50 Years of Hanna-Barbera, Disney, Filmation & Richard Williams with Tom Sito

USC Professor of Animation & Animation History TOM SITO shares inside stories from his 50-year career with Hanna-Barbera, Disney, Filmation, Richard Williams, and more.

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna
Barbera. Welcome to the fantastic world
of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah,

(00:31):
Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Airbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony.
Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.
I'm Greg Airbar, author of HannaBarbera, The Recorded History
from Modern Stone Age to Meddling Kids, on sale now.

(00:54):
Please get a copy and I think you'll like it a lot.
But most importantly, we are here with the person whom
Animation magazine has named oneof the 100 most important people
in animation. And he's also worked for almost
every major studio, independent studios.
He is extremely much an advocatefor the animator, which makes

(01:18):
him a great guest for this show because we talk so much about
the people of these studios. So without any further ado, I
want to welcome Mr. Tom Cito. Hi, how you doing, Greg?
And Tom, first of all, tell us specifically what your position
is at USC. So I'm a professor of animation

(01:39):
and animation history at the University of Southern
California. And at USC and the Center of
Cinematic Studies where you teach, I want point out because
I put a picture of this in the book, there is a huge wall
filled with various donors to the building of this edifice,
which I believe George Lucas helped design.

(02:01):
And one of those contributors ona great big old plaque is Hanna
Barbera production. So there's still a presence
there. But welcome to our program.
And just like to start with, as we often start, did you always
want to draw pictures? And I know you're a Brooklyn kid
just like Joe Barbera. How do you go from that to what
you do? Yeah.

(02:23):
Yeah, I was born and raised in Brooklyn as the son of a
fireman, and I like drawing pictures When I was a kid and
for any kind of like Boomer, being raised in the 50's, the
family always had the Sunday newspapers with the Sunday
funnies. So I would look at the Sunday
funnies and I'd try and copy them and, you know, I thought
that'd be great. And then when I got to school, I
found out that the class artist doesn't get beat up as much.

(02:47):
It sounds good to draw as I started drawing.
And then I was lucky enough to get into a vocational school
that specified the arts called the High School of Art and
Design. It's the same school that Ralph
Bakshi and Keith Haring and a number of other well known
people and, you know, went to inManhattan and that kind of broad
my horizons. And one of the instructors there

(03:07):
showed me how to make my cartoons move.
And I said, wow, this is great. This is a lot of fun.
And then I found out you can make a living doing this.
There was a group called the SEFO, which is the International
Animation Society. It got started in the 60s and
they would have a meeting once amonth and everybody would get
together, like all the New York artists would all get together
and go. You got a job?
No. You working?

(03:28):
No. And then we moved to California.
The business and animation is very, very different in New
York. And also the voice actors, some
of the greats. There are not as much household
names as they are in Los Angeles, and there are some
great people out there and greatanimators.

(03:50):
Oh yeah, that's true. There's some excellent people.
And there was people that moved back and forth, like the great
Disney animated Bill Tyler, who did the Devil on Ball Mountain
and all in Grumpy and Snow White.
At a certain point he relocated back east, I think after World
War 2 and was working for Paul Terry and for Paramount.
But then also he came out, I think at the very end of his
life in the 1960s, he was doing some work in Hanna Barbera.

(04:13):
I had a colleague at Filmation who when he was young was a
runner, used to drive tight luckfrom home to the studio at H and
BI. Don't remember exactly what
shows that he worked on, but he was sort of in ill health, like
he had had a stroke or two and all.
He'd be a little out of it, but just the fact that he was still
working there was just fantastic.

(04:33):
Hanna Barbera in the 70s especially became sort of a
lifeboat for a lot of golden agegeneration animators.
Bill and Joe were very loyal to the people that, you know, had
built the industry and would give work to some artists that
were like down on their luck or frail or something.
There was an animator named Hicks Loki, and Hicks was a lead
animator on Fantasia, on Dance of the Hours, you know, like the

(04:57):
alligator and the hippo dancing together and all.
Hicks did a lot of beautiful sequences on that.
But he had retired by the 70s. But then I guess like a member
of his family, I think his granddaughter or something was
born with an eye problem and needed like serious surgery,
serious medical attention. And also Hicks came out of
retirement and Bill and Joe gavehim work.

(05:18):
He would work out of his house and all.
And I remember like, I'd accompany this other assistant
and we would drive out to Hicks's house and this ancient
little man, he looked like a little apple doll or something.
You know, he would walk out, youknow, with his hands full of, of
animation scenes. And he's like, I got this thing
here. It's Godzilla versus the smug

(05:38):
monster or kelp monster or something, I don't know.
Oh yeah, the Godzilla of our power with the fabled Jana of
the Jungle. Yeah, yeah.
The voice of Godzilla was Ted Cassidy was like Lurch from The
Addams Family. I met him once in the parking
lot of H&B. And it's funny, you know,
because like, I'm 6 foot even and I was talking with a friend

(06:01):
who was 6 two and when Ted walked past us, we were all
looking up at him like, wow, that's a really big guy, you
know, but very sweet man. He was very nice personality.
Yeah, what a voice. Frankenstein Junior.
And on the Huckleberry Finn show, he was.
Oh, and he was The Giant and Jack and the Beanstalk.
He was. And he could do comedy, too.

(06:22):
He wasn't always a villain he could become.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Although like in
Godzilla, he mostly roared. A lot of fans would love to see
that again, but like some of these series because there are
other entities involved. It's complicated.
It's not impossible, but it's complicated.
Which leads me to 1 film that you worked on, which in many

(06:47):
ways was a Seminole film and yetnever released on DVD, never on
Blu-ray, which it would be so great to see on Blu-ray.
A lot of great veteran animatorsand then some brand new
animators worked on it. Also very young Jerry Beck, and
that would be Raggedy Ann and Andy.
A musical adventure. Oh yeah, yes.

(07:08):
A strange movie because it was almost an indie underground film
and at the same time a great bigexpensive musical with
merchandise and all of that. Yeah, it kind of was like a
forerunner of the big animated musicals of the 1990's.
The music was written by Joe Raposo, you know, he wrote.
Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

(07:31):
It's not easy being green and all.
It had backing from IT and T andall.
And what's fascinating was you really saw on that film a
changing of generations because there was a big generational gap
that occurred in the late 50s and 60s, not only in animation
but in live action as well. Because Steven Spielberg talked

(07:51):
about his first job directing episodes of Night Gallery.
He says everybody on my crew is in their 60s, you know, and he's
like 26 or whatever, you know? And it was the same thing on
Raggedy. And it's like all the assistants
and Inbetweeners were in their like, teens and 20s, and all the
animators were in their 60s and there was nobody in the middle.
That's because if you were trying to get into the

(08:12):
entertainment or film in the early 60s, people would tell you
don't bother, it's dying, everything's dying, forget it,
you know, waste of time. I wonder how many genres and
platforms have been declared dead that are still with us.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of going on
right now at AI and everything. Everybody's saying, oh, the

(08:32):
whole film business is going to collapse, everything's going to
die. You know, I have a book in my
collection written by Hollywood Agent called The Decline and
Fall of Hollywood and How It Collapsed.
And it's written in 1964. We're all still here.
Yeah. My thing I would say is of stop
motion, because after Jurassic Park in 1994, everybody thought

(08:56):
that's the end of stop motion. Everything is going to be
digital from now on. Even Ray Harryhausen was kind of
depressed. He was like, I don't know if
there's any future, but nowadaysthere's more stop motion being
done than in 1950. It's amazing.
And the like us always doing stuff.
Like US stuff, they had a display a few years back and
those sets, our works of art loaded with detail.

(09:19):
It was like fine museum pieces. But it doesn't necessarily
matter what the medium is. What matters is how how it
touches you and how it just captures an audience.
That's true. That's true, yeah.
And just to get back into H and BA little bit, since we're
talking about these classic films, what was wonderful about
working at H&B? Started there like around 1978.

(09:43):
And I also worked a bit in the 80s.
Well, first of all, it was huge.You know, it was like 3000
employees or whatever. It was very large.
And just walking down the hallway was like animation
history. I'd look at 1 cubicle and that
is Dave Tendler, an animator whoworked for Max Fleischer.
He did Betty Boobs and Popeyes, you know.
And then there was Cosmo Ancelotti who was assistant

(10:03):
director to Ralph Bakshi on Fritz the Cat.
And then there's Nick Nichols, who's a Disney animator,
director of shorts, just all these people.
And of course, The MGM people like Mike Law, you know, Ray
Patterson, Ed Barge and all, they were all there.
Jack Ozark was another Fleischeranimator.
You just met all these people walking around and they all had
wonderful stories. I remember up the block from

(10:26):
Hanna Barbera, there was a little market called the Oak
Crest Market. You've been there for for many,
many years. And some of the elderly guys
during the afternoon break, likearound 2:00 or something, would
stroll up to the market to get apint of bourbon for their desk
for the late afternoon shot or something.
And I remembered that Mister Barbera got in contact with the

(10:48):
manager and told me, says don't charge them, just keep the tab,
send it to me the end of the month and I'll pay it.
These guys were incredibly, you said loyal.
Yeah, you mentioned this a little while ago.
By the way, folks, if you friendTom Seto and follow him because

(11:08):
he beyond animation, has an extraordinary grasp of history
and you get daily, sometimes more than daily pieces of
entertainment and animation history, but also world history.
And it's told in such an easy toswallow away.
It's quite a delightful thing. And you look forward to that.
One of them said that at one point, I think when you were

(11:30):
there, Hanna Barbera, as far as artists had about 1400, not only
the biggest company, but the biggest employer probably in
history in the industry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're very large. At their peak, around 1979, they
were doing 12 series plus commercials, plus the feature.
I think they started a Heidi's song, Yes, like right around

(11:52):
that time, the place was just bursting at the seams.
And they had satellite studios in Australia and in Spain,
Taiwan and all these places. You know, one of the thing about
the the old folks we're talking about on Godzilla and everything
as well as Superfriends, I got to assist this fellow named Ken
Muse. Oh, Kenny Muse was one of the
Tom and Jerry animators going back to the 40s.

(12:13):
You know when you see Gene Kellydancing with Jerry the Mouse and
anchors away, a lot of that's Ken Muse.
He did a lot of that work on that stuff.
Brilliant animator, absolutely brilliant.
Long life and hard living, you know, like that.
At the end of his life, he was kind of frail.
He'd walk with two canes and kind of bent over.
I can sympathize. I'm doing that right now.

(12:34):
And it's funny because he had done the scene of Superman
talking while he's flying, and he had animated the hair going
in the wrong direction. Like the hair was going forward.
There's still Superman flying backwards instead of, you know,
being blown by the wind. So I brought it over to Kenny
and to kind of show him. I said, you know, this little
correction needs to be here. And Kenny was just just follow

(12:54):
the roughs. Just follow the roughs.
Like, okay, so I went over to mysupervisor of cleanup.
He was a fellow named Jay Sawberry.
And I explained to him the problem.
And Jake took a pencil and started to reanimate it.
And I said, why doesn't Kenny retire?
He's obviously, like, struggling.
And Jay suddenly, like, stood up, like Thumper being upbraided

(13:17):
by his mother, you know? And Jay said, Mr. Barbera says
Kenny is one of the men who madethis studio.
So as long as Kenny wants to work, Kenny can work.
And with ageism being an issue, that is an extraordinary thing.
Fritz Freling came back. You know, they worked with him
way back in the harmonizing daysand Cats and Jammer Kids, which

(13:40):
he couldn't stand working on. Then when Warner folded, he came
over and did some work on the 1st Yogi Bear feature and
whatever people needed. It's like, hey, come back, we
got a lot of work to do. We know you're good and IT.
Was a funny anecdote. A friend told me that he ran
into Tex Avery, you know, pulling in the parking lot
because Tex was working there atthe very end and he had worked

(14:02):
with tech at the Patty Frailing and he saw Tex pulling into the
parking lot. And he said the text, what are
you doing here? You know, and H&B and text
rolled the window down, said hey, don't you know if this
roll, the elephants come to die?One way to look at it, but it's
also where the legends to keep working because Lord knows when
you get up there, you got a lot of prescriptions to fill.

(14:25):
You got a lot of doctor visits and you really need to keep got
to get part time jobs, got to get out their work.
And it doesn't end for a lot of people, obviously.
And you know, the great thing about it, the two, and the plus
side is these guys had men and women.
Actually there's a lot of amazing women doing stuff there
too, like Helen Comar and Mabel Gesner and things.

(14:45):
I learned a lot from them. The amazing thing is when you
look at, especially at the early60s Hanna Barbera stuff, the
people animating had done full animation.
They had done beautiful high quality animation.
So when they had to go to limited, they knew exactly where
to shortcut so that you weren't conscious of that.
This is just a trick to save money.

(15:06):
They know exactly how to style the thing so that it seemed
obvious. And there's a lot of beautiful,
you know, like working with those early designs, like Ed
Benedict designs of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo and all this stuff.
They're just fun to draw. You pick it up in like 15
minutes and you can animate it full, you can animate it
limited, you can hold the drawing.
They always look good. And that's not an accident.

(15:28):
There's a lot of experience and intelligence went into their
design. One of the things I notice about
Tom and Jerry's and studying even more on Anna Barbara than I
than I had all my life was when you look at those Tom and
Jerry's, you see what Bill and Joe both.
Joe would board it and then Billwould had this timing and there
are held cells there, especiallywith Tom.

(15:51):
So they knew sometimes less is more.
They knew how to really make it work.
Even when they had the luxury ofbig budgets and in prime time,
those shows were still more expensive than live action
shows. So their first group of
programs, you know, through like66, I like to look at those as

(16:12):
the TV equivalent of the, you know, the five gems of Disney,
the Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.
Because even though there was great stuff after and also low
budget stuff, those really were the foundations of work and they
are still Marvel still. I mean, Johnny Quest

(16:33):
occasionally race, did a move, akarate move and it was full.
You know. Sometimes it happens, sometimes
it doesn't. But you know, when people in
live action speak to each other and Hanna Barbera stuff is
verbal, they don't necessarily move their heads a whole lot
either. I mean, they don't necessarily
just nod back and forth like Yogi might do.

(16:55):
But it's television. And in television, that worked.
Yeah, yeah. And they were designing for a
small screen. They weren't designing for a
large screen. And also the resolution on a lot
of TV sets wasn't as good as it is now with digital and all.
So they took that into account. In terms of the grayscale, they
knew like the majority of TV's were still black and white, so

(17:16):
they had to design for that. Simply.
I just say one of my favorite examples I love to use is there
was a Yogi Bear once where Yogi and Booboo were being chased by
this dog. And Don Messick did the voice.
And when the dog barked, he didn't bark.
He went Yelp, yo. Yeah, the only thing.
So he's chasing them through a park and going, yo-yo, yo, like

(17:38):
this. And they run into a cave.
And when the dog follows them into The Cave, Yogi and Boo Boo
have dressed up as Mary Poppins and and a baby in a
perambulator. So she's sitting there with her
umbrella and the baby's there. And the dog just kind of sticks
his head in and goes, yo-yo, yo-yo.
And then they cut to a close up of Yogi and Yogi says, stoop

(18:02):
that wreck it. Don't you see there's a baby
here? And then it come back to the dog
and it's just the eyes. The dog looks up, the dog looks
like the baby, and then the dog goes yo-yo yo.
So damn funny and it's so simple.
Yeah, there's a moment in Pebbles birth episode where Fred

(18:24):
wraps up Dino in the blankets and thinks it's Wilma and takes
Dino to the hospital and and when the policeman stops them,
Dino is making all these adoringglances and fluttering his
eyelashes. And Dino, it was really the
poses, it was the skill of thesepeople that made it work.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. They know exactly where to cut

(18:45):
corners. And it didn't look cheap.
It always looked good. And they had to sustain it.
And so the later cartoons were different and they were
seriously over budget when Taft came in.
And that's one of the reasons ofthe change.
They poured way too much money into their shows like Walt
Disney did, and they had to change things.

(19:05):
But elements of what they did well still showed up in later
cartoons. And the great thing also too, I
said with all these old professionals is that they were
the masters of their craft. They knew exactly what they were
doing. Oh, interesting thing too about
working for them. And that is Walt Disney had this
whole thing from very early on where he insisted nobody call
him Mr. Disney, it has to be Walt.

(19:27):
So everybody's on a first name basis.
There's always Walt and Tom and Skip and whatever like that.
Hannah Barbera, unless you were part of Bill and Joe's MGM
family, like unless you worked with them on Tom and Jerry's,
when you address them, it was Mr. Hannah and Mr. Barbera.
And we were OK with that. That's why.
You know that's what you do and.You know, Hannah was always

(19:51):
like, very, he was very methodical and everything.
Like Joe Barbera was kind of a jocular, you know, hey, how you
doing? Kind of like very good at
meetings and things like that. And Hannah was very precise.
He was always like, yes, no good.
Fixed that, changed that very fast.
And like you said, he didn't draw like the way Joe did, but
he was very good at timing. And The thing is working with

(20:13):
television is that you had to time out these shows.
You couldn't write like 2 hours worth of script.
Somebody's got to shave it down to like it would actually fits
into like a 26 minute TV show really more like 20 minutes with
commercials. He was very meticulous with his
stuff. He was always timing shows out.
You know what a stopwatch show and what I heard from other
people would happen would sometimes on the weekends he

(20:36):
would invite a bunch of the top directors or animators to a
party on his boat and everything.
So they would all get on his yacht or something.
They'd sell out like Catalina orsomething and barbecue and beers
and all. He would hand out sheets and
have them time shows. This was Bill.
Yeah, that's. Yeah, this was Bill.
He was always working. Well, you know, these guys loved

(21:00):
making cartoons and they just kept going into work no matter
who owned the company. And they loved other people that
loved making cartoons. It was pretty astonishing that
until they were physically unable, they never really
stopped working. Yeah, Mr. Hanna at the end of
his life really kind of sufferedbad from Alzheimer's, but he
still kept coming to work. He'd still be there all the
time, he and Joe both. And I was working then at then

(21:23):
it was Warner Brothers because Ted Turner had bought Hanna
Barbera from Taft, and then Ted had merged it into Time Warner.
So now it's considered Warner Brothers.
But Bill and Joe still had theirown offices.
And we had to get a briefing about what to do if you find Mr.
Hannah and he's lost because oneday, like, somebody found him,
like standing in a stairwell staring at the ceiling.

(21:43):
But I mean, the mind was still there and all, but just, it had
these lapses and all his chauffeur, Carlton was telling
me one time about they did a tribute to Bill and Joe.
They got some sort of municipal award.
So they were downtown at city center in Los Angeles.
And as Carlton was driving Mr. Hannah back to the studio, up to
Hollywood, they were driving down Hollywood Blvd. and Hannah

(22:07):
suddenly said, pull over, Pull over right here.
Like, what? Oh, OK, let's see.
He pulled the car over, and Hannah got out.
And all it was was like a bunch of storefronts.
So, you know, boarded up, just looking kind of like derelict.
There's really nothing there. And Hannah stood in front of
this one storefront and said it was here.
It was right here. What he was alluding to was that

(22:27):
it was the Mints Studio from 1930, which was like one of his
first jobs. Like he first got hired as a
painter or a cell polisher or something.
And he just stood there looking at this boarded up store and he
started weeping, you know, then got back in the car and
everything, and then they just went on.
But just that memory hits you. Yeah, the long range memory,

(22:51):
yeah. Here's a question about the
actual animation of a Hanna Barbera cartoon or even a
filmation when I know with filmation they use the stock
Hanna Barbera to a degree did, but they were still different.
When you animate it but you've got a repeated movement like a
head tilt, you know, is every sheet going to have that on it

(23:13):
or do you indicate that the heads tilting in each thing
because the body is all in pieces?
So how do you actually animate all the pieces?
Do you chart it or what? Because you're not using as many
pieces of paper. Yeah, it's charted.
It's try to like they have, they'll have like head bobs.
This will be like H1 will be thehead up straight, H 6 will be

(23:33):
the head down with a few in betweens.
And it's a standard sort of headBob.
And just in like the eye blinks were standardized and the mouth
system, we had this very elaborate system, but it's just
called 8 E mouths, which was like the A mouth, the B mouth,
the C mouth. And when you were doing
dialogue, you basically just expose those drawings.
You just say #3 #7 #9 number one, number one again #3 and

(23:59):
that would be the mouth. Movements.
And then what would you draw? You draw around that.
Yeah, you would. If you're using pre-existing
stuff, the studio expected you to sort of work into the show at
least like 30% reuse. And again too, it's like Fred
Phone Stone runs the same, talksthe same, they just changed the
backgrounds. How did they do those famous

(24:20):
Fred's house runs forever and Yogi's forest runs forever?
How did they slip the papers through and where there's a seam
or something? Or was it 1 great big sheet?
Yeah, there's a specific way, like it's a long piece of paper.
It's got the artwork in the center with blank on either
side, and the end of one side matches to the beginning of the

(24:40):
other side. So as you pan it through, when
it gets to that point, they would take the piece of paper
and put it back on the pegs fromthe beginning and run it again.
And the artwork was designed in such a way that you wouldn't
notice, like you wouldn't see a seam or anything.
So that's why when thread Flintstones running, you see the
same window go go by the same chair.
We call them bicycle pants. Yeah, it's called a bicycle pan.

(25:03):
Oh, so that's how it's because it's like I keep looking for the
seam or some sort of a a break and you can never see it because
getting in the end is identical.Oh yeah, that's all very
carefully planned out. And the mouth movements too are
they're not just flapping lips. There is a precision to how you
use them and how you chart them.And you know what's funny is in

(25:23):
the Man called Flintstone, it's funny.
My sister and I both noticed this at the beginning when the
statue is being operated on. You don't know it's a gargoyle
that fell off a roof. There's a close up of a doctor
and he says that's enough and heactually mouths the F and it's
like wow. Yeah, yeah, the F mouth, yeah,

(25:44):
FS and VS and things like that, that was all worked out.
At Filmation, was there even a larger percentage of reuse and
the stock being expected? Yeah, I think so.
I think it's about the same whenwe're doing the He Man show and
He Man had a lot of physical action characters fighting and
things like that. And one of the cameraman was a

(26:04):
weightlifter. So we would have him go on the
roof and he would do the He Man licks and live action and then
they would match that, you know,turn it into an animated
character. It was all sort of like a stock
system. So stock 1 is He Man standing
there talking and then there's the run and then there's the one
of him swinging his sword. All those things were like
calculated to be used again and again.

(26:26):
Could Johnny Quest be consideredthe show that proved you could
do action and a lot going on, even though there wasn't
tremendous amounts of movement all the time?
That's true, yes. Yeah, very much so.
Doug Wilde, he did the designs on that.
And Doug Wilde, he was a great action adventure cartoonist.
He had done comic book things and all, and he introduced me to

(26:46):
Jack Kirby and all the superheroguys.
But Doug figured out a way to like make the designs
interesting enough and all that.Even if they don't move a lot,
it still look good. But like you mentioned, in
places there's still full animation.
Like I think if you look at the Johnny Quest, like opening title
sequences, there's a cut of like3 snakes crawling along the
ground and that's all fully animated.

(27:08):
If you ever try to animate a snake, it's hard.
It's like there's no shortcuts, you know?
You just have to animate it. Yeah, you do see occasionally
even in the 70s stuff you will see the occasional like wow,
they, they had to do a little bit more here because that's not
a movement. They do all the time.
You have to look for it, but it's there and, and you're

(27:29):
right, there's plenty to look at.
And now that we're getting better, high quality, quality,
high res looks at this, especially shows like Space
Ghost and Herculoids, the art direction and the choices of
color. You know, you had backgrounds by
Walt Paraguay on scooby-doo. They were lush.
They were gorgeous. Yeah, Paraguay was one of the

(27:50):
art directors of Disney's 101 Dalmatians.
That's the thing too, is that, you know, a lot of people think
that there was a Disney group and there's a Hannah Barbara
group and there's a filmation group and all in Los Angeles.
There was one pool of talent. There was like a lot of artists.
And sometimes they go from studio to studio, they move
around and all. And the studios knew that.
They stayed in regular communication.

(28:10):
Like 1 friend of mine that was in the Disney training program.
This is like in the late 70s andhe wanted to leave Disney's, you
know, he was going to quit and work someplace else.
He gave his notice. He went back to his desk.
He sat down, the phone rang. He picked up the phone and it
was the supervisor to Hanna Barbera going, do you want a
job? And he's like, how did you know?

(28:32):
You know, because those guys allknew each other, like the head
of animations supervisor, the animators name is Bill Kyle, and
the head of cleanups name is JaySawberry.
And they all worked at Disney's before.
So they were in regular connection with the people at
the other studios. They knew that people could come
in and hit the ground running because especially at HB and

(28:52):
Filmation, you had to produce the footage.
Yeah, You know, when filmation started to go under in the mid
80s, a number of the cleanup artists and layout artists and
effects artists were picked up by Disney for The Little Mermaid
because they had to expand. And the thing about these
artists is that they don't fuss.They don't have egos, whatever.
They turn out the footage. So you have the star animators

(29:15):
doing beautiful stuff, but then you also have people who just
get it done. Right.
Do you know what the story was? Because I've heard various
stories and it's kind of sad, you know, because Lou Shimer
from all accounts was a wonderful fellow and he wanted
to keep animations of mestic as long as he could.
And he did bring in people who weren't experienced to give them
a shot. And filmation was just cranking

(29:38):
at one time. I mean, they invented the 65
episode format daytime, and everybody basically stepped
right in and did the same thing.But they invented it and they
were making so much. What happened?
Well, I think the big shows likeHe Man and Shira and all, You
know, ran its course. It had its craze and everything
when everybody loved him. Lou tried to do some theatricals

(30:01):
like Happily Ever After and someother things that didn't turn
out that well. It was also that time period of
the 1980s where you had what wascalled the Vulture Capitalists.
Basically what people would do is that an investment company
would buy their way onto a boardof directors.
Like they'd buy up enough stock of your company so that they
could become a part of that company.
And if they could seize control of the company, they're

(30:23):
basically stripping off its assets, bankrupted and then take
the write off in taxes. That happened in a lot of
different companies. This is the time period also
when Roy Disney was able to wrest control of the Disney
company away from Ron Miller, his uncle's son-in-law, and take
control. And but Roy was experienced in a
sort of 1980s type of business. What happened to Filmation was

(30:46):
there was this company that willL'Oreal Nestle's the European
cable stations were becoming popular.
You know, the 24 hour news and 24 hour this and they want to
animation product for their children's programs in Europe
and all. And Filmation kept control of
all their library, the Hanna Barbera library and the Warner

(31:06):
Brothers library and stuff had been leased out a long time ago.
So that's what they were like all over the networks and all
and smaller stations. Disney kept control of theirs
and Filmation kept control of theirs.
So getting control of Filmation was you got their library of
like whatever was like 4060 years worth of cartoon shows.
That's what they were really after even more than the

(31:27):
production company. Filmation had sold itself to
Westinghouse and is being run byWestinghouse.
And basically the deal was worked out between Westinghouse
and L'Oreal to basically like take control of Filmation.
And they got in just after I think President Carter had
passed some sort of law about 60day notice for planned Closings,

(31:48):
something like that. So they got in just in time so
that they could shut down the studio before that law went into
effect because they really, he wanted the library of cartoons
instead. And it was a shame.
Yeah. I kind of saw it was happening a
little bit. And that's, I jumped to work on
Who Framed Roger Rabbit in England at that point.
And then friends called me up and said, Tommy, you're right.
The whole thing's going down. And it's like, I didn't know I

(32:09):
was that right. I was like, I tell you a cute
Little Joe Barbera story, too, because we were telling some
Hannah stories. The great movie star Jack
Nicholson got his start as a Gopher, you know, an errand boy
at MGM under Hanna Barbera around 1957.
And he could see there's some caricatures of the crew, and
there's a kid named Jack Jackie.And of course, Jackie went on to

(32:30):
become Jack Nicholson and becamea top star and all.
It was somewhere like in the early 90s Hanna Marbera.
We're getting a lifetime achievement.
Oscar. I was there that night, too.
That was a big deal for them to be there and all.
And Nicholson at that time was in his prime, and he was always
sitting down front with his sunglasses on and his tuxedo and
all, and sort of holding court. And we're waiting for the

(32:53):
evening to begin. Everybody's was sitting down and
all. And just as a joke, Joe Barbera
walked up behind Jack Nicholson,like right behind his seat,
leaned in his ear and said, Hey,Jackie, go get me a Coke.
And Nicholson turned around, looked at him, and that big
smile came on. And he said anything you say,

(33:14):
Mr. Barbera, I. Love that there's another
parallel to in your career having worked on one of the
greatest scenes in motion pictures that those of us
sitting in the theater and I went back to Rodger Rabbit over
and over again. When all those characters are on
the screen singing smile, darn you smile.

(33:34):
I felt vindicated. I felt like they have all
gathered it changed the world. I mean, as far as our world.
And there was a film that was astonishing with how it blended
live action with animation. But you mentioned Gene Kelly and
Jerry the mouse and Ken muses work.

(33:56):
And I assume that the optical printer that a fireworks
developed at that time. I can't confirm this, but I
think that helped with the seamless technique.
Patricia Ward Kelly, the widow of Gene Kelly, said she was
watching Roger Rabbit with Gene Kelly.
And he said we did this and, andwhen you compare the two

(34:17):
sequences, 1945, you know, and then what?
A 1988. 88. Yeah, 88 and there was some
augmentation electronic, you know, computers, there are ways
to blend it with practical mechanics and electronic.
They didn't have that in 1945. And it's still beyond belief how

(34:39):
he could. And it was because Gene Kelly
was so good at precision dance, right?
You could swing Jerry around on his leg like that.
Yeah, One thing people don't notice when you look at the
scene with Jerry dancing with Gene Kelly and anchors away,
it's a Formica shiny floor, and Jerry is casting a shadow just

(34:59):
like Gene is. So Gene's like natural shadow
because the lighting, Jerry's shadow had to be drawn in by an
effects department who had to draw Jerry upside down dancing
like matching his feet. And then that had to be
meticulously painted and then blend it in.
The thing is that if it's perfect, you don't notice
because it looks natural. So like when Jessica Rabbit runs

(35:22):
down an alleyway in the dark andshe's throwing off like 3 cast
shadows. Those shadows all had to be
animated by hand and they all had to be perfect.
And if it works, you don't notice.
So it was that kind of precisionto achieve that idea, Bob
Zemeckis, the director, told us early on when we were starting
the picture. He says I'm not making some

(35:44):
serial commercial here. You got to believe the tunes and
the human beings are in the samespot.
They've got to touch each other,they got to mess each other's
hair, they got to pull each other's clothes.
We need contact and everything. It can't just be he's over here
and he's over here. You suspend belief.
And it worked. Actually, Rodger was like one of

(36:05):
the last films using the traditional optical process.
We call it mat and Rodo. So it's like travelling mats and
compositing on the optical printer because digital was just
coming into to its own, like it really wasn't really there yet.
So when one of the weasels is holding a pistol, we couldn't
create a digital pistol that looked real.

(36:25):
So they would take a real pistol, put it on the end of a
stick and got somebody from Muppets to like hold it up.
And then you had to match the character hand to hold a gun.
The scene in Roger of the Ink and Paint Club, you know, all
the waiters and bartenders are tunes and as human beings and as
where Jessica's singing. They built that entire club on a

(36:47):
set 12 feet off the ground so that you can have people from
Muppets underneath holding thesewooden dowels, holding trays
with drinks, checks and all the kind of like physical stuff that
you would have in a restaurant. And, and, and and they were all
running around underneath while the human beings are on the set
on top. And then we had to match the

(37:08):
characters to all of all those positions.
The world changed when that cameout as far as animation and what
you could do. People like Jerry back and you
and Leonard Maltin and John Kane.
Maker, you know, you were The Pioneers of anybody even
studying animation. So here's the movie that like,
brings it all together, all these characters all at once,

(37:31):
and Roger creating a character who belonged in the contemporary
and in the classic. And all of us who were working
on it, and I'll love the old characters.
We were raised on those 1930s and 40s characters, and they get
a chance to be able to do those.It was like the dream of a
lifetime. It was so much fun to be able to
animate Yosemite Sam, all those characters and do them well, as

(37:53):
full and as beautiful as possible.
You know, coming out of the 1980s, you can't be violent.
Characters can't hit each other,they can't do anything.
You know, the old Warner Brothers stuff where characters
would give each other dynamite or hit each other with a mallet
or something. You couldn't do that anymore.
And then we got Roger and Roger's like got all this
insanity and crazy stuff. You know, I remember reading the

(38:15):
script and I came in the next day to Bob Zemeckis and said,
this is really good. Like, are we going to do this
for real? And he almost looked a little
offended. He's like, of course we are
great. Like, I'm just, you know,
because I'm so used to projects when they say they're going to
do something great and then theylike undercut it and homogenize
it to when it's boring. But this, it stayed all the

(38:38):
dynamic and all the stuff and, and everybody loved it.
It's a major historical moment, your transition into teaching
and working with young people. How do they view not only the
respected classics, Looney Tunesand the Tom and Jerry's?
Do they also know about the television stuff, or if they've

(38:59):
never seen it, how they react toit?
I think it's a challenge to us as teachers to keep
reintroducing this stuff to everybody because it fades from
memory very quickly. The average college student
right now graduating college wasborn like in about 2006, 2007.
So they had never lived a day inthe 1900s, like we're from the

(39:19):
past century and like 911 means as much to them as Pearl Harbor
means to us. You know, it was a very
important thing, but it happenedbefore we were born.
So they look at a lot of that stuff that way.
So you have to kind of keep reintroducing it to the students
and going, no, you know, you should look at this, this is
very good. This is an important thing to
master. And that's saying everybody,
they should always do the same stuff.

(39:41):
But, you know, it's like actors with Shakespeare.
This is your fundamentals. And if you know this well, you
can take on any assignment and you could take on any project.
All these British actors that show up at the Oscars and all,
they're all Royal Shakespeare Company.
Patrick Stewart was standing with a spear behind Laurence
Olivier. Once.
You know, they could do comedy, they could do horror, they could

(40:01):
do drama, they could do period pictures, they could do modern
things because they've got that grounding and the fundamentals.
And that's what I try to push tothe students.
Know your fundamentals. Do you encounter students who
have that spark in the back of their eyes and and start saying,
you know, I'm going to look in the more of this?
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. It's very nice when you see

(40:23):
you're getting through to them and you see that spark pop up.
Something my old animation teacher taught me in the 70s as
a fellow named Howard Beckerman.Howard had worked for Paramount
and Terry Tunes and all in New York.
But he would say in a group of students, maybe you have like
about 15 or 20 or something, maybe about four or five are
really focused and they're really drinking up everything

(40:45):
you're giving them. And he says teach to them
because they're going to be the professionals.
Because you can see they alreadygot the fire in the valley.
Like they wanted to do it. Even like 4 out of 20 that's
still pretty good. Yeah, the the ones who like
myself and my wife, we were the ones who waited till the class
was over and then walked up to the desk and asked more
questions. Yeah, yeah.
That's it. I just did a college

(41:06):
presentation and it's same thinghappened.
Two young people had a million questions and I was like thank
you, thank you. There is hope.
It won't go away, and there willalways be those who either pick
up on it. Because when we were kids, we
saw old movies that were before our time and said, I got to

(41:28):
watch more of these Busby Berkeley's, They're nuts.
And Hitchcock, you know, they were all before.
But wow. And people only knew the Walt
Disney stuff as something that came to the theaters every seven
years. They didn't think about it was
made in 1942 something. Yeah, I would talk to students
about the original Snow White. And I said what's great about
Snow White is that Walt Disney tried very hard so that the film

(41:52):
wouldn't date. He didn't want pop illusions of
the time or cliches or things like that that were very popular
at the time. So basically it's a 1937 movie,
So you can watch this movie from1937 and enjoy it like today.
And I said, how many 1937 moviesdo you go out of your way to
see? Like, you know, I really want to
see the life of Emil Zola, you know, but you could look at Snow

(42:16):
White. I mean, the Warner Brothers
stuff went the other way where it was like, full of pop
illusions. It's full of swing music and a
lot of jokes about jitterbuggingand things like that.
And I'm constantly having explained to students, OK, this
is what a gas rationing card wasand this is what a blue plate
special meant, you know? My wife was going through some
of her family artifacts and we found an A card and I was so

(42:39):
excited. Wow, you know how it is with
these A cards. Exactly.
You know when he was falling with the dog.
Yeah, and the very first Yosemite Sam, you know, somebody
Sam's chasing bugs through this train and bugs goes into this
one's boxcar and locks the door.And, you know, somebody seems
banging on the door. He's going open the door, Rabbit

(43:00):
open the door, I see, open the door.
And then he looks at the audience and goes, you notice I
didn't say Richard. And I've seen this cartoon like
8000 times, you know, and it never registered.
One day I was driving through Pasadena and on public radio
they had the thing called The Old Time Radio Show, where they
would play classic radio broadcasts from the 30s and 40s.

(43:22):
And they said, we're going to play a Top 40 hit by Louis
Jordan and the modern Heirs from1940.
Open the door, Richard. And standing there right in the
middle of traffic, I'm like. I finally get that joke.
Yeah, Yeah. You know, Hanna Barbera didn't
do it as much in their cartoons,but the record albums, because
Charlie Shows wrote them all. He wrote jokes he wanted to
write. And so it took me decades.

(43:46):
References to Gus Grissom and lots of LBJ jokes and historical
references, and it took me years.
But it's so much fun. You don't have to get every
joke. It's like when the showrunners
of, I think it was Phineas and Ferb, I said, how do you get
away with the obscure stuff? He said.
We follow it with something thatisn't so that when they say, oh,

(44:06):
no one's going to get that. They say, yeah, but they'll get
the next one, don't worry about it.
Let's talk about some of your books, because you got a whole
shelf of them. Oh my goodness.
Yeah. Yeah, Well, I started
originally. The first book I wrote was The
History of the Animation Unions,because I was always fascinated
about the great Disney strike of1941, Again, because I knew a

(44:27):
lot of that older generation. If you asked them what's the
most important thing that happened in 1941, you figured
they would say Pearl Harbor or something like that.
It's like, no, the Disney strikethat was like the big turning
point in a lot of careers. Like a lot of people went
through that strike, you know, and you don't realize people
like the director of Charlie Brown Christmas was in the

(44:48):
Disney strike. You know, he was an assistant a
lot of famous New Yorker cartoonists and all involved in
it, like Sam Kobin. So I had a chance to talk to a
lot of artists about that. I also wrote a history of
computer graphics called Moving Innovation because I saw the
digital revolution happening. Now it's 30 years ago, but I
remember when it was people weresaying computers are coming,

(45:09):
computers are coming, they're going to put us all out of work.
Like that didn't happen. One of the things that came out
recently was I wrote a cookbook,which was kind of odd, called
Eat, Drink, Animate the Animators Cookbook.
And the joke originally was thatyears ago when I was working on
Raggedy Ann and Andy, Richard Williams had me assist the
animated Grim Natwick. And Grim Natwick was this

(45:30):
animator who, like lived to be 100 years old.
He designed Betty Boop like he sat with a blank piece of paper
and created Betty Boop for Max Fleischer.
And also he was a lead animator on Snow White.
He taught Chuck Jones how to animate.
Astounding man. I was absolutely terrified
working for him. He was actually very nice, you
know, but I was so intimidated. I was like, you know, 19 or 20

(45:53):
like that. But then when it was all over,
his way of saying thank you was he gave me his personal chili
recipe because he really liked chili.
I said, OK, you know, and it's funny because I noticed that a
lot of artists who you work in avirtual medium, when you're
working on something that's not tactile, that you're just
creating it, characters who cometo life and images and all the

(46:13):
way you relax when you want to like kick back and all is to do
something physical. So a lot of programmers I know
like the garden, refinish furniture, and a lot of people
like to cook. So I was talking to my publisher
and I said, you know, I've got Grim Networks chili recipe, and
I've got Walt Disney's chili recipe.
And Mark Davis gave me Mary Blair's martini.

(46:36):
You know which Grim? Natwick said, you haven't lived
until you've had Mary Blair's martini.
And then I have some friends at Ghibli in Tokyo who gave me
Miyazaki's personal recipe for ramen noodles.
Yeah, I said, apparently Miyazaki, when the staff was
working late, they would all take turns cooking.
And when it was his turn to cook, he had a favorite ramen
recipe that he made. And it's funny because I started

(46:57):
to ask people, and actually I have a recipe of Bill Hanna's.
I talked to Bill's family and I said, yeah, Dad loved to like,
cook this particular type of trout.
So I got a Bill Hannah recipe. I got Frank Thomas from Chuck
Jones. It's like something that people
didn't expect to be asked. It's like, do you have a
favorite recipe? I know we could talk more and I
hope you can come back and we'lljust pick subjects and just go

(47:21):
with it because you are so closeto all of these great people and
you're doing such great work by sending more young people out
into it. One of the silly stories, a
quick one, but you know, Joe Barbera used to love to tell
stories about Fred Quimby, who was the producer of the Tom and
Jerry cartoons in the early 50s when the I Love Lucy show got

(47:42):
started. Everybody kind of knew in the
50s that like this thing, television is coming on and it's
taking over and people aren't going to movies anymore.
They're staying home and they'rewatching television.
But we got to figure out how to make animation for television,
how to make it work. And Bill and Joe actually
freelanced animating some those station bumpers for the I Love

(48:04):
Lucy show. They did a very limited the sort
of caricatures of Lucy and Desi introducing the show.
And Quimby was trying to talk tothem and he says, you know,
those station bumpers, were theyintroducing of the I Love Lucy?
That's what you should be doing that like, like.
And inside, Joe is going. You know why I ought to.

(48:29):
Oh, that's great. See, I love these stories and I
thank you again for sharing thiskind of stuff because it is a
human story about people who made great cartoons and we're
all different and fascinating and that's that's what we're
trying to bring folks. So thank you again.
Mr. Tom Seto. Professor Tom Seto Mr. Seto The.

(48:49):
Professor is fine. The professor and Mary Ann,
there we go. And thanks to all of you for
listening, giving nice reviews, and subscribing.
And I couldn't be more grateful because this is something that
has become something truly wonderful for all of us.
So thank you again and until next time, bye bye.

(49:10):
We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and
Barbera with Greg Airborne. Please join us again and Many
thanks for listening.