#fred seibert

𝟑𝟏 𝐘𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐀𝐠𝐨 𝐓𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐧! 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐎𝐧 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐧 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤!!!

To mark yet another end of a year, I got the idea from an animation of an alternate ending of The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish Season One finale. This animation was created by @galacticslug on Tumblr and I began working on this in Photoshop from superimposing screenshots taken from different episodes.

The synopsis is basically the same as the original animation: It’s an alternate ending of “Battle of the Big Wand,” where Dev reveals the the Big Wand chip's location to save Cosmo, Wanda, Peri and Jorgen. After Dale is sent back home with no memory by Jorgen, Irep attacks Jorgen, which causes the Big Wand to become unstable. One of the named fairies quickly open a portal to the Star Dome, where Jorgen, Cosmo, Wanda, Peri, Hazel, Antony, Winn and Jasmine escape through. As Dev is about to enter through the portal to escape the collapsing dome, an enraged Irep impales him with his mace wand. Peri and Hazel watch in horror as the portal closes with Dev collapsing.

Why Hazel, Peri, Dev, and Irep only appear is they are the only characters who appear the in the 28 second video

Most of the Fred/Alan book is available right here at FredAlan.org, but we thought you might want to read the two introductions. Here’s Alan’s. 

...

Introduction by Alan Goodman 

August 1970. I arrived at Columbia University as an experienced newspaper reporter and joined the college paper staff, getting my first assignment almost immediately. I was disillusioned just as quickly when I saw my article in print with virtually every word rewritten. That had never happened to me in two summers of working at my award-winning hometown paper. 

Maybe radio, I thought. I rang the bell at WKCR-FM, and Fred Seibert answered the door. He’s been opening doors for me ever since.

I’ve been telling that story for years. It’s shown up in print a time or two. Recently I admitted to Fred I’m not entirely certain it’s accurate. It happened more than 50 years ago. It might have been Lou Venech, who was at the station every minute he wasn’t in a classroom, keeping a pot of coffee hot next to the porcelain frog “piggy bank” where you were supposed to drop a quarter-per-cup. When I say it may not be true, I mean the first part. The second part, where opportunity after opportunity became available to me in my career and life, that was all Fred for sure.

I know this book is about our company, Fred/Alan. But my relationship with Fred is deeper and longer than that and so much of who we were as a company was rooted in who and what Fred is as a human. Like anyone, I struggle to put into words how Fred’s massive intelligence, superior instinct, personal charisma, consistent point of view, and powers of persuasion were like an iceboat through a frozen corporate sea of immobility, copycat decision-making, blaming and shaming, and general inaction. It was amazing to see in person as co-workers, rivals, clients, and supervisors fell into line as Fred led any charge.

Those traits were on display early. 

I remember a time at the radio station when we were in the midst of one of our trademark marathons celebrating a musician’s birthday. This one happened to be a three-day event honoring Charles Mingus. At some point around mid-way through the special we started playing Mingus’ music chronologically. I believe it had been scheduled. When it was Fred’s turn to take the mic, he said “I thought we’d take a break from playing Mingus’ music chronologically and for the next few hours focus on the music that made us all fall in love with him as a bass player and composer.” He programmed his own three-hour shift. I stood there thinking, any one of us could have done that. Who cares about the schedule? It was college radio. Aren’t you supposed to be a renegade? But none of us was, only Fred.

(People always said that at Fred/Alan we broke all the rules. Not true. We obeyed lots of rules. We only broke the stupid ones.)  

After school we went off into the world, Fred into radio and I into film school, then advertising at CBS Records. We were in touch all the time. For a while I would call his new station in L.A., ask for Fred Seibert, and be corrected by the receptionist. “Sei-BERG,” she would tell me as she quickly put me on hold before I could tell her I actually knew the guy.

In radio he became a protégé of Dale Pon, who in a few years Fred would hire as the advertising agency for MTV. Dale taught Fred, and later me, things like the inextricable link between media and creative, the value of numbers, the importance of making and backing up a claim, and how to build audiences. In following Dale, Fred wound up back to New York, where he was able to resume his side hustle in freelance record production. He was doing a date in the city once and called me to come sit with him in the control room. He had just had an offer from Bob Pittman, head of The Movie Channel, one of the new premium subscription channels springing up to take on HBO. Bob had gotten a recommendation from Dale for Fred to run promotion for the network (Bob and Dale knew each other from their days at NBC Radio). Fred was struggling with the decision. I looked at the musicians on the other side of the glass. One or two of them were drunk, I think there was an argument in progress, no one was sure what was happening, and it was unclear that anything worthwhile was going to get recorded that evening. “Do it,” I told him.

It wasn’t long before I was by his side producing animation for the network and within days, working with him to plan MTV. 

One of Fred’s great innovations in on-air promotion was bringing The Movie Channel subscribers to New York for two days of sightseeing, dining, and promo recording. He believed in the value of unscripted opinions from real people, a strategy we later employed at Nickelodeon with real kids. One commercial for The Movie Channel has stayed with me all these years. “There are only three things in my town that are 24 hours,” the man told our camera. “The hospital, the diner, and The Movie Channel.” I’ve never written anything that good.

“24 hours a day” was an example of a promotable promise for The Movie Channel that we also used for MTV, in an era when it was typical for us to develop a list of five or six promises for the networks we were promoting. 

Again, Fred’s idea, borne out of his radio experience where the DJs had a set of “liners” they’d use in breaks to call out the station’s attributes.

Anyone who ever worked with us knows about our affection for promises. We objected to slogans – slogans wear out and get replaced. Also, we insisted on devoting a LOT of time to promotion, which would have hastened that burn-out. With the right promises, you could execute endlessly and never run out of ways to creatively tell each story. I could probably rattle off all the promises, to this day. It’s a system that wouldn’t work in today’s era where everything is streamed, content is king, and brands are less valued. But for years I would run into generations of promo producers who learned from Fred and me, and would tell me about their promises, long after that strategy ceased being useful.

Another of our innovations was producing TV “audio first.” As MTV began building its staff and Fred started hiring producers, he found he couldn’t afford seasoned pros and none existed in TV who understood music the way we did. We had spent years doing segues and mixes and montages in college radio. Sound, we believed, mattered more than picture. If something doesn’t sound right, it’s grating as hell. If a second-long image isn’t right, what difference does it make? People are barely watching anyway. So we worked with newbies and sent them all to Clack Studios, a recording studio where I had worked in the music business, owned by the best audio engineer in New York. Audio studio time was $50 an hour. Video hours at video studios were $300 an hour, before they started adding all the extras like special effects processors, title generators, and dubs. Better to have novices crapping around at a lower rate than what the video joints charged. Like many things with Fred, there was a practical reason, but the aesthetic reason was there as well. 

Later, as we built Fred/Alan, I was often in a position where young staff members were asking me to interpret Fred for them. “I brought him an ad to see,” they’d tell me, “and he wrote a note on it, but I don’t really know what he wants.”

I would try to explain Fred to them. “Look, Fred is at heart a jazz musician,” I’d tell them. “You brought him something, and based on what you showed him he started improvising. He started riffing. I guess he wants to see something different, because if he were in love with what you showed him he would have told you. But don’t worry too much about what he told you. It was just a riff. He doesn’t necessarily want to see that exact thing, and probably won’t even remember it. He wants you to think. He wants something that works. Go away and do some more work. Don’t bring him one idea, because I can tell you he doesn’t want to see one idea. Don’t come back and tell him his idea doesn’t work either. But if you come back and show him, ‘I tried this direction, and then I tried this, and then I tried this third one, and then I thought about this, and this seemed like the best way for us to go,’ he may still not like what you have but he will totally respect your process of development and believe you did what he wants you to do.”

Other times I’d tell them, “Yeah, I can’t read his writing either.”

While we could often finish each other’s sentences, we weren’t the same person.

An important thing to say about Fred is how he is the world’s greatest champion of great ideas. A myth abounds that he only likes his own stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have never seen anyone discard his own work faster in favor of someone else’s when it was clear the other person had a better idea. It was a great lesson to me. There can be great satisfaction in recognizing the contributions of others.

I think of all the things we did at Fred/Alan I am most pleased about the careers we launched. Not the work. The work was great. I still have some of it hanging on the wall because I love looking at it. But nothing matches the joy I feel knowing I pulled people out of the team to tell them, “You’re a writer. You don’t know it yet, but you’re a writer.” And now those people are writers. Or the junior art director who was supposed to accompany me to a shoot I was directing who I told at the last moment, “I’m not going. You’re directing.” It was his first of many. He just needed the push. Fred/Alan was a wonderful nest, but how thrilling when we could push someone out of the comfort and safety into the wider world.

At Fred/Alan we filled extra offices with colleagues who needed space because we wanted those brains around us. I once hired a comedy writer to write ads for us because he made me laugh. (Later he hired me to run his sitcom.) We made account executives out of people who had never been account executives before. We boosted voiceover artists into being producers. We convinced East Village artists to do advertising for MTV, getting them to take commercial work for the first time in their lives because we promised them they could do whatever they wanted – we wouldn’t change a line in their drawings. (R. Crumb, the legendary underground comic book artist, did a full-page ad for MTV that was basically about how much he hated MTV. It’s a brilliant drawing.)

In today’s corporate world HR departments write job descriptions, then go looking for people who fit those descriptions. It’s an impossible assignment, because no one will ever match your dream applicant. Our attitude was, let’s surround ourselves with smart people we like being with, and we’ll figure out what they’re good at. Our business cards never had titles on them. That wasn’t the part we cared about. Instead, we gave people shots and we were loyal. I still work with suppliers who were Fred/Alan people 40 years ago.

It was also a great place for personal experimentation, craft building, and innovating. I would never have gotten the breaks I got without Fred’s cheerleading for me. When we were younger, he hired me to write liner notes for his records. He hired me to produce animation at The Movie Channel when all I had done to earn the job was attend one class in animation at film school before dropping the class. It’s not common for advertising agency vice presidents to direct commercials, but I loved doing it and Fred was absolutely determined that I should do things that I loved, so I was often our director. When Nickelodeon was getting ready to produce its first sitcom, he told them the reason the pilot to “Hey Dude” sucked was that they needed a story editor like Alan to supervise the writing. I had never done that job before. But I wrote a new pilot and we went on to do five seasons and suddenly my career as a writer/producer was launched.

Our Fred/Alan people were wonderful. But let me say this about the work. The work was frikken unbelievable. We did more work, and more great work, than seems possible to me now. Part of that comes from the fact that Fred and I love to work. A guy who was a big-deal consultant to MTV pointed this out to me early in our agency’s life. He had sold his direct mail company to American Express and didn’t have to do anything anymore. “I’ve never seen anything like you guys before,” he told me. “You really seem to still love doing the work.”

I don’t know about Fred, but I don’t think I’ll ever retire. What would I do? Neither one of us plays golf. We don’t really have any interests. We’re not great at small talk. Travel is okay, but it’s sort of an exhausting pain in the butt. What’s more fun than working, and talking about work? 

We’ll always be checking up with each other, too, if only to take each other’s temperature on some issue or another. I can usually count on him to fill in gaps in my memory or fact base. In 50 years I’ve never heard Fred express an opinion that wasn’t apparently well-reasoned, deeply considered, poked and prodded for holes and flaws, and ultimately decided in a way that would allow him to have a ready answer if called upon to respond to a question on that subject. I say “apparently” because no one could possibly have that many opinions all sorted and filed away. He has to be making it up as he goes, but always in a manner that makes you believe you’re not the first person to ask.

I can’t imagine what my life would have been if I hadn’t met Fred Seibert more than 50 years ago and fallen under his spell of creativity, inspiration, and delight in making things. I still measure a lot of what I decide based on “what would Fred do.” 

So much of the joy I’ve experienced in life I really owe to Fred’s moral, courageous, generous, and spirited example. I love him more than I could ever say. 

Or maybe I owe it all to Lou Venech. I guess we’ll never really know.

...

Behold, the king of online cartoons

Ex-Hanna-Barbera whiz Fred Seibert blazing a trail with YouTube network

A couple of times over the years, then-USA Today’s entertainment and tech reporter (and photographer) Jefferson Graham was nice enough to feature me in an article about the cartoons I was producing. First time was in the late 90s with “Oh Yeah! Cartoons,” but in 2015, with streaming video finally reaching the mainstream press (Channel Frederator actually started in 2005) and Graham’s animator son joining our network, he revisited.

Thanks to animator Michael Hilliger, who sent over his copy of the article in 2024.

By Jefferson Graham USA Today July 17, 2015

LOS ANGELES — Fred Seibert wants you to have his card.

And his phone number. He even won't mind if we print his [email protected] e-mail address right here in USA TODAY.

Seibert, 63 is the online toon king, with 400 million views monthly to his Channel Frederator network on YouTube, but he's never sure where his next hit will come from.

So he's always out there looking, at schools, industry gatherings, book signings. You name it.

Next weekend, he'll be at the Vidcon convention near Los Angeles, a gathering of folks who make their living off YouTube, which is where most folks see his online `toons.

"I have no ideas," he says. "But I recognize talent."

That's for sure. Seibert, then president of Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studios in the 1990s, is credited with discovering Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the Family Guy, fresh from college, when he hired him to work on Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

For Seibert's "What a Cartoon!" series for the Cartoon Network, Seibert hit ratings gold, signing up the creators who churned out hits like "The Powerpuff Girls," "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Johnny Bravo." Their series debuted as shorts for first for Seibert's series.

He still serves as executive producer of "The Fairly OddParents," a TV series he began producing in 1998 when it debuted on his "Oh Yeah, Cartoons," series. It's been running ever since on Nickelodeon.

Seibert's biggest audiences, however, have come from online, to the tune of some 1.9 billion views for 'toons like the Bee and PuppyCat and Bravest Warriors.

We had Seibert as a guest on our #TalkingTech podcast in June. At the time, he was averaging 300 million monthly viewers to the Channel Frederator network. Now he's already up to 400 million monthly viewers, and predicts he'll top 700 million by year's end, and 1 billion by 2016.

The reason for the massive growth is that unlike before, when animation was targeted just to young kids, either for Saturday morning TV, and kid-based cartoon TV channels, anyone of all ages can view `toons online.

Seibert's Cartoon Hangover, a Frederator section where he shows the best of his `toons, bills itself as the channel for "cartoons that are too weird, wild, and crazy for television."

“Bee and PuppyCat,” about a young woman with a hybrid dog-cat, is written by Natasha Allegri, a woman in her 20s, about a character in her 20s, and thus, obviously not targeted to the traditional animation crowd.

"No matter what your interest online — whether it be anime, or science fiction or comedy cartoons, there is a place for you," Seibert says. "TV has a tough time supporting the sub-genres. Online is all about sub-genre."

Channel Frederator is what's known as a multi-channel network. Cartoons run on YouTube, but his network promotes them, sells ads and distributes the proceeds to some 2,000 of his video makers.

Through Frederator, the channel makers learn about which color to make their thumbnails to find larger YouTube audiences (he recommends yellow) and which keywords to use in the descriptions ("funny" always works, he says.)

"We give them the tools to grow their performance," he says.

Dominic Panganiban, a 24-year-old animator from Toronto, joined the Frederator network in November, and has seen his subscriber base grow ten times since.

He had been working with Full Screen, another multi-channel network that works with YouTube creators to help them monetize their videos and attract larger audiences.

"Frederator was a better fit, because they cater more towards animation channels," Panganiban says. Because Frederator attracts folks who enjoy cartoons, "I have more potential here."

By being part of the Frederator network, Australian animator Sam Green says he's learned about how to better promote his cartoons, and gotten access to a database of free music and sound effects to use in his cartoons.

He too has seen a spike in traffic.

Being with Seibert "helped me move from my mother's garage to affording my own apartment in the big city," he says.

How did the traffic for both creators go up so dramatically?

Seibert promoted the cartoons to his audience. With 2,000 cartoon makers, that's a lot to choose from. He says he'll plug as many of them as "show an interest" to growing their audience. He looks for people who post new work regularly, stay in touch, and ask "what we can do to help them more."

And despite the massive online audience, Seibert isn't making money yet, and doesn't think he will for another three years. 

"Our cartoons are 3-4 minutes long, and the average American watches 6 hours of TV a day," he says. "We have a long way to go to even that out."