd go into development and he would go into production, and we would sort of flip flop as to what our duties were at TV animation. I was at a point of development, and we were creating this show called B players, and B players, I thought was kind of a clever idea. Came out at the time of Roger Rabbit. So the idea of all these cartoon characters mingling with live action people was popular at the time, so we said, "Well, who's the one character who is a star in motion pictures and then never worked again?" It was Baloo, so he said, "Oh, here's a guy who should be doing more movies, and he's not, he's stuck on the back lot. And along with him, is this kid who turns out to be a nephew, I think, of Mickey Mouse, his name was Ricky Rat, and Ricky had stars in his eyes, he wanted to be as big as his cousin or his uncle, whatever it was. And so the stories were all about Baloo and Ricky trying to convince the powers to be, specifically Michael Eisner, as a character in the show. "But it's too Western. Hey, let us do a space show. Hey, let us... " And then every week, they would be... Try in some way to get into the next gig, in that part of the cast, where all of these other people that weren't working anymore, like Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabelle Cow, and whatnot.
1:07:07 S7: Everytime we pitched it, it just never seemed to stick. And, at one point, Kaztenberg said to me, "If you say B players one more time, I'm gonna throw you out the window."
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1:07:18 S7: Well, it's like, "Well, I guess that project's dead." Everything I'd pitched there had pretty much gone. And so we were thinking, "This is gonna go", but it didn't, we'd stopped dead, and we were stuck, as we had to pitch the next series to all the department heads in Florida, and we had no show. And we had to get into production for the next 65 episodes. And on top of which, it was going to be the linchpin of the Disney Afternoon. And I remember Michael Webster, who was not a fan of mine, poked his head in my room and he said, "You better come up with a new show real quick or it's gonna be Tumbleweed City around here," meaning, we're gonna fire everyone."
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1:08:01 S7: And I thought, "How did this fall on my shoulders, that everyone's future depends on me? Am I that important? And if so, let's see a bigger paycheck, [chuckle] if I'm that important." So it was like, "Oh, scratch head, scratch head, what am I gonna do?" And one of the guys that I had hired at TV animation was Mark Zaslove, and Mark had gone onto fame and fortune by story-editing the Winnie The Pooh Show. And so Mark and I did a lot of talking, a lot of collaboration on ideas and whatnot, and I said "Mark, come in here, I have an idea that I wanna chat with you, I wanna use you as a sounding board. "So what had happened was during DuckTales, one of the early ideas about Launchpad McQuack was that he had a courier service, and that he would fly anything anywhere overnight, or something like that, was his slogan, and so, Scrooge McDuck would use him to send things to crazy places like, 'I need a whale sent to Sea World', [chuckle] in Dubai, or something.
1:09:01 S7: And that never went anywhere, because, eventually, Launchpad became Scrooge's private pilot. So I said, "What if we took Baloo from B players, who's a really good character, I believe in him, and we took this air cargo service of Launchpad McQuack's and kind of glued them together so that Baloo is the pilot and he's got this company, and it's failing because he's a jungle bum bear, and he's got this kid, the typical Disney orphan, like Mowgli, who he's gotta look out for." I said "Now, we're starting to get the dynamic of what drove Jungle Book so well, which was here's a guy who is torn between being a big kid himself, and being a father figure." And I said, "I think there's something there." And so Mark and I kicked it around and we had some drawings made up. And in three days, we had TaleSpin. And we went and pitched it, and it was like home run. [chuckle] So whereas we could pull our hair out over B players for weeks and months, TaleSpin came together really very quickly. And so Mark and I ended up as the producers on that show.
[music]
1:10:12 S1: Mark Zaslove.
1:10:13 S1: He had pitched B players and that got shot down and they didn't have that fourth show to put on, which became The Disney Afternoon. I gather it was a $2 billion pitch, eventually, that's what they made off of it, off of TaleSpin. I remember walking in sort of in the middle of something, on Pooh, or on a break or something, and it was like, "Yeah, try this. What can we do with these characters?" And then, three days later, we had TaleSpin.
1:10:35 S1: Tad Stones.
1:10:36 S6: Gummi Bears, it was just... I mean, it was cool. We were a very small team, we were still trying to figure out things. It was just a lot of camaraderie in the studio, there was only... I wanna say like, two shows going, or on a special like, Fluppy Dogs and gummies and Wuzzles had just one season, and development was going on, so it was a very small group and a lot of energy. It was a lot of fun. And then when we got into the Disney Afternoon, it was even better because we didn't have to have network approval for anything, it was basically, if we could sell Michael and Jeffrey on an idea, we then did it. [chuckle] Buena Vista Distribution had to take it, they didn't have any input, and we got a lot of close scrutiny for the first three scripts from our president, who was Gary Krisel, of TV animation, and then he had stuff to do. So you were on your own. You'd come up with anything and then when first footage came back, there was kind of like a little more scrutiny, 'cause is it going the way we expected? How is it looking? What adjustments do we have to do? You went back to doing whatever you wanted, until it's about time to go on the air.
1:11:41 S6: At which time, it'd either be good times or panic, depending on what they thought of your show. I couldn't have done Darkwing Duck and had the show we ended up with under any other situation, because I was just trying all sorts of crazy, goofy things.
1:11:57 Speaker 20: I've just gone crazy!
1:11:58 Speaker 21: Come on, dad! It's not that complicated. Cabbages from outer space are duplicating everybody in the world, so they can take over the planet. And this cow, who's really an alien, has come here to recapture them. Just deal with it.
1:12:13 S6: It started as Jeffrey saying, "Hey, you did this episode of DuckTales called Double-O-Ducks. I want a show called Double-O-Duck." Again, I thought it's just a spy parody, there's no Disney heart to it, but boss said I gotta do it, and that's all I presented to him, and he said the same thing, he says, "There's no Disney heart to this. Do it over. Thank goodness. [chuckle] He should have said, "Get me somebody else, " but instead, I went into, "Okay, what about the Shadow and Doc Savage had a team of guys who worked in secret?" And ideas like that bubbled around Silver Age of comics and he really turned into more of a superhero, a non-super superhero than a spy, but you could look at that pitch and really do a normal show, [chuckle] I guess. And then, as we got into it, it was like, "No, I'm pitching, what if you take Warner Brother shorts and gave them heart in 22 minutes instead of seven minutes of just gags?" And that's what I was chasing, and some hit it better than others.
1:13:10 S6: When I was doing development, they wanted a new character, so I came up with Double-O-Duck, who, at the time, wasn't much more than... Visually, was Donald Duck, white tuxedo mask and a little hat. But, anyway, when we were developing him, Launchpad was not in it. In my head, was Doc Savage, who had a team of guys who worked with him, who were specialists, and then that shrunk 'cause it was like too many people. And for a while, he had a sidekick who was a little guy who wore derby, so it wasn't until Gosalyn entered the picture that we really had a show based on the idea that what if Batman had a little girl who refused to stay at home? Although I don't think we said it that concisely at the time. And we still felt like we needed a guy for Darkwing to talk to. And Launchpad, because he had been there in the beginning, and we knew him, just seemed like that personality is great. So we brought him on to Darkwing, but really changed his design and subtracted many an IQ point from him. [chuckle] So he's a lot dumber in our show.
1:14:10 Speaker 22: I got a whole scrapbook, a few newspaper clippings. Of course, it's not a very big scrapbook.
1:14:16 Speaker 23: Wouldn't it be easier to fly if we were facing the other way?
1:14:20 S2: Oh, yeah, sorry. [chuckle] I sometimes have trouble with that.
1:14:25 S6: The real pilot for Darkwing Duck is an episode I wrote called, "That Sinking Feeling", with Moliarty as the villain, this guy who is based on the mole man, basically, except he really was a mole, stealing objects from the surface, bringing him down to the center of the Earth where he'd reconstruct them into this giant ray that was going to pull the moon out of orbit to block the sun so it would be darker on the surface, and Moliarty and his minions could all live on the surface. That was the first one written, and the first one boarded that we went into and act three of that, for no reason at all, they're in a baseball stadium, and suddenly, everybody's in... Except for the villain, is in baseball outfits. It was that thing where Bugs Bunny would go off screen, come back with a whole new costume.
1:15:07 S6: We actually didn't get that level of breaking reality in the show a lot, although we went crazy in different ways, but that was the one that was testing out everything, it really set up Gosalyn's relationship with Darkwing Duck and how close they were and her relationship to Honker. So that was our pilot. That's the first thing through. Then what everybody considers the pilot, which is the four part, Darkly Dawns the Duck, that story, again, became a little straighter. But the main thing is, everybody always asked about the origin of Darkwing Duck, and I said, "You know, he's basically a Batman, what am I gonna do? Have him sitting in his mansion and a duck breaks through a window and he goes, 'That's it, an omen, I shall become a duck'"? Wait. There was nothing to tell there. I certainly wasn't gonna kill his parents, and have him have this life of seeking revenge. So, I said, "No. Let's address the heart, let's bring Gosalyn." This is the story of how he adopted Gosalyn, and then that story got a little darker, dealing with what happened to her parents. But that's what made you really care about her, so... And care about her predicament.
1:16:17 S2: Yeah, once again, saved by my buzzsaw cufflinks.
1:16:21 S6: Some of the things with Darkwing were very not formulaic, but I had orders for my editors, and I said, "Every show, he has to say, 'Let's get dangerous'". The secondary thing was, "Suck gas, evildoers" when he used his gas gun, and too many people didn't hear the G, and it just didn't come up as much, that one kinda fell away. Originally, he just had one thing that he said, he said, "I'm the terror that flaps in the night." And I, frankly, forget the second line, it was like the third script in, it was an episode where Launchpad had to play the part of Darkwing, and he could never get the line right. He said, "I am the road salt that rusts the underside of your car." He continually screwed up throughout the episode, and we all thought it was hilarious. And I said, "You know what? Rewrite the scripts we've already got done. Let's give that to Darkwing. That's too good to just leave on this one episode," and that became his ongoing thing.
1:17:15 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the jailer who throws away the key. I am feeling really stupid. Boy, I hate it when I'm early. You'd think criminal masterminds would be more punctual.
1:17:35 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.
1:17:37 Speaker 24: So, throughout the entire office, everyone from secretaries to producers and everything, they ran a contest. "Name this character", "Name this star" "Name this guy", and out of all the names, out of all... You know, we each put in dozens. They picked Darkwing Duck, and of course, it was Alan Burnett, who came up with the name and he got the 500 bucks. I would never conceive the name "Darkwing Duck", it just doesn't make sense. But now, how could it be anything else. Actually, Wiemers and Koonce, who were my story editors, who by now, had left Disney to seek their fortune in sitcoms, they sued Disney because they said they had written that Double-O-Duck episode of DuckTales and they thought they should be recompensed or whatever the word is.
1:18:19 S2: Of course, anything to do with Disney, they own anyway, but they did see some kind of settlement, I believe. I don't think it was huge. Then they later came back to Disney, so I guess there's no huge bad blood, or maybe that was part of the deal. Tad really had the whole thing down first, he was really into Twin Peaks at the time. I remember our first meeting, where we all go in to pitch stories and stuff, he had two bagels or donuts in front of everyone, which was like a thing from Twin Peaks. I wasn't a fan, so I didn't really know, but I knew it was sort of an iconic thing and he was very into the whole Twin Peaks thing, and very artsy stuff. And I would later make fun of him, because he would... I guess, it became such a big deal, the show, that he would start giving notes.
1:19:05 S2: Everybody would write out notes and give it to the story editors and stuff, like, he would start cassette-taping his notes like from some undisclosed location, like Howard Hughes, or something, and then the cassette would arrive at the story editors, and then they would play the cassette for you, and I would put this cover under... A lot of that may have been because of his hours, he liked to get there like five in the morning and leave at two or three in the afternoon, 'cause he had kids, and he was an early guy. Most people like me, I'm probably the worst case, but before 10:00 AM, forget it. So I never worked directly under him, where I had to report to him directly as a story editor, but he liked to run a tight ship, I think. But the cassette notes were a bit much.
1:19:49 S2: I am the thing that goes bump in the night. I'm the neuroses that requires a $500 an hour shrink!
1:19:55 S6: I know, when we started Darkwing, they wanted to do a Darkwing Duck movie, and the studio in Paris, that later went on to work on features, they did a bunch of development that was totally ignoring what the show was. I took one stab at it. Again, this is the opposite of being left to do whatever you want. I had to pitch this, and it didn't go, and I just said, "You know, I can't do both. I can't do a movie and get this show up and running. So I'm just gonna do the show". I only found this out recently, they thought that maybe that should be a musical. Jymn Magon was actually gonna have meetings with Barry Manilow, ended up having meeting with another big music guy, not a name you would know as a star, but that was just crazy. And that really showed that, man, they don't understand what Darkwing Duck is, so thank goodness that didn't happen.
1:20:41 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the weirdo who sits next to you on the bus. I am the swan prince?
1:20:52 S1: With the Disney Afternoon well on its way, it was time for the first of the fab five to get his own vehicle.
[music]
1:21:02 S5: I think they were going to originally do it as a scout troop to the show, and that's why it's called Goof Troop. I was not there for that development, but when it finally came around who... Goofy's gotta live in Spoonerville, and have a next door neighbor, Pete, that's when we developed the show in earnest. We looked at those old cartoons of Mr. Geef or Goof, or whatever his last thing was supposed to be, and he was always... Lived in the suburbs and would wave bye-bye to his wife, as she would get in a car and drive off, and he was in charge of the kid for the day. Goofy would make mistakes, and the son would just go along with it, and I remember thinking, "Well, we've gotta kinda make it more interesting than that." And you look for the key to the series. And the key to Goof Troop, for me, was, "I don't wanna grow up to be my dad," and I think we felt like, "Yeah, that's what we want. We want this guy who's a single dad trying to raise his kid right, and was next door to this bad influence, Pete and his family." That, to us, was where all the comedy gold was to mine, skateboards and school and working in town, and commuting, and stuff like that.
1:22:11 S5: My forte was always in the comedy [1:22:15] ____ is in Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin kinda thing. Goof Troop was more of a sitcom, [chuckle] more Laverne & Shirley, that kind of thing. Feels like adventure to me because Goofy found a way to mess everything up.
1:22:30 S1: Michael Spooner, artist.
1:22:32 Speaker 25: I was a principal layout designer on the project. We decided to go with the style of 101 Dalmatians, where it was line art, the painter would actually do a watercolor under a cell line, so my line art would be transferred to Xerox to cel, like traditional animation was, and then they would do a watercolor. I had done so much design on the town in which he lived. The studio decided to name it Spooner though.
1:23:00 S1: Jymn Magon, original pitch for syndicators to buy Goof Troop.
1:23:05 S7: So, I wanna introduce you to Goof Troop. And, in it, Goofy is now a man of the 90s. He's a single dad living in suburbia, with his three phones, two TVs, one cat, and a very contrary 11-year old son. Let me take you through a day in the life. An alarm fire goes off. It belongs to good old Goofy, that good-natured klutz whose motto is, "A day without sunshine is like night!" Goofy embraces the dawn like every other obstacle in his life, with boundless and fondling enthusiasm. Now I wanna show you the difference, here is his son Goofy Jr, or Max, as he likes to be called, because he hates being silent with an adjective, like his father. Anyway, as you can tell from Max's enthusiasm, this is a school day. Now, Max loves Bo Jackson, Goofy thinks he's one of the Jackson Five.
[laughter]
1:23:50 S7: Max loves Mario Brothers, Goofy's pretty sure they'd beat him off in the third grade. Max loves his VCR. Goofy can't spell VCR.
[laughter]
1:23:58 S7: Anyway, Goofy heads downstairs to make a nutritious breakfast, or more to the point, a nutritious mess. "Junior, food's on!" Well, Max heads downstairs, shaking his head, wondering, "How does such a radical kid like me end up with such a goof for a father?" And so it would appear that the fruit seldom falls far from the tree. However, this is a curse that Max is determined to break. He desperately wants to swim out of the deep end of his father's gene pool. But you know, through all these crazy escapades, the one thing that Max learns is, "Just when you're convinced your folks are totally useless, they're there for you when you're totally useless." So relax, Max, your father ain't so bad. He's just Goofy. Hell, let's face it, kid, you're a little goofy. Welcome to the Goof Troop, kid.
1:24:47 S7: Yeah, I had done an episode called 'Have Yourself A Goofy Little Christmas', which the idea of the father-son going off and father wants to do one thing that's traditional and the son wants to do something different. That, to me, felt the most like a booby, and kind of set the tone. And, at one point, we were gonna do, I think, a two-parter, that was Goofy and his son on vacation, and somehow, that two-parter turned into the idea to do another... Well, it was called "Movie Tunes" at the time, when we did the DuckTales movie, and that was driven pretty much by Mr. Katzenberg, who told us a really interesting story about how he was losing touch with his daughter, and he decided "We're just gonna take time off and she and I are gonna get the car and just go somewhere." And he says, "I don't know where it happened or how it happened, but we connected on that trip, being trapped in a car together. That became the gist of The Goofy movie, which was father wants it the one way, the son wants it another way, then they finally find each other along the way. That was very rewarding for me, to be able to move from the TV show into a feature film.
1:25:57 S7: Well, I sat by myself for a long time, and then they finally brought in Kevin Lima. Kevin just had a whole plethora of people he trusted, and they were great. The film took off from there, and I think, of all my experiences in animation, that was the most... I want to make sure I say this right, kind of the most disconcerning, because it was so different from writing for episodic television, 'cause in episodic television, the writer becomes king. I'm not sure that that's the correct position for the writer, but just because of the time limitations, you had to have something written and, basically, directed on paper, and then everybody followed it. That's whether you could get it done in time. But when it came to a movie, it was a very flexible thing, and lots of people are involved, and they're changing their sequence, and that sequence is so powerful that it changes that sequence. And suddenly, the writer's, "Huh? I think I recognize one of my lines in here." [chuckle] I think Moss Hart said that. I would come into work and I had written a sequence and then it would be storyboarded, and I look at this and say, "This is genius! I wish I had written this!" [chuckle]
1:27:05 S7: It was terrific. It was such a new way of working for me. So it was disconcerning from the standpoint that, gee, I don't have the kind of control over the project that I used to have on TV, but that's not to say that they weren't doing spectacular work and that I was such a lucky guy to be a part of it. While I feel like I brought the essence of 'I don't wanna grow up to be my dad', I really feel like so much of all the clever little things and the sort of Kelly moments, that was Kevin and his team coming in there with their stuff, and it was just such a delight to work with them, and that's why I think I was upset, because I didn't get to follow through on the movie. I was told in... Go over here and work on DuckTales. We went to lunch as I was leaving the series, we went to Sizzler, of all places, and I just said, "I feel so bad, Kevin, because I wanted to be so helpful and such an important part of this and I feel like so much of what I did didn't end up on the screen." And he said, "But Jymn, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing, if we weren't standing on your shoulders", and it was like, "Oh yeah, I guess so" [chuckle] Made me feel better. That's just a part of the creative process. The first link in the chain sometimes doesn't look like the last link in the chain [chuckle], it's painted a different color along the way.
1:28:33 S1: After the company had dabbled in its most famous IPs, the next show would be a wholly original character, well, sort of. Bonkers was loosely based on the idea of Roger Rabbit, he was a former cartoon star who had fallen on tough times after his show had been cancelled, and became a cop, teamed with a human partner. But its production was mired in reboots and dissatisfaction. Greg Weisman, creator, Gargoyles.
1:29:00 Speaker 26: Well, I mean, Bonkers is complicated. Bonkers was a show that I developed, and got Duane Capizzi, the producer, story editor, Bob Hathcock was chosen to be the director, producer on it. We had real high hopes for it, but, unlike Gargoyles, that was a show where I got it up and running and then I walked away from it, and other people were supposed to be paying attention to it, and the very first two or three episodes that came back didn't look very good, from an animation standpoint, not sure that, initially, the show's art directed very well. We had humans and quote unquote "toons", even though the whole thing was animated.
1:29:37 S2: And I think there should have been a distinct, more kind of realistic art style, not Gargoyles, necessarily, but something, even from a color palette standpoint, that felt a little less cartoony, so that the quote unquote "toons" on the show, like Roger Rabbit, and Jitters Dog really pop, because they were toons in a human world, and I don't think that art direction ever quite came off, but I think we had a really smart show which featured Bonkers partnered with Miranda Wright as a cop. Bonkers drove her crazy but he was her partner, so she'd back him no matter what, and ultimately, they were friends, and we did a lot of smart sort of clever things about what it would be like in a Roger Rabbit vein to live in a world with toons and humans.
1:30:25 S2: And then I think, honestly, that some of the executives, when the first stuff came back and didn't look very good, overreacted. There were certainly problems, maybe even some problems with the writing, but I don't think the problems were quite as problematic as some people thought, and I think, frankly, most of it could have been fixed by fine-tuning the art direction. But I wasn't in charge and I was also in the process of trying to move over to Gargoyles and all this stuff is sort of happening simultaneously. I did get dragged back into it, and at some point, it became clear that... To Gary, that he wanted some real wholesale changes here and neither Duane nor Bob were giving him that, so both of them wound up getting booted off the show, and a guy named Bob Taylor, who had done Goof Troop, was brought in, and Bob made some very drastic and, I think, unnecessary changes to the show.
1:31:19 S2: He did get the art direction better, but Bob didn't think girls were funny, so he ditched Miranda and put in a character who, in essence, was Pete from Goof Troop, and was voiced with Pete's voice by Jim Cummings, and Jim is great. Jim voiced Bonkers. I love Jim. But it was just a dynamic that we had seen before. The story lines were, I thought, way less interesting, and I was really not happy with the change in direction on the show. And then, of course, they wanted this stuff first, so it all got very rushed and they couldn't throw away the dozen or so episodes that featured Miranda, so even though that stuff was made first, it aired last, and they actually created an episode where Piquel joins the FBI and moves away, and Bonkers is partnered with Miranda for the last dozen episodes, which again, were the dozen or so that were made first. But they created a new pilot and basically played it as if the Piquel stuff was first, and the Miranda stuff was second, when it was really the other way around. And so, it became a show of...
1:32:31 S2: It makes me sad, [chuckle] but... 'Cause I think a lot of potential was squandered there, and I think a lot of the changes were unnecessary, and, to be fair, Taylor and I didn't really see eye to eye on anything, and I finally just begged off, and asked Gary to take me off the project, 'cause I didn't think I was helping Bob, 'cause we agreed on almost nothing. And so I was just in his way, and Gary had gone with Taylor, and it was his show now, so I had to let it go, and so Gary said, "Okay." And I sort of stepped away from the project, and had very little involvement with all but the first couple Piquel episodes, which I didn't care for, which doesn't mean they're bad, it just wasn't the show I had developed, and wasn't the show that I wanted to make.
1:33:30 S1: Bonkers hit the air in 1993. It had almost been a decade since the brunch that started it all. In that time, Disney television had gone from nonexistent to the standard that everyone else had to chase. The problem was, by the time Bonkers hit the air, other networks had already caught up and would even take the lead, and now Disney television animation would have to decide if they were going to chase by rebranding, or stick with the girl who brought them to the days.
1:34:00 S2: Here were all these people from different studios, there were people like me that had never worked for any studio, in animation. I was a record producer. So I think it was [1:34:09] ____ and I, we're talking, and we said, "Are we doing this right? Are we doing a Disney TV show correctly?" And then we realize, there's never been a Disney TV show, at least a Saturday morning style TV show. And therefore, because we work for Disney, and we're making these shows, we are Disney [chuckle], what we're doing is Disney. And that, whatever we were doing, whether it was right or wrong, would be a Disney show.
[music]
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