| Craig Bartlett | |
|---|---|
| Born | Craig Michael Bartlett October 18, 1956 Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
| Occupation | Animator |
| Years active | 1985 - Present |
| Known for | Rugrats (1991–1994) Hey Arnold! (1996–2004) Dinosaur Train (with Jim Henson Productions; 2009-current) |
| Spouse | Lisa Groening |
Craig Michael Bartlett (born Sunday, October 18, 1956; Seattle, Washington) is an animator best known for writing for Rugrats and creating the television series Hey Arnold!.
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His first job, after graduating from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was at Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon, where he learned the art of stop-motion animation. Bartlett moved to Los Angeles in 1987 to animate the Penny cartoons, with assistance from Nick Park for Pee-wee's Playhouse on CBS.
He later worked at BRC Imagination Arts directing projects such as Postcards and Mystery Lodge for Knott's Berry Farm.
Bartlett met the Nickelodeon execs while story editing Rugrats in its first seasons. He pitched Hey Arnold! to them in fall of 1993, produced a pilot in spring of 1994, and the series was greenlit in January 1995. Hey Arnold! was in production continuously from 1995 to 2001, culminating in a TV movie originally titled "Arnold Saves the Neighborhood", but which Nickelodeon decided to release theatrically as Hey Arnold!: The Movie, in June 2002.
A dispute over a 2nd planned Arnold movie then resulted in Bartlett leaving Nickelodeon to write and produce a TV movie for Cartoon Network called Party Wagon, a story set in the 1850s that featured Sean Astin as Randall P. McDuff, a young man who flees his own shotgun wedding and wanders west, eventually joining up with a band of other misfits whose wagon is continually getting kicked out of various wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. Broadcast in the US on February 29, 2004, and originally intended as a pilot for an ongoing series, it ended up being the first CN movie-length pilot to be broadcast, but not picked up as a series.
In 2005 Bartlett returned to BRC to make a multi-media simulator attraction for NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, called the Shuttle Launch Experience. In the course of the 3-year project, Bartlett interviewed 26 astronauts to gather their experiences from launch to orbit. One of the astronauts Bartlett interviewed was four-time shuttle flier and commander Charles F. Bolden Jr..
After developing various pilots and feature scripts, Bartlett moved to the Jim Henson Company, where he co-wrote the computer animated film Unstable Fables: 3 Pigs and a Baby. Bartlett stayed at Henson to work as story editor on a PBS Kids pre-school show called Sid the Science Kid with PBS executive Linda Simensky, whom he had worked with at Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.
In September 2008, a show for pre-schoolers called Jim Henson's Dinosaur Train was picked up by PBS Kids; produced by Henson, this was his first show created by Bartlett to be picked up since Hey Arnold!.[1] The series debuted on PBS stations on September 7, 2009.[2]
He is married to Lisa Groening, sister of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama, after whom Lisa Simpson is named.[3]