Of all the icons of New York’s animation community, there are some who are recognized by one well-known piece, some by two. Candy Kugel has dozens. Being one-third of the brains behind the award-winning studio Buzzco Associates, as well as being a New York animation veteran since the male-dominated 1970’s, Candy has produced pieces of animation that have built a firm place in popular culture. You might remember their widely-recognized “Sesame Street” clips (“It’s Hip to be a Square!”), their commercials featuring Underdog and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or the original MTV spots of the moon landing – not to mention her consistent track record of award-winning and critically-acclaimed short films.

“I was never interested in animation to do ink and paint. I was interested in moving my drawings,” she says simply, as we sit in the hallway outside her classroom. When she’s not running a studio, Candy finds time to teach animation at the School of Visual Arts. I was eager to learn all the gory details of Candy’s rise to a studio head.

Apparently, her determination goes back to her childhood. “I was a third-born kid,” she says with a laugh. “I knew that whatever I had to say was valid [to me] and if you didn’t believe what I had to say, then screw you. So I got to where I was by having my own path. I was marching to a different drummer.” As a teenager, in the 70’s, Candy worked in the New York theater community. “I was a substitute ‘usherette,’ and I have to tell you, with the women’s movement and everything, being called an ‘usherette’ was a sticking point … and I just so loved the theater, but at the same time I knew from the plays that I was in at high school that I had terrible stage fright -- I didn’t want to look stupid. And when you’re an actor, you can’t be afraid to look stupid.”

Later, while an illustration student at Rhode Island School of Design, she went to a seminar by Jack Zander a one-time assistant to Chuck Jones while at Termite Terrace. “You have to believe,” says Candy, “that animation wasn’t always as omnipresent as it is now. In the 70’s, there was a real dearth of it. It wasn’t being done except for kids’ cereal, basically. And Saturday morning cartoons were all reruns from the old Warner Bros and Terrytoons stuff. But [Zander] had a commercial studio and it was very exciting to me. All of a sudden it occurred to me that my drawings could act. What I couldn’t do, I could make my drawings do.”