Whether you know it or not, you have Fred Seibert to thank for most of your favorite cartoons when you were growing up: The Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Laboratory, The Fairly Odd Parents, and Courage the Cowardly Dog, just to name a few. But if that wasn’t enough, Fred can also be noted for being the source of MTV’s original branding, as well as being the reason that you’ve ever heard of Nickelodeon. And if you’re plugged into the current cartoon scene, you probably know about Frederator Networks, Fred’s independent cartoon production company that is responsible for such hit shows as Bravest Warriors, and the hit YouTube channel Cartoon Hangover.
Thanks to Fred’s willingness to give anyone a chance, he gave me the thumbs up to come by Frederator’s New York office and pick his brain for an hour. Whether you’re a prospective cartoon-maker, aspiring entrepreneur, or just a big geeky fan, Fred has insights in here for you that you’ll want to hold on to.
Fred: I always say that I don’t really have a career. That I’ve been a ping pong ball in a wind tunnel. Wherever the wind brought me and it looked interesting. I literally had no ambitions to be in the animation business at all. Zero. Right? I had watched cartoons when I was a kid. And when the Beatles and girls showed up in my life when I was 12, that was the end of cartoons, right? And here I am. So who knows? You just don’t know where your life is gonna bring you. If you’re open to it.
Stephen: How did you manage to stay afloat the whole time you were bobbing around different…
Fred: You know, the first five years out of school, I had a roommate who unbeknownst to him, without either of us talking about it, he started supporting me.
Stephen: Man.
Fred: Right? For five years while I was trying to figure out how do I go from being a chemistry major and a history major, which I was, with parents who were pharmacists, to making this work. I had no guidance. There was no internet. There were no blogs. There were no magazines about the business. So you’re like a rat in a maze.
Stephen: Wow.
Fred: Yeah. But you know, I made 30 records. I learned a ton of the things I eventually needed to know to become a professional. Actually, I was just at a conference, at a film festival in Canada, and I was saying that there was a famous recording engineer that without him knowing it, gave me the secret I needed to be the kind of producer that I have become. You just don’t know where it’s all gonna come from.
Stephen: And what was that?
Fred: So I talked myself into this little tiny record company above a bagel store, you know, that made a lot of records. And they would hire me to be the so-called producer, which basically meant I had to get the musicians to the place on time.
So I’d be in a session one day with guys I don’t know, in the studio that is the most famous jazz recording studio in the world… the guy’s name was Rudy Van Gelder, just passed away a couple months ago. He’s so famous, he’s much more famous than musicians. I’m so excited to be there.
And we set up everything, and I go, “Take one.” And he doesn’t do anything. And then I go, “Rudy, take one.” And the musicians are getting kind of antsy. They wonder what’s going on. I said, “Rudy, did I fart or something? What’d I do wrong?” He goes, “You keep looking at me and my equipment.” I said, “Yeah. I’m really interested.” He goes, “Don’t be.” I’m like, “Excuse me.” He goes, “Look. I’ve worked with the most famous producers in history.” I’m going, “Yes, Mr. Van Gelder.” I’m completely freaked out now. He goes, “They understood that their job was to put the right person in the room out there and the right person in the room in here. If you don’t like what I do-” I said, “I love what you do.” He goes, “Just pay attention to the right things.”
And it was sort of the beginning, I didn’t even know what a record producer was. I thought actually it had something to do with the sound, initially. And then I had to learn how to record. And I had to learn how all that stuff worked. And he was telling me that that had nothing to do with my job, right? It’s like you guys when you’re making films, you have to get the right cinematographer and you have to get the right actor and the right production designer, right? You don’t need to do all those things.
“I think every idea I’ve had about starting a new business was probably a really good idea. The ones that worked, are the ones I really thought about for along time, and I planned. The ones that didn’t work are the ones I leapt into right away”
So I get into animation. I had done a bunch of stuff. I had been the first employee at MTV… they made me the head of production and I had never seen a television camera. It was crazy. So now I get into animation where I really don’t know anything other than I had watched Bugs Bunny cartoons and the Flintstones when I was a kid. And I started realizing then, “Oh, my job is who’s in charge of the cartoon.”
So my job, just like in jazz, was to put the right person in the room and then get out of the way. So I had to figure out how do I pick the right person. So all of that came from that little tense exchange with Rudy Van Gelder when I was 25.
Stephen: Wow (laughs).
Fred: Yeah. It was crazy. But that’s what happens when you’re the age that you guys are. You’re figuring everything out and you’re making half of it up yourself like you don’t really know. You’re a little scared to ask. Because if you ask somebody that knows what you’re doing, you’re gonna go, “Why are they having me do it when there’s this guy who really knows something,” right? So you stay back. Or you’re arrogant so you think you’re smarter than those guys. It’s one or the other. But the truth is you’re stumbling through, you’re failing all sorts of ways on your way to success. It’s like dating. Every failed date is one step closer to a date that works.
Stephen: (laughs) Yeah. You’ve been a part of starting a lot of things, and we as a start-up love hearing about how people went about that, and so if you have any … things you learned along the way starting businesses, or being part of businesses that are starting.
Fred: Well, you know, somebody asked me recently … Somebody who used to work for me, he said, “What was the difference between succeeding and failing?” Which I never really thought about, and as I’m sort of thinking of an answer, I said, “Well, okay. Here’s what I think is the difference. I think every idea I’ve had about starting a new business was probably a really good idea. The ones that worked, are the ones I really thought about for along time, and I planned. The ones that didn’t work are the ones I leapt into right away, because they were such a great idea, that I didn’t do all of the building blocks I needed to do to make sure it could survive.”
Stephen: Interesting. Okay.
Fred: And that’s really tough for me, because I’m not a great planner. (laughs)
Stephen: (laughs) It’s almost the opposite of what … I mean, obviously people always advise that you plan, but people also will say “Just do it”, which gives the-
Fred: Yeah, but the question becomes… just for whatever it’s worth, what are you, 23?
Stephen: 22.
Fred: Yeah, 22. Just do it for you, and just do it for me are radically different. Right? Because a year of your life is 1/20th of your life. A year of my life is almost 1/70th of my life. Right? So the relative nature of “just,” is really different.
Stephen: That’s true.
Fred: I started my first adult business when I was 31. That’s not counting my not-quite-business as a record producer at a record company. So I was the first employee of MTV. I rode the wave for three years. I was the first guy promoted to big jobs. But I really only planned on working there for a year.
So I go into my number two guy, who is one of my best friends from college, I go into his office, I go, “I’m leaving. I’m quitting.” He’s like, “Uh, what?” (laughs). I was like, “I can’t do it anymore.” He goes, “Now?” I said, “Well, actually no, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just know I’m going to leave.”
That day started a process for me, and again I’m not a great process guy. But I had to figure out what am I going to do, how am I going to make a living, all that type of stuff. So, I made one commitment to myself, other than that I was going to leave. I was going to have one meal a week. I did business meals all the time. One meal a week was just going to be about me, and what I was going to do. So, I go out to lunch with a woman and I go, “I’m starting a company.” She said, “Really? What are you doing?” I said “Yadda yadda, I’m going to do whatever. And I really want you to work with me, because you’re really good at selling stuff, and I need somebody to help me sell my stuff.” So, we spend two hours at lunch of her telling me all the reasons it was a bad idea. I said, “But what if, and what if, and …”
So a week later, I go out with a guy who eventually became my partner. My number two guy. I said, “Okay, I’m starting a business. I want you to be in my business. And we’re going to do … ” But it was different than what I had told her, because of the things she had said to me, and the dialog we had had. So he goes, “Well what about yadda yadda… ” We go back and forth. The next week, I book another lunch or dinner with somebody that I thought could be helpful, I said, “Oh, you know I’m starting a business,” and now it’s a third version of the story. This went on for 52 weeks. Literally.
Stephen: Wow.
Fred: Once a week I would go out with somebody I thought could be helpful, they would impart with me some wisdom, some assholery, some point of view, whatever it was, and I would … Like a jazz musician, right? I would improvise my way through. Until one day, the guy’s name was Alan Goodman, he’s actually my brother-in-law now.
So we’re out with a guy who had done some of our most important work as a supplier for MTV. He was seven years older than us, had a really ongoing business. We said, “Oh, we’re going to start a company, we’re going to ….” And he goes, “You guys are going to do great. You’re going to be really successful.” And we’re like, “Whoa,” that was the first time that happened. He was like, “Hey, you want to do something together?” We went, “Uh, yes.” I go, “What do you think?” He goes, “Well, you know the Playboy channel needs shows. Why don’t we do a show for the Playboy channel.” I’m like, “What? A show?” And within several weeks, we had developed a show, we sold it to the Playboy channel, the day I sign the contract I called my boss and quit.
Stephen: Wow.
Fred: And by the way, just to finish that piece of the story, I call the guy, I say I’m quitting, and he goes, “What if I give you a raise?” I go, “But, I’m quitting.” He goes, “What if I double your salary?”
And like a complete arrogant asshole, I go, “Bob, if I’ve been dumb enough to work for the last three years at half salary, I’m really an idiot. And if I can’t double my own salary in a year, I’m even dumber,” and I left. Now fast forward, we made no money the first year. None. And he hired us back as a consultant for a third of our salary (laughs). But by the way, we stayed as consultants for that company for the next ten years, and our last deal was 100 times bigger than the first deal, so you know it all worked out.
Stephen: That was with more in the advertising world, right?
Fred: Well, what we thought we were going to do was make shows and movies.
Stephen: Oh.
Fred: And we realized quickly we had no idea how to do that. So the work that came up was my expertise and Alan’s at MTV network, is we were the guys who really established that media could be branded. That whole concept of branding didn’t exist in television. The average home in America in the … All the way for most of the 80s, they had two channels of television. All you had to do was show up.
And in the first five, six years of cable, 30 channels popped up. Eventually it became 100, eventually it became 500, we were like, “Oh my God, 30 channels, what are we going to do?” So, we realized we had to have a programming approach that was different than everyone else. But my job was figuring out how we were going to promote ourselves. And I took that to mean how we were going to establish our personality. So, Alan and I literally wrote a rule book about how cable networks could establish personality. We did it first with MTV, and I say all the time, we were on a magic carpet ride. We could have made the look and sound of MTV being a bear ass farting, and people would have followed it, but I think we did better than that. But then, they also owned Nickelodeon, and Nickelodeon was going under. Literally of those 30 channels, they were the number 30 channel. So, they brought us in, and we didn’t know anything about kids’ programming, we didn’t like kids, you know. But we had this methodology, and we applied our methodology to Nickelodeon, and six months later they had gone from number 30 to number 1.
“That’s my job, to pray every night, before I go to sleep, that when I show up in the morning, somebody great will walk in the door.”
Stephen: The method is just focused around finding … Just treating the channel as a personality and how you showcase that?
Fred: Yeah, well, you know what? Television now does it again, which I think is one of the reasons that so much television is struggling, they’re all about “Next week, a very special episode.” They just tell you what happens every week in a show. We didn’t bother telling anybody what happened in any show. We bothered telling people that Nickelodeon, if you were a kid, was the greatest place to be in the universe. And we did that for 10 years. We sometimes used the shows to illustrate that, but it was all about Nickelodeon, not about the shows.
Stephen: Do you think you applied that to Frederator and all the cartoons?
Fred: I like to think so. I mean, when you walked in here and you said, “I watch all the Cartoon Hangover stuff,” I think that’s really an anomaly of the YouTube space. Most of the channels that people pay attention to, the channel and the show are the same thing. I pay attention to PewDiePie, or I pay attention to … I don’t know who. Grace Helbig or Hannah Heart or whatever it is. There was no difference between the show and the channel. We established, early on, that we had a channel and shows. So we spend as much time thinking about Cartoon Hangover as we do about Bravest Warriors.
Stephen: True. I’ve always loved the “Go! Cartoons“, because it’s coming from all over.
Fred: Thank you.
Stephen: It’s cool, just because you can tell how different all of these are, because they’re from all different people, but that makes it interesting with kind of a branded channel, because the brand is just that it’s all over the place.
Fred: Exactly. Well, interestingly, the methodology that Alan and I developed is what we call “The Promises”. We have a series of brand promises. We had it at MTV. We had it at Nickelodeon. We had it at Nick At Night. That’s what we do. As Cartoon Hangover was sort of making its way through, I called Alan, and I said, “You know, I’m just in the thick of the soup here, trying to keep the wheels on the bus. Can you come in and be our branding consultant?” He developed a series of promises. When you leave, we have a bunch of postcards on the door when you walk in.
Stephen: I’ve got to look at them. That’s interesting. Promises to the …
Fred: To the consumer, to the viewer.
Stephen: Oh, I see. What are the Cartoon Hangover ones?
Fred: The Cartoon Hangover ones are: We’re perfectly odd entertainment for perfect people. We think that everyone has something good inside. We think Cartoon Hangover is bad for you. Together, our audience and us, we support independent artists. We make indie cartoons. I’m blanking. I’ll look at the list myself, but it’s that kind of thing.
Stephen: You establish those before creating the channel?
Fred: Right.
Stephen: That’s interesting.
Fred: It’s very meaningful to all of us as we’re figuring out what do we do. Are we breaking a promise? To me, it’s sort of interesting. You probably never watch the History Channel. Then, all of a sudden, they come up with Pawn Stars. How does that fit the promise of whatever the History Channel stood for? I always guess that the pitch meeting was, “Well, you know, every item in a pawn shop is someone’s personal history.” What else could you have come up with to convince somebody to do that thing, right?
Stephen: True. I’ve always been interested, how does it work, finding these cartoon creators? Are you going seeking, or are people coming to you?
Fred: Both. I was just up at the Ottawa Film Festival, and one of my whole reasons for being there is so that I would meet new people. In “Go! Cartoons’” case, we got 800 pitches to pick the 12 cartoons.
Stephen: Wow. Oh my gosh.
Fred: We literally got them from all over. We make it an article of faith we will talk to anybody. If a 16-year-old calls, I will listen to them.
Stephen: Wow. How does it work to become a freelance writer? How do you get freelance writers on shows, or is that a thing?
Fred: Well, all of Hollywood are freelancers. So you have to go out into the swimming pool, and you just have to start swimming. You have to hope you bump into somebody who’s a better swimmer and go, “How do you do that stroke?” There’s an old cliché, “You have to fish where the fish are.” So it depends what kind of writing you want to do and where’s the work.
Stephen: I see.
Fred: My feeling was when I was growing up, I didn’t know people actually made things. I didn’t know what credits were or anything like that. I would have given anything to find out stuff.
Stephen: True.
Fred: So my point of view has always been if somebody bothered to show up here, we’re going to pay attention to them. That’s really true even with our cartoons. Look, I’m 67. I’ve been doing animation for 27 years, and I still go out there as often as I can and talk to as many people as I can, hoping against hope that one of them will show up with something that’s wonderful. That’s my job, to pray every night, before I go to sleep, that when I show up in the morning, somebody great will walk in the door.
Interviewed by Stephen Kipp | Head Writer