The Cartoon Cartoon Show
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| What a Cartoon! Show | |
|---|---|
 The What a Cartoon! Show logo |
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| Format | Variety show |
| Created by | Fred Seibert |
| Starring | Various voice actors |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of episodes | 63 (21 shows) |
| Production | |
| Running time | Approx 30 mins. (7 mins. per segment) |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | Cartoon Network |
| Original run | February 20, 1995 – November 28, 1997 |
| External links | |
| IMDb profile | |
| TV.com summary | |
World Premiere Toons (later known as What a Cartoon! Show, now known as The Cartoon Cartoon Show), was the mid-1990s animation showcase that appeared on the Cartoon Network. It served as the launching point for multiple original cartoons including Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, The Powerpuff Girls, and Courage the Cowardly Dog. The Big Cartoon DataBase cites What a Cartoon!/World Premiere Toons as a "venture combining classic 1940s production methods with the originality, enthusiasm and comedy of the 1990s." What a Cartoon! now airs on Boomerang.
World Premiere Toons was an animation project conceived and produced by Fred Seibert, the original creative director of MTV and Nickelodeon who served as the president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc., prior to founding Frederator Studios. Its mission was to return creative power to animators and artists, by recreating the atmospheres that spawned the great cartoon characters of the mid-20th century. Each of 48 short cartoons mirrored the structure of a theatrical cartoon, with each film being based on an original storyboard drawn and written by its artist/creator.
Each of the show creators worked with the internal Hanna-Barbera "Creative Corps" Art Director Jesse Stagg and designer Kelly Wheeler 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.
The first World Premiere Toon broadcasted in its entirety was The Powerpuff Girls' Meat Fuzzy Lumkins, which made its world premiere on February 20, 1995 during a television special called the World Premiere Toon-In (termed "President's Day Nightmare" by its producers, Williams Street). The special was hosted by Space Ghost and the cast of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and featured comic interviews and a mock contest with the creators of the various cartoons. The Toon-In was simulcast on Cartoon Network, TBS Superstation, and TNT. The special, without the Powerpuff Girls cartoon or any of the clips from the other WPT cartoons featured in the special, was later included in the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast Volume 3 DVD. The version with the other WPT cartoons was later included in the Powerpuff Girls Season 1 DVD, with Meat Fuzzy Lumkins included as a separate special feature. Most of the WAC shorts that were voted into shows had more than 1 short. In fact, Cow & Chicken and Courage The Cowardly Dog were the only exceptions. Shake & Flick (a WAC short set in Rome about a conceited poodle and a ferocious flea) was nominated for a run by Cartoon Network, but it was Johnny Bravo that won the contract. Shake & Flick ,however, still received popular reception even though it never went past being a one shot and Cartoon Network never found the proper way to continue it past it's WAC pilot.
There were also a large number of animated shorts created by several cartoonists such as: Genndy Tartakovsky (four Dexter's Laboratory shorts and Dial M for Monkey), David Feiss (No Smoking, which introduced the siblings Cow and Chicken), Van Partible (two Johnny Bravo shorts and Jungle Boy), Craig McCracken (Meat Fuzzy Lumkins and Crime 101, which introduced The Powerpuff Girls), Butch Hartman (who did two shorts starring Pfish and Chip and a number of one-shot shorts, including Shake & Flick, Hillbilly Blue, and Gramps, and was also the art director for Snoot's New Squat, a one-shot short about a flea from space who searched for a home for his people and found one for himself in a paranoid yellow dog), Seth MacFarlane (Larry and Steve, which were prototypes of Peter Griffin and Brian of Family Guy), John R. Dilworth (whose Oscar-nominated Chicken From Outer Space introduced Courage the Cowardly Dog), Zac Moncrief ("Godfrey and Zeek"), Paul Parducci, James Giordano & R.J. Reiley ("Zoonatiks" short, Home Sweet Home), Jon McClenahan ("Fat Cats: Drip Dry Drips"), and countless others. Also included were works from veterans like William Hanna (Wind-Up Wolf and Hard Luck Duck), Joseph Barbera (shorts featuring The Flintstones' Dino), Robert Alvarez (Pizza Boy), John McIntyre (Kitchen Casanova), Mike Milo (Bloo's Gang and Ignoramooses), Ralph Bakshi (Malcolm and Melvin), Rob Renzetti (Mina and the Count), Eddie Fitzgerald (Tales of Worm Paranoia), Patrick A. Ventura (Sledgehammer O'Possum, George and Junior and Yuckie Duck), Meinert Hansen (The Adventures Of Captain Buzz Cheeply), Jerry Reynolds and Russ Harris of Perennial Pictures Film Corporation (O. Ratz - Rat in a Hot Tin Can), Don Jurwich, Jerry Eisenberg and Jim Ryan (Yoink of the Yukon) and Jon McClenahan (Fat Cats).
The What a Cartoon! experiment introduced many of today's top animation talent and was repeated several times. A similar program, also created by Fred Seibert, was introduced on Nickelodeon in 1998, titled Oh Yeah! Cartoons.
The What a Cartoon! shorts ended with silent clips of the cartoons squeezed in with the credits and sometimes the cartoon's full title would show up along with the clips above the credits. A vast majority of the shorts have never received their own runs as series on the Cartoon Network schedule (especially if the short only had one original What a Cartoon! pilot). In fact, some shorts were even created as the type that were better off as one shots and would never perform well beyond stand alone status (like Awfully Lucky which centered around a pearl that granted good luck, and bad luck following each moment of good luck it brought).
[edit] Trivia
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- A What a Cartoon! short entitled Strange Things was computer animated, making it the only What a Cartoon! short that did not use the traditional hand-drawings animation.
- Cartoon Network signed on for a second season.
- Cartoon Network's What a Cartoon! project, which was assembled into a half-hour series, The What a Cartoon! Show (later re-named The Cartoon Cartoon Show), featured over 52 new seven-minute cartoons, starring 42 new characters.
- "Mina and the Count" shorts were also featured on the Seibert-produced Oh Yeah! Cartoons on Nickelodeon, making it the only cartoon to be featured on both shows. So far it never had its own series.
- In the short Buy One, Get One Free, Top Cat can be seen mingling in the party.
- The name of the short The Ignoramooses is a mix of the insult "Ignoramus" and "Moose".
- In the short Gramps, the aliens can be seen with masks of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble from The Flintstones.
- Some of these World Premiere Toons/What a Cartoon! shorts were featured in some Cartoon Network videos (e.g. Pfish & Chip is included in The Town That Santa Forgot, Shake & Flick is included in Scooby Doo's A Nutcracker Scoob, etc.)
[edit] External links
- What-A-Cartoon! at the Internet Movie Database
- What a Cartoon! at TV.com
- What a Cartoon! at Frederator
