![]() “Well, the score didn’t really work, the sound effects didn’t really work,” he said. I threw out the second half and did it over again.” I went, “What do you mean?” So he comes down to my office, and I go, “What happened between this cut and the first?” And he goes, “Well, the first cut didn’t work.” I went, “Uh huh…?” He said, “So I threw it out. So he had never, ever finished a film at this point in his life. So when we came up with the idea of What A Cartoon!, he just dusted off his senior thesis film, came up with a storyboard, and pitched it. And it never occurred to Genndy that he’d ever have a chance to create a cartoon. They were very dedicated animation directors. So these guys, in their senior year, took a job in Spain in a contracting studio to learn how to animate better. And by that point in the history of TV cartoons, no animation was being done in America. Now you have to understand that background-wise, Genndy was at Cal Arts but never finished his senior thesis film - which was in fact Dexter’s Laboratory - because he took a job with Rob Renzetti, the eventual creator of My Life As a Teenage Robot, in Spain, animating on Batman: The Animated Series, because both Rob and Genndy were really interested in animating. And we all looked down and went, Oh my god, this is amazing! So I called Genndy Tartakovsky down to my office. The next thing I knew, a second cut was coming in, which never happened. “So I threw them out, asked the composer to redo it, and then I re-edited the end.” I went, “You re-edited?” ![]() Then what was supposed to be the final cut, but what turned out to be the first cut, with music and effects, came in. And so the Dexter’s Laboratory pencil test was OK. So when the first pencil test for each show came up - by the time pencil tests happened on all these cartoons you sort of lost that first energy of, Oh, this will be great! -almost all of them were only OK. ![]() And if truth be told, while there were a few cartoons in the earliest days that I was very adamant about wanting to do - Cow & Chicken would be one of them - when Dexter’s Laboratory came, I didn’t have a feeling one way or the other, but the room was into it, so I went with the room. And at the time, I was incredibly insecure, knowing that I knew nothing about cartoons. Was there ever a cartoon that you thought was one of your favorites, like one of your favorite possible shorts that didn’t go? And can you tell one of your favorite stories about meeting a creator that turned into a series that you never thought was going to be as big as it was?ĭexter’s Laboratory was a show that when it was pitched, a lot of people in the room liked it. That story, which follows, should provide some valuable insight into the inner workings of the animation industry, all while highlighting the absurd work ethic of a young Genndy Tartakovsky-the guy who created Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack, which returns to television for a fifth season on Adult Swim in just one month. Our previous conversation with Seibert covered a wide range of topics spanning his entire career - and we intend to publish it in full eventually - but we found quite the nugget of cartoony brilliance buried within the 6,000 plus–word transcript. During that time, he launched the anthology series What A Cartoon!, which begat such classic ’90s series as The Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, Cow & Chicken, and Courage The Cowardly Dog-and, of course, Dexter’s Laboratory. īut Seibert only returned to Nick after serving as president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons for five years. Last August, we interviewed the animation guru for our Nicktoons Month package, and he chatted with us about his contributions to Nickelodeon since he helped relaunch the company in 1985 and after he was brought back aboard in 1997 to launch the anthology series Random! Cartoons and Oh Yeah!Cartoons. If you’ve been following The Dot and Line for a while, the name Fred Seibert might sound familiar to you.
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