What a Cartoon!
What a Cartoon! is an American animated anthology series created by Fred Seibert and produced by Hanna-Barbera Cartoons for Cartoon Network. It consisted a total of 48 cartoons, intended to return creative power to animators and artists, by recreating the atmospheres that spawned the iconic cartoon characters of the mid-20th century. Each of the shorts mirrored the structure of a theatrical cartoon, with each film being based on an original storyboard drawn and written by its artist or creator. Three of the cartoons were paired together into a half-hour episode. By the end of the run, a Cartoon Network Studios production tag was added to some shorts to signal they were original to the network.
What a Cartoon! premiered under the World Premiere Toons title on February 20, 1995. The premiere aired during a special episode of Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast called "1st Annual World Premiere Toon-In", which features interviews with animators Craig McCracken, Pat Ventura, Van Partible, Eugene Mattos, and Genndy Tartakovsky, as well as model Dian Parkinson. During the original run of the shorts, the series was retitled to The What a Cartoon! Show and later to The Cartoon Cartoon Show until the final shorts aired on August 23, 2002.
The series is influential for helping to revive television animation in the 1990s and serving as a launching point for the Cartoon Network animated television series Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, and The Powerpuff Girls. Once it had several original shorts, those became the first Cartoon Cartoons. From 2005 to 2008, The Cartoon Cartoon Show was revived as a block for reruns of older Cartoon Cartoons that had been phased out by the network.
History
Origins and production
became president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1992 and helped guide the struggling animation studio into its greatest output in years with shows like 2 Stupid Dogs and SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron. Seibert wanted the studio to produce short cartoons, in the vein of the Golden age of American animation. Although a project consisting of 48 shorts would cost twice as much as a normal series, Seibert's pitch to Cartoon Network involved promising 48 chances to "succeed or fail", opened up possibilities for new original programming, and offered several new shorts to the thousands already present in the Turner Entertainment Co. library. According to Seibert, quality did not matter much to the cable operators distributing the struggling network, they were more interested in promising new programs.With Turner Broadcasting CEO Ted Turner and Seibert's boss Scott Sassa on board, the studio fanned out across the world to spread the word that the studio was in an "unprecedented phase", in which animators had a better idea what cartoons should be than executives and Hanna-Barbera supported them. The company started taking pitches in earnest in 1993 and received over 5,000 pitches for the 48 slots. The diversity in the filmmakers included those from various nationalities, race, and gender. Seibert later described his hope for an idealistic diversity as "The wider the palette of creative influences, the wider and bigger the audiences."
Seibert's idea for the project was influenced heavily by Looney Tunes. Hanna-Barbera founders and chairmen William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, as well as veteran animator Friz Freleng, taught Seibert how the shorts of the Golden Age of American animation were produced. John Kricfalusi, Hanna-Barbera alumnus and creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show, became a teacher of sorts for Seibert and was the first person Seibert called while looking for new talent for the project.
As was the custom in live action film and television, the company did not pay each creator for the storyboard submitted and pitched. For the first time in the studio's history, individual creators could retain their rights, and earn royalties on their creations. While most in the industry scoffed at the idea, encouragement, according to Seibert, came from the cartoonists who flocked to Hanna-Barbera with original ideas.
Format
The format for What a Cartoon! was ambitious, as no one had ever attempted anything similar in the television animation era. The shorts produced would be a product of the original cartoonists' vision, with no executive intervention: for example, even the music would be an individually crafted score. Each 7-minute short would debut, by itself, as a stand-alone cartoon or a stand-alone series on Cartoon Network. Three of the 7-minute cartoons are paired together into a half-hour episode. Seibert explained the project's goal in a 2007 blog post: "We didn't care what the sitcom trends were, what Nickelodeon was doing, what the sales departments wanted. We wanted cartoons."Crew
The What a Cartoon! staff had creators from Europe, Asia, and the United States. The crew also contained young series first-timers, but veterans as well. In addition to the veterans, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera each produced two shorts each for What a Cartoon!. Many of the key crew members from previous Hanna-Barbera series 2 Stupid Dogs joined the team of What a Cartoon! as well.Many of its crew members later went on to write and direct for Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, and The Powerpuff Girls, including those named above. The Kitchen Casanova director John McIntyre is particularly known for directing several Dexter episodes. Ralph Bakshi's series was considered too risqué to be shown. It has been rumored that John Kricfalusi was slated to direct new Yogi Bear-themed What a Cartoon! shorts of his own under Spümcø.
Inspired by Seibert's interest in the modern rock posters of Frank Kozik, each of the shows' creators worked with the internal Hanna-Barbera Creative Corps creative director Bill Burnett, and senior art director Jesse Stagg, to craft a series of high-quality, limited-edition, fluorescent art posters. The Corps launched a prolonged guerrilla mailing campaign, targeting animation heavyweights and critics leading up to the launch of World Premiere Toons. The first poster campaign of its kind introduced the world to the groundbreaking new stable of characters.
Broadcast
The first cartoon from the What a Cartoon! project broadcast in its entirety was The Powerpuff Girls in "Meat Fuzzy Lumkins", which made its world premiere on Monday, February 20, 1995, during Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode "1st Annual World Premiere Toon-In". Written by Cartoon Network staffer Matt Maiellaro, it was hosted by Space Ghost, humorously interviewing Hanna-Barbera animators while his adversaries judge each individual short. It was simulcast on Cartoon Network, TBS and TNT. To promote the shorts, Cartoon Network's marketing department came up with the concept of "Dive-In Theater" in 1995 to showcase the 48 cartoon shorts. The cartoons were shown at water parks and large municipal swimming pools, treating kids and their parents to exclusive poolside screenings on 9' x 12' movie screens.Beginning February 26, 1995, each What a Cartoon! short began to premiere on Sunday nights, promoted as World Premiere Toons. Every week after the premiere, Cartoon Network showcased a different World Premiere Toons made by a different artist. After an acclimation of cartoons, the network packaged the shorts as a half-hour show titled World Premiere Toons: The Next Generation, featuring reruns of the original shorts but also new premieres.
Eventually, all of the cartoons were compiled into one program which was used the name World Premiere Toons: The Show until the summer of 1996 when it started bearing the name of the original project: The What a Cartoon! Show. The show's initial premieres for each short preceded Cartoon Network's Sunday night movie block, Mr. Spim's Cartoon Theatre. The shorts continued to air on Sundays until 1997, when the network moved the shorts to Wednesdays at 9pm. Following the premiere of Johnny Bravo and Cow and Chicken as full series in July 1997, the series shifted to Thursday nights, where it remained.
The What a Cartoon! Show continued airing new episodes on Thursdays until November 28, 1997, when the final short of the 48 contracted during Seibert's era aired. In 1998, Cartoon Network debuted two new short pilots and advertised them as World Premiere Toons: Mike, Lu & Og and Kenny and the Chimp, both of which were produced by outside studios and produced after Time Warner's acquisition of Turner Broadcasting in 1996. The two pilots were later compiled into The Cartoon Cartoon Show, while both shorts eventually garnered their own series, Mike, Lu & Og in 1999 and Codename: Kids Next Door in 2002. Three shorts were retconned into The Cartoon Cartoon Show anthology. Bill Wray's King Crab: Space Crustacean, as well as his former colleague John Kricfalusi's What a Cartoon! shorts, Boo Boo Runs Wild and A Day in the Life of Ranger Smith, aired on the program with minimal Cartoon Cartoons branding in 1999.
On June 9, 2000, The What a Cartoon! Show was relaunched as The Cartoon Cartoon Show. In this new format, it aired reruns and new episodes of the full-series Cartoon Cartoons, as well as new Cartoon Cartoon shorts and old WAC! shorts. From 2000 to 2001, the pilot shorts appearing on the network's viewer's poll that lost to The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and Codename: Kids Next Door were added to the anthology. The show continued to air until October 16, 2003, when it was temporarily dropped from the network's schedule.
On September 12, 2005, The Cartoon Cartoon Show was revived, this time as a half-hour program featuring segments of older Cartoon Cartoons that were no longer shown regularly on the network, such as Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, and others. Some Cartoon Cartoons were moved exclusively to this show and the Top 5, though there was also some overlap with shows that already had regular half-hour slots outside the series. In 2006, the programming was expanded to also include non-Cartoon Cartoons that were regularly shown on the network, such as Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Camp Lazlo, My Gym Partner's a Monkey, and Squirrel Boy. The show ended on June 21, 2008.
In 2007, reruns of What a Cartoon! played briefly on Cartoon Network's retro animation sister channel, Boomerang.
In 2020, a selection of shorts were added to the Cartoon Network website and app.
On July 29, 2024, reruns of What a Cartoon! returned to Cartoon Network, airing only on Monday evenings as part of Adult Swim's Checkered Past block.