My Dad: The Trendsetter (original) (raw)

INTRODUCTION

When I started interviewing my Dad I had no idea where it would lead me. I figured I would get all wrapped up in his fascinating ancestry or something like that. But a really incredible thing happened to me during these interviews. I got to see my Dad in a totally different light. I was no longer a daughter talking to a father; I was a reporter interviewing a television producer. As I got deeper and dearer into the interview, I began to realize how special my Dad really is. I had always taken him and his work for granted; I never looked at it with an objective eye before. But when I started being objective about him and his work, I realized for the first time how much my Dad has influenced the path of children�s television. I began to see my Dad as a trendsetter, a thought that never entered my mind before. I began to realize how his philosophies about life really affected his work, and consequently gave him the creative ability to he a trendsetter. I am so thankful that I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet my Dad, the trendsetter producer.

My Dad-The Trend Setter

I started to school in September of 1948. Going to Carnegie Tech was a pivotal point in my life, in my development as a human being because it wasn�t just an art school. Your main course every year, besides the art courses, was an academic course. Carnegie Tech�s philosophical approach to teaching was not to teach you things, but to teach you concepts. Every part of the school had a point of view, where the instructor�s object was to teach you to solve problems, all sorts of problems. It was the same way in the drama school.

The school I went to was one large building: first floor drama, second floor music, third floor architecture, fourth floor tainting and design. All the arts were there in that one complex. Engineers were on the other side of the campus, across the hill. Some classes we took together with engineers. In this way, you got to meet all these various behaviors. Just the drama school alone was an experience, with it being one of the finest drama schools in the world. Their productions were really professional productions. Every year they had one major Shakespearean production. It was usually directed by a man named B. Iden Pane who used to come over from Stratford-upon- Avon and would just do that play.

I used to walk to school with Andy Warhol; his name was Andy Warhola then. He was a year ahead of me because he had not been in the army. Well known artists like Philip Pearlstein, who is, one of the foremost neo-realists in the country today went to Tech. A lot of people who became really successful painters had gone to Tech, were going to Tech. It was a vital and exciting and electric atmosphere, and tough.

The first two years everybody took the same courses. The second two years in the Art school you had the ability to take one of three options: you could take teaching, industrial design or painting and design. The option I decided for was painting and design because I was not interested in industrial design; I was definitely not interested in teaching art. I couldn�t understand why people were teaching art. It seemed absolutely meaningless if you weren�t going to do anything more than teach with it. I�m not talking about teaching in college and higher schools because I think that would be interesting and I really thought about doing that after I graduated, about the concept of teaching art in college because that I could see would be stimulating. The idea of the people you would meet, the students you would meet and the caliber of the students would make you think and push yourself. Teaching art in most grade schools or high schools, I think, would be a waste of time, or would have been for me anyway. I was much more interested in illustration and perhaps even easel painting. But you knew that you had to make a living somehow when you got out, and it wasn�t likely that you were going to make a living as a painter. Itwas never too easy.Most of the guys who ended up making a livingas a painter really were teaching too.

I really enjoyed what I did. Hundreds and hundreds of drawings, paintings, design problems. Yet, I could never, never really get to where I really felt that I had mastered anything. I always felt uncomfortable with the drawing; it was never right. I never got to the feeling that I had really been able to get exactly what I wanted on that paper, or on the plywood or on the Masonite I was painting on.

There was one guy who had tremendous facility as a draftsman. He could draw with such marvelous freedom. I envied him and I respected him. I wished I had that ability to draw that easily. Outside of him, that was Bill Schaffer, there was no one in that class that I would have traded my talents for. So I didn�t feel inferior, I just didn�t feel that I was as good as I wanted to be. And I wasn�t. There was no question about that.

You would look at something that you knew was great and you kept saying, "Damn, if I could just get that." There were a group of painters, like Paul Flay and Joe Nero, who were so wonderful and innovative. I could never get that. I never had that style, that point of view graphically, and I never did. I started at one time, almost getting somewhere, and this is many years after I graduated, but then I stopped painting. I had visions of being able to satisfy myself and I never really satisfied myself. I never really satisfied myself in any of the artwork I�ve ever done or ever did, because I don�t do it anymore.

While in college, as well as before, I spent a lot of my time reading; reading everything. I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. The Will Durant book especially affected me because it started me thinking and understanding that there were a lot of ideas out there. There were concepts, ways of life. It kind of related to art when you start thinking about modes of life, and people�s points of view because you have artistic and philosophical points of view graphically too. I don�t know whether there was any real tie in a specific way, but the broader you are, the more you try to expand your own horizons, the more that it somehow, probably would show up in your work.

I got through Carnegie Tech. I enjoyed going through Carnegie Tech. I think it was a formative influence in my life. If I got nothing else out of it, got out of it the ability to really think about problems from the point of view of something is out there to he thought about and to be solved. You look at all the various avenues for approaching a problem and you try tofigure out which is the best way to approach it. In design there is size, shape, position, and direction. Those are the things you play with and you rearrange them. You come up to something and you say, "Hey that�s about as good as I am going to be able to do with this specific problem." Well, you can translate that to anything. Being able to solve things graphically really is wonderful because it�s a point of view that allows you to think about many problems: literary, emotional. You look back, you think about it. You feel it. It�s not just your head. It�s all those emotions that come out at the same time. Then you use position, shape, direction, texture and color. There�s a whole new life to be found in limiting yourself too; like just working in black and white for months, with no color at all and getting as much as you possibly can out of that. Working with nothing but lines, and the quality of the line and the texture of the line and what a line can do to define a form. It becomes part of you. After awhile, you do it by second nature, I guess, it�s not a conscious process. It�s a way of communicating.

I remember, in the early 1950�s, starting to see some animated films that were so unique, so daring, and so unlike anything that anyone had ever done, that I became intrigued with animation. The studio called UPA, which no longer really exists, was just beginning then. They did the "Gerald McBoing Boing" things, the "Magoo" stuff and the Thurber films. Each one of those was like a little moving painting and when you saw those, they were lust marvelous. You said to yourself, "Wow, look at what people are doing out there. They are making art move!" These were all classical animation, I mean, they were not stop motion. This was people drawing paintings. They did wonderful graphic things. This was my first exposure to animation of that sort. Of course you had seen all the Warner Bros. animation, but you never thought about those as art. You thought about those as� storytelling. But when UPA started doing those things, youthought about that as art and motion and time. That intriguedme. I thought that one day I might like to get involved in something like that.

I graduated from college in June of 1952. Shortly after that, on December 20,1953, I got married to Jay Wucher whom I had known for three and a half years.

In 1955, Jay and I decided to go to California on our vacation. We didn�t say too much but we decided before we even went to California that we were going to look around and see if I could find a place to work. We came out here and I took my portfolio to all the animation studios I could find. I had no experience specifically in the animation field, but the experience in painting and illustrating that I did have, allowed me to paint backgrounds, which are creatively very interesting and also take the least amount of technical knowledge.

We stayed at a motel on Sunset Blvd. that was near a couple of animation studios. So I went to see them. I went to Ray Patton�s, UPA, and some art services too. I found one studio called Cling Studios, which was a commercial studio, located on the corner of Highland and Sunset. They saw my stuff and said, "Gee, that�s nice stuff. We�ll hire you to paint backgrounds if you come out, but we don�t want you to move out here because of us." I said, "Hey, that�s enough for me. If I have a job here, I�ll move out here."

Jay and I drove back to Pittsburgh and packed all of our stuff and drove back to California. So we drove across country three times in the space of a month. It was great. It was really fun. We had our stuff coming here and we drove back to California. I went to report to this place and tell them I�m all ready to go to work and they said, "Oh, I�m sorry but we don�t really need anybody now. We hired somebody else." That was really frightening. What do you do now? After a couple of weeks they called me, and they did hire me.

I didn�t know what kind of a mess I was getting into in the animation industry. I find out that as soon as a studio runs out of work, they let everybody go, especially those commercial studios. Well I ended up with five jobs in about six months. I was not prepared for that. I mean, I was not emotionally and psychologically prepared to look for work every time I turned around.

Shortly after I got hired at Clings, we decided that it was silly for us to be paying rent on a place. We decided that we were going to buy a house. So we went out and bought a house for 17,500andIwasmaking17,500 and I was making 17,500andIwasmaking106 a week. We called back to Pittsburgh and told our families that we bought a house. They thought we were really crazy. As soon as we bought the house, there was an industry wide strike. I was out carrying placards; I didn�t know what the hell was going on. SO that first year in California we went on strike and bought a house.

One of the things that got me through was getting a free_lance_ job at Walter Lance, doing one ofthe cartoons they did. I never forgot that because we, Bob Gibbons and I, did a magnificent job painting the backgrounds for that. We did all sorts of wild stuff that Lance had never seen the like of:collages, pasting up photographs, painting into the thing; I mean, it was really fun. Lance looked at that stuff and said, "That�s really not the kind of stuff we normally do"

Anyhow, I got a lot of freelance jobs, and that�s how I kept going. I worked at Cling Studios again, then at Ray Patton�s, and then at Warner Bros. By then I was beginning to understand the business I was in and became technically pretty proficient. I could layout for animation and I really began to understand animation. I knew how to make the thing work and how to make it tick, and how to design a picture that could be done and how to storyboard a picture. I never became an animator, but I could do any other function besides the animation. I could understand the process of the medium. I could understand the camera. I knew what the camera could do and couldn�t do. I worked at Warner Bros. on a couple of the Bell Telephone science shows. I never was all that great at the stuff. I mean, I always wanted to do better and I never could really quite capture the thing that I wanted to do. It always eluded me.

In the meantime, I had been doing little freelance jobs, picking up stuff. I knew a guy at Paramount where I would pick up commercials to do. This guy at Paramount, Walter Bien; had met a commercial company there. They had a very, very difficult commercial to do. It was a combination of live action and animation. There was supposed to be color searchlights introducing the 1962 Fords. They could not photograph color searchlights against a dark sky. So they called me in and wanted to know if we could animate them. With the help of my friend, Hal Sutherland, an animator I met at Harmon�s Studio, we did the commercial. That was really the beginning of the studio because we got a lot of dough for that, and Hal and I did it as an outside job. It was really a tough commercial because there were traveling mats, combinations of live action and animation, automobiles speeding, animating searchlights against the sky. The thing turned out to be a great looking commercial.

One day I said to Hal, "Hey Hal, I think I could round us up enough work to go on our own. Would you be interested working with me? I think I could get us some money." Hal said, "Let�s not worry about the money, Lou, we have friendship. That�s all we need." I went down to Family Films and they were going to do a series of very, very, very limited animated films on the life of Christ. So I lined up that work. Then I went to the guI knew at Paramount, and I knew that he was doing the Gillette commercials. I said to him, "Hey, I�ve got enough work from Family Films and if I pick up some animation from you, you�d have an animation department and it wouldn�t cost you anything, and I�d be in business." So he said that would be O.K., and he�d give us his commercial work.

So I went into business. I worked it out with Ira, my lawyer, to incorporate us. I gave Ira 10% of the company, Hal 10of the company and I kept 80% of the company because I had gotten all of the stuff together. I�d gotten all of the work together and I�d made all of the deals. We had to name the studio something when we incorporated, so I thought about it and thought about it and I said, "Well we�re working on film and it�s animation, why don�t we call it Filmation." It�s an ugly name, but we�ve been stuck with it all these years. Our first office was the back of Hal�s station wagon. It was a traveling office. We were doing our jobs by night and working for someone else by day. It was really murderous.

In the meantime, about 1958 or 1959, I met Norm Prescott. Erv Kaplan, whom had hired at Harmon�s, had a brother who was Norm�s insurance agent. Norm and I kept in touch with one another even though things didn�t work out right away. In 1961, Norm had somehow gotten together some financing and started to do the "Return to The Land of Oz**_"_** picture in Europe. So Norm called me one day from back east and said, "Lou, would you guys like to produce the "Oz" picture?" The problem was that there was very little dough to do it. Norm had a very limited amount of money so we negotiated and negotiated. You see, Norm started out not being a partner, but was a client. So anyway, we started doing the "Oz" picture.

I called Norm one day and I said, "Norm, this is not going to work. We can�t do this picture." He said, "Well, let�s do it some other way. Instead of me being a client, why don�t come in and be a partner somehow. We�ll all own whatever it is on the picture, if we can get it done." I said that was O.K. because we were going to go down the tube anyway, so what did I have to lose. I said, "From now on we�re partners." I tried to figure out how to divide things up. I couldn�t take any percentage from Hal and Ira. They only had 10% of the company and I had 80%. So I gave Norm half of what I owned in the company. That way he and I both ended up with 40% of the company, and Hal and Ira still retained their 10%. Then we started to the "Oz" picture. However we were going deeper and deeper into the hole. It was a disaster.

Every once in a while we picked up a little lob to do. That�s how we kept going. We did a short film in 1963 for the American Pavilion at the World�s Fair of 1964. It was a fascinating little film on water conservation. Hal and I did the damn picture all by ourselves. I did all the storyboards, all the layouts, painted the backgrounds, designed the characters and Hal animated the whole picture. And we kept getting little jobs like this to do.

At this time the studio had two employees, me and Hal, and we had a mannequin out in front as a secretary because we couldn�t afford anything else. Things were getting pretty discouraging. However, I knew that if I did not do it then, that I would never try it again. If I ever went to work for anybody else at that period, which would be the last chance I would ever have to really go out on my own. I just didn�t want to do it. I suddenly realized once we had done it that being my own boss was worth so much to me that I would do anything in order to try and make that company work. I also knew that if I ever got anything to do, we could do it. We proved it with "Rod Rocket"; we took an enormously complicated job and turned it around and did it right and got it done. We took the "Oz" picture, and even though we couldn�t finish it because we didn�t have enough money, we were doing it for less money than anybody else could have done it for. We were pretty good at it too. It was the beginning of animation on television, and you had the feeling that one day it was really going to happen.

Norm came out in 1965, and we decided that that was it. We couldn�t continue. We were going to have to close the studio. Things were so bad that Hal and I used to take turns answering the phone because we would know that anybody calling was asking for money; nobody was calling to give us work to do. Norm was out here, and it was going to be our last meeting. We were going to dissolve the company. We�d gone on, for like two or three years without any real income, and it just seemed that we couldn�t go on any longer.

Anyway, the phone rang, and Hal answered it. Hal�s eyes went wide and he said, "There�s a nut on the phone, Louie. Maybe you�d better talk to him. He says his name is Superman Weisinger. He�s looking for Norm." I said, "Let me talk to him. Is it long distance?" Hal said, "yeah." I said, "Is it paid for?" Hal said, "yeah." So I got on the phone and said, "Hello Mr. Superman. Are you calling from a phone booth?" He said, "Mort Weisinger here. I�m the story editor of Superman, and I�d like to talk to Norm Prescott." So I told him where Prescott was.

Weisinger caller Norm. It turned out that Fred Silverman, who was just new at CBS, had decided that he could turn around the Saturday morning schedule at CBS and do something that no one had ever done. He was going to buy stuff specifically for Saturday morning. Up until that time, they used to have suppliers. Advertisers would supply shows and they would buy off network used stuff. No one had really programmed for Saturday morning. Silverman had gotten in touch with DC Comics and told them he had wanted to buy Superman as an animated show.

I got a phone call from Norm and he said, "Hey Lou, do you think we could do this serie ourselves?" I said. "How much arethey offering?" He said they would give us $ 36,000 a half hour. Well, I knew then that Hanna Barbera was getting $ 45,000 a half hour for an animated show, but I said, "Sure we can do it. What the hell, we�re out of work anyway. The worst that can happen is that we can�t do it." He said, "Well maybe we can get this job to do. The problem is, they want to see the studio." I said, "What studio!" Norm said, "Well they�re going to send their local guy down to see the studio and see whether we have the facility. Lou you better get in touch with him and stop him or do something!"

So I called the guy; his name was Whitney Elsworth. It was like a Friday or a Monday. I said, "I�m sorry Mr. Elsworth, but we really don�t have visitors here during the working day. It�s just too difficult. People can�t concentrate. If you could come next Wednesday lunch, we�ll show you through the studio and show you what we are doing." So I had like two days. I called everybody I knew. I called Ted Knight. I got him to come down. I called Kim Wong, an assistant animator I knew. I called a guy who had a fan mail service named Jack Mock. I called a couple of animators from Hanna Barbera who could only come down at lunchtime. I called a guy across the street whose name was Harold Alpert who was an accountant. Thank God he did not show up because it turned out that Whitney Elsworth knew him. If he had seen Alpert sitting there pretending to be an animator that would have blown the whole thing.

Elsworth walked in, and I had the place packed. Don Peters was in there pretending to paint backgrounds. We had passed out scenes from "Oz" to all the people. We borrowed a moviola to make it look like we really had an editorial department. I had done this once before when we tried to get a "Lone Ranger" to do, so I had experience in packing the studio. This was the second run through. I told the damned Ted Knight not to say anything because he had a tendency to overact. I said to him, "The guy knows something about our business. If he asks you any questions, just tell him, �I�m sorry I can�t talk to you right now, there�s some trouble at the lab.� Just pretend you�re on the phone or something."

Well, Elsworth comes in and the studio is humming. We even had the mannequin out there, but the mannequin looked O.K. We had like twenty people in there. Everybody was furiously at work, but it wastwelve o�clock. Half of the guyshad to take off soon to get back to work. We showed Elsworth some of the stuff from "Oz." We were sitting in our little office that Hal and I had, well it was really a pretty big office, discussing things. There was a knock on the door. It was George Rowley, and I knew that George had to get back to Hanna Barbera. George opens up the door and comes in. He said, "Lou, I got this tooth ache. Do you mind if I take off and go to the dentist?" I said it was O.K_._ So George left. I turn around to Hal and said, "Make sure you dock that son of a bitch!" Then all of a sudden we hear, "There�s trouble at the lab, trouble at the lab, tro�" in twenty different voices. Ted Knight is running around pretending he�s a lot of different guys, yelling that there�s trouble at the lab. Elsworth said, "What the hell is going on. You guys must have an awful lot of work for there to be that many guys involved with trouble at the lab."

Whitney left. He called back to New York and said, "It�s a little studio, but they seem to run a pretty tight ship down there." So this guy who�s running DC Comics, Jack Libowitz, trusted us without a completion bond or anything. He gave us the job to do. It was our first network show.

We did Superman around November of 1965 for the 1966 season. It was difficult because we got a lot less money than the same sort of work that was being done elsewhere in town. Hanna Barbera was the only competitor anyway back then. It went on the air and was one of the most successful new programs ever introduced. It did tremendous ratings. That program really served as the basis for CBS Saturday morning. Also in its own way, it was peculiar because it started a rash of imitations. Some of those were the kind of thing that eventually ended up with the whole problem of violence on Saturday morning television, because whereas Superman was done, I really think, with some degree of sensitivity toward the audience, other programs that were sold later just increased the tempo of violence. Super heroes were flying through the air all over the networks within, two or three years.

We worked long and hard hours. Hal, Norm and I divided up some of the responsibilities. Hal took care of the animators; I took care of everything else. I handled background, storyboard, layout, and scripts. It was challenging because somehow you could have your hand on every phase of production. You knew that everything was going on, and this made it an exciting period.

I remember Dick Clark came to the studio around this time with Norm who knew him. Anyhow as we were wandering through the studio, I knew everybody by their first name; I mean, everybody in the whole place. One of the things he said was, "Hey, you may be able to do that now, but someday you�re going to turn around and there�re going to be so many people that you can�t possibly remember all their first names." Unfortunately, that�s the way it is now. I don�t know the name of everyone in the studio.

For the next three years, 1966 through 1969, we did very well. We kept selling more and more shows. We sold "Superman", then we sold the "Superman/Batman" hour, then we sold "Journey to the Center of the Earth", and I think the "Jerry Lewis" show was sometime around then too. Oh, I never thought I�d forget "Fantastic Voyage".

Then came the big show for us in 1968. The whole cycle of what was happening on Saturday mornings was getting a little crazy because there was adventure show on top of adventure show. We acquired the rights to the comic strip Archie. Archie was sort of, in a funny way, a breakthrough show because it was the first show specifically done for Saturday morning in all those years that was not an adventure show. It was a comedy, a situation comedy with new music as its background. We made arrangements then with Don Kirshner who was just going out on his own. He had just been doing the music on the "Monkees" and broken his relationship with Screen Gems. We made a deal with Kirshner to produce the musical segments which were songs. It was a breakthrough for the company too because all of a sudden we were in another business. We were in the music business, and all of a sudden we had musical hits on our hands. We had never really had any experience with anything like that. It was really sort of exhilarating. One of them, of course, was "Sugar, Sugar" which turned out to he the second highest selling record of the 1960�s,with it selling more than six million copies; second only to the Beatles. Archie started a whole movement on Saturday morning, which in it�s own way was sort of nice, away from just the super heroes to comedy. I really think we were trendsetters in many respects because we were constantly looking for new forms, new ideas, and new ways to present programs.

In 1959, a friend of mine named Marvin Josephs, head of ICM, called and said that he thought it was about time that we sold the company. We were at that stage in our career where the acquisition of our company by another company would be in everyone�s interest. There were a couple of companies interested in us at that time: Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures and Teleprompter, to name a few. We made a deal with Teleprompter to acquire the company for stork. We acquired personally Teleprompter stock and they acquired the company.

We did it for a number of reasons. Number one: it was financially appropriate, and number two: it was the beginning of cable television. Teleprompter was not at that time the largest cable company, but would become so shortly. It was our dream to be able to think about the possibility of producing programming for cable that ultimately went directly to the viewer, rather than going through the middleman of the network. It is always frustrating to deal through the network because you�re not really dealing with the public. You�re dealing with somebody who is telling you what the public will see or not see. I felt that sooner or later cable television would be the forerunner for a whole other kind of communication in this country. Unfortunately, it�s taken a lot longer than any of us perceived back then as what would be likely.

Cable television hit all sort of snags: government snags. Financial snags. Teleprompter got broiled in all sorts of financial difficulties. The company was even on the verge of bankruptcy. It was odd because all the time that this was going on, our company, Filmation, was doing great. There were years when we wondered how the hell to get out of that mess and whether we should try to get out of that mess. But eventually it all worked out all right. Now it looks like there is a pretty glorious future ahead for pay cable, Teleprompter, the cable industry and also for those people who are going to be involved in the production or programming or software for cable.

We have even, in a rudimentary way, gotten involved with Teleprompter. They are thinking seriously in developing an all children�s channel. We�ve already done some experimental programming for them, only in a limited fashion however. You can see that in the next three or four years, the probability of cable becoming a really huge market that will be able to use all sorts of interesting programming because it does not have to appeal specifically to the greatest number of people in order to become financially viable. Commercial television cannot appeal to limited audiences; pay cable can. Hopefully within the next decade there will be a revolution in what people will be able to get on that set in their house. That revolution will involve diversity of programming, many types of programming, age-specific programming, especially for children, which you cannot do on commercial television now because it had to appeal to the broadest group of people. You can possibly think about producing shows for two, three, four year olds; five, six and seven year olds. The idea is limitless. You can think of special interest groups, older people, teenagers, informational programming, news programming. Also the multiplicity of channels is so much greater for cable than for commercial television. Cable right now is capable technologically of supplying 75 channels. Yet technology for printed material coming out of your set exists, has existed for years, may happen. That�s really exciting.

Now let�s get back to where we were after we sold the company. In the early 1970�s, 1970 or 1971, we tried to make a production arrangement with Bill Cosby to do a "Fat Albert" show. It took a long time. It was very complicated. But we eventually ended up doing "Fat Albert" for CBS. When we sold it, we sold it on the basis of doing a worthwhile show. Again it was Fred Silverman who ultimately bought it. The pressure was starting to come from the various pressure groups like Action for Television, and people like that who were yelling and screaming about what was happening to children on Saturday morning. So CBS decided they would do a "worthwhile" show for young people on Saturday morning.

I talked to them at CBS and I said that perhaps it would be a good idea if we went and got some outside counsel. We could do the shows and probably come up with the concepts, but didn�t really feel comfortable with the educational background that we had as producers in being able to do everything that should have been involved and included in the shows.

I quite by accident called UCLA and asked to speak to someone in the School of Education because I couldn�t figure out any other way to do it but to get to a university. I got in touch with the guy who was the assistant dean of the Graduate School of Education that year, and that was Dr. Gordon Berry. I went out to talk to Gordon about it. I was delighted when I walked in and found that Gordon was black man because it just seemed so appropriate to have a black educator involved with "Fat Albert." Gordon, as a result, became the first of the educational psychological advisors to the networks on children�s programming. The fact is, I hired Gordon, actually to work for us. Then I talked to the network about it and they felt it was inappropriate because they really wanted those advisors to be on their staff. So they ultimately made an arrangement with Gordon to be on a retainer.

We got involved with eight or ten educators, child psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, for example Madelyn Hunter who is the principal of the University Elementary School war an advisor. It was a pretty prestigious group of people. Their input was significant. We worked out a fascinating way of working with them. We would come up with subject material, they would either approve or disapprove it. We had joint sessions, that is all of us meeting with the writers and the educational panel; we�d all work together. There was no problem at all working that way. The fact is, in many respects it added to the authenticity and the honesty of the show. The show became probably the most successful "worthwhile" children�s program ever produced for commercial television. That show was the first time that a board of educators had ever been used for a commercial television series. "Fat Albert" is the most satisfying series that I work on to this day.

It became apparent to us that sooner or later there would be other forms of programming for children that would be viable. Animation was one form, one way, one medium. Sooner or later there would have to be live shows. So we started to put together a small unit that would produce live shows if and when we would sell any. We acquired the rights to "Shazam", the Captain Marvel character. I presented it to CBS, NBC and ABC. Again it was Fred Silverman who looked at it and said he liked the idea. What we wanted to do with Captain Marvel was to change the concept and have Captain Marvel be the first super hero who would teach young people essentially the same kind of lessons that we were doing in "Fat Albert." A little different in that we would talk about interpersonal relationships a little bit more. I presented the show as an animated show. Silverman said, "I�ll buy the show if you can do it live. Can you do it live?" I said, "Of course we can do it live." I had no idea whether we could do it live or not. "Shazam" was just about the first live action Saturday morning show done for kids. Maybe the Kroffts� had done "Puff �n Stuff", but that was really an animated show done live. "Shazam" again used the board of educators. It came on the air and was instantly successful.

The year after that, 1975, I really had lots of thoughts about it. I felt that there was no viable woman who was presented as a positive role model. I went to the writers and said, "Guys, let�s think of a way to create a woman super hero that we could do as a live show as a companion piece to �Shazam�." Isis was created because we wanted to have some mythological background that could explain the powers and that kind of exotic feel always helps the super hero. That background story is so important, a la the Superman background story. That year we did the "Shazam/Isis" hour. Again it was first in its time slot. Again it really worked. Again the educators liked the show. Again young people responded to it.

The success of Isis made me feel, very good. I enjoyed doing it in live action. I enjoyed being able to come up with a show that was entertaining and worthwhile at the same time. I was especially proud of Isis because of the fact that it was thefirst time that a woman had been presented as a hero for young people. I was very happy with "Fat Albert" too because the letters that came in on "Fat Albert" were phenomenal. In most of the letters that came in, "Fat Albert" was not perceived as especially black. It was perceived as a group of kids with problems. The show seemed as significant to any segment of the audience as it was to the black segment of the audience. It was also nice because black people for the first time and black children, who were almost disenfranchised on Saturday morning television, could identify with black people on television.

Well actually the first black face in an animated cartoon was a character that we put in the "Hardy Boys" show, which we did back in 1968. I felt that it was wrong to have this lily-white duo running around. You looked at Saturday morning and there was a huge segment of that audience that would assume that there were no black people in the world, no ethnics in the world. If you turned on Saturday morning everybody was lily white, pure, had no problems, and the world that they lived in was unreal. So we in our own way tried to introduce at least some segment in our shows where there seemed to be a balance of types.

Around this same time, 1974 or 1975, we were doing the animated version of "Star Trek." This series was nominated for an Emmy and to my surprise it won. However, it was a peculiar thing because it really was not a vindication of the kind of children�s programming we did. "Star Trek" was very unusual. I don�t think that the Emmy really related to what is in the mainstream of what we do. I�m not too sure that the Emmy was not given because of the popularity of "Star Trek" period, rather than because of the animated version. So it was to me not quite an honest win, I mean to me personally. Although I do think that "Star Trek" was really a good show. It was the kind of show that should be on the air too. It was an honest adventure show, full of ideas, mind expanding and, I think, worthwhile.

It was the most adult adventure show ever done for Saturday morning. There was no cut back in the kind of thought, and the kind of story because it was Saturday morning show. Any of those stories could have easily gone on nighttime. I think that is interesting because nobody was talking down to children.

The show that was the most difficult to take as not being successful was "Ghost Busters" which we did in 1976. I always wanted to do a comedy that was really an outrageous corned. However, there�s all these things you have to think about. The money you get for doing a Saturday morning show is so limited that you don�t have the time and the finances to anything as well as you want to do it. We created "Ghost Busters" in hopes of putting together, for the first time in a long time, a comedy team like Abbott and Costello or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. There had been no comedy teams for young people on years. The closest thing we could find to anything like that was what Larry Storch and Forest Tucker did in "F Troop". It seemed to me that they would he two good guys for young people. They were funny. They had that visual quality that seemed proper. They had that relationship that worked; so we designed a show around them.

I really think that "Ghost Busters" was as fresh and spontaneous a show as you could put on the air for Saturday morning. It was wacky and unpredictable. We tried to put the kind of humor in it that was almost Ernie Kovacs. It was illogical. It was fun. It was also not too terribly successful, but that was not because of the show. It was produced probably technically was well as you could produce a how like that. It wasn�t because of the chemistry of the two guys who were the stars. I think they really worked. I loved Tracy the gorilla. It�s possibly that it was just a little too sophisticated for the audience. It seemed that we were getting much older audience than you really needed in order to he successful on Saturday morning. The failure of that show to really work was, to me, the hardest thing to take because I really felt that it possibly could have been responsible for a lot of comedy that would have been creative on Saturday morning. When a show like that doesn�t work, what happens is that they go back to the tired and true, the staples, and that is too bad because the audience suffers.

In 1977, we sold "Space Academy� to CBS as sort of a United Nations group in space. Again we put together young people in situations where the audience could empathize with them, and we included special effects and miniatures. No one had ever done a show like that. It was sold almost a year before "Star Wars" was released. Nobody knew that that technology was even out there. I didn�t. We went around looking for people who could build models and photograph that sort of thing. About three or four guys who worked in "Star Wars" came to work for us. We actually, almost from scratch, nut together a system not too different from the one they used in "Star Wars."

Now I�d like to come to some sort of a wrap up in all of these things because we could keep talking about the individual shows, but I don�t think they really mean an awful lot. There only three or four companies that really produce the Saturday morning children�s programs. Among the companies, Filmation and Hanna Barbera produce most of it.

Where I see the future is not really in commercial television. The future of our industry, I think, is in other forms of transmission, for example: cable T.V., microwave and fiber optics. Once those means of transmission are there, something has to be done to fill those hours, those days. Whatever it is, you hone the people watch less, but better.

As for my future, I don�t really know. I think that�s one of the nice things. I mean, if I really knew what the hell I was going to be doing ten years from now, I might not even want to do it. One of the interesting things is that you don�t know what�s going to happen tomorrow. There�s always some other challenge out there. There�s always some possibility of doing something more interesting, something better, something more worthwhile.