Profile: Fred Seibert
An interview with famed producer of original programming for cartoon TV
by Jake Friedman
*Originally published in the October, 2006 issue of the aNYmator newsletter.
In recent years, Fred Siebert and his Frederator Studios have been an open door to all who want fame and glory. As an independent producer, he not only pushes his own projects forward but offers his ear to show pitches here in New York and in LA. He executive-produced such cartoon hits as “Chalk Zone,” “Fairly Oddparents,” “My Life as a Teenage Robot,” and most recently the preschool project “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!” with Film Roman. Siebert discusses winning pitches in Dave Levy’s Your Career in Animation, but I was intent on finding out the whole story.
Courtesy of Fred Seibert
JF: What path did you take to be where you are in animation today?
FS: I never thought I’d do animation. The first piece of animation I ever worked on was in 1975 – I composed and produced a soundtrack for a student film. I was just out of school, and I was a recording engineer and record producer. And then in 1978 I did a few animated commercials for radio stations through my boss, who knew how to do such things. We created, conceived and produced some animated commercials with animation production companies around the country. In 1980 I went to work in cable television for the first time and I ran the promotion dept for a number of cable TV networks that were starting. We started doing animated station identifications. Over the next 10 years I probably produced a thousand 10-second station identifications, with animation studios from all over the world. And then in 1992 I became president of Hanna Barbera cartoons and that got me into story-telling animation, which is what I do to this day.JF: How did you land that job as president of Hanna Barbera?
FS: It was a stupid happy accident. I was at Universal Studios Florida on their opening day, and they had a Hanna Barbera ride. I’ve always loved the Hanna Barbera characters, so I went on this great ride. At the end of the ride they had a store, and I bought as much as I could hold, including a Hanna Barbera watch. I went out to dinner with a friend of mine at a really fancy restaurant, and he said, “What’s that watch?” I said, “This is my Hanna Barbera watch. What’s yours, like a rolex?” Fast-forward 18 months. That guy became president of Ted Turner’s entertainment company. So he calls me up one day and says, “You know we just bought Hanna Barbera. … You want to run it?” And I looked down and I had the same watch on.So I went to Hanna Barbera, and I assumed that my whole life in the cartoon business would be my years there, which ended up being five. After that, Ted Turner sold his whole company to Time Warner, and I made the decision to find something else to do, at which time the guy who was the president of Nickelodeon called me up – I knew him for many years, since I was 17 – and he said, “Hey, are you doing anything? Maybe you want to make cartoons with us.” I set up an independent production company, Frederator, and made a deal with Nickelodeon and I’ve been making kids cartoon shows with them ever since.