LOU SCHEIMER: CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION Lou Scheimer Author
Andy Mangels Co-Author & Researcher & Production
Mark McNabb
Emiliano Santalucia
Designer
Cover artist
Eric Nolen-Weathington
John Morrow
Editor
Publisher
DEDICATIONS To my loving wife, Jay Scheimer, who was always there for me. Lou Scheimer To Lou Scheimer, the man whose entertainment helped shape a generation. Thanks for the adventures and morals, and for allowing me to help chronicle the amazing work of Filmation. Andy Mangels Adventures of Waldo Kitty, The: © 1975 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Aquaman, Batman, Blackhawks, Superboy, Superman, Wonder Woman and all associated characters and elements are TM and © 2012 DC Comics. • ArchieTM: © 1968 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • The Archie Show: © 1968 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • Archie and his New Pals (Special): © 1969 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • The Archie Comedy Hour: © 1969 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • Archie’s Funhouse: © 1976 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • Archie’s TV Funnies: © 1971 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • U.S. of Archie: © 1974 Archie Comic Publications Inc. • The New Archie and Sabrina Hour: © 1977 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. • Archie and Sabrina are trademarks of Archie Comic Publications, Inc. in the United States and around the world and are used under license by Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. The ARCHIE characters were created by John L. Goldwater. The likenesses of the original Archie characters were created by Bob Montana. • Ark Angels: TM and © 2012 Adventist Media Productions. Used by Permission. • Ark II: © 1976 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Blackstar: © 1981 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Bozo The Clown: TM & © 2012 Larry Harmon Pictures Corp. All Rights Reserved. • The Brady Kids: © 2012 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. • Brave Starr®: © 1987 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Brave Starr®, The Legend: © 1988 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Buck Rogers: TM and © The Dille Family Trust. • Captain America: ™ & © 2012 Marvel Entertainment, LLC and its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. • Duckula: © 2012 Scott Shaw! Used by Permission. • Fabulous Funnies: © 1978 Classic Media Distribution. Nancy, Sluggo, Emmy Lou, and the Captain and the Kids are trademarks of United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Alley Oop is a trademark of Newspaper Enterprise Association. Broom Hilda: © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Dick Tracy: © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission. • Fantastic Voyage: © 1969 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved. • Fat Albert and the Cosby KidsTM: Series I/II © 1972/1984 William H. Cosby, Jr. • The Fat Albert Christmas Special: © 1978 William H. Cosby, Jr. • The Fat Albert Easter Special: © 1978 William H. Cosby, Jr. • The Fat Albert Halloween Special: © 1978 William H. Cosby, Jr. • Under exclusive License to Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and all character names and likenesses are trademarks of William H. Cosby, Jr. • Flash Gordon: © 2012 Hearst Entertainment, Inc. • Fraidy Cat: © 1975 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Freedom Force: © 1978 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Ghostbusters (Animated): © 1986 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. •
Ghostbusters (Live): © 1975 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Groovie Goolies: © 1970 Archie Comics Publications, Inc. • Heckle & Jeckle: © 2012 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. • He-Man® and the Masters of the Universe®: Series I/II © 1983/1984 Classic Media Distribution; Characters © 1983/1984 Mattel Inc.; All Rights Reserved. • He-Man® and She-Ra® A Christmas Special: © 1985 Classic Media Distribution; Characters © 1983/1984 Mattel Inc.; All Rights Reserved. • Secret of the Sword, The: © 1985 Classic Media Distribution; Characters © 1983/1984 Mattel Inc.; All Rights Reserved. • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and other character names are trademarks of Mattel, Inc. Used with Permission. • Hero High: © 1981 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Jason of Star Command: © 1978 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Journey Back to Oz: © 1974 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Journey to the Center of the Earth: © 1968 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved. • Lassie’s Rescue Rangers: © 1973 Classic Media Distribution / Classic Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. • Lone Ranger®, The: © 1980 Classic Media Distribution / Classic Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. • Mighty Mouse: © 2012 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. • Mission: Magic!: © 1973 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved • M.U.S.H. : © 1975 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • My Favorite Martians: © 1973 Jack Chertok Television Inc./Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • New Adventures of Gilligan, The and Gilligan’s Planet and all related characters and elements are TM and © 2012 Turner Entertainment Co. • New Adventures of Zorro, The: © 1981 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Oliver Twist: TM & © 2012 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. • Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night: © 1987 Classic Media Distribution. • Prince Valiant: TM and © 2012 King Features • Robin and Dreamweavers: © Dreamweaver N.V. Curacao Dutch Antilles 2000. • Sabrina the Teenage Witch®: © 1969 Archie Comic Publications Inc. Sabrina and Archie and all names and likenesses are trademarks of Archie Comic Publications, Inc. and are used under license by Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. The SABRINA characters were created by George Gladir and Dan De Carlo. • Secrets of Isis: © 1976 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Shazam! animated ® : © 1981 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • She-Ra®, Princess of Power® Series I/II © 1985/1987 Classic Media Distribution; Characters © 1985/1987 Mattel Inc.; All Rights Reserved. • She-Ra, Princess of Power and other character names are trademarks of Mattel, Inc. Used with Permission. • Snow White Christmas Special, A: © 1980 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Snow White Happily Ever After: © 1989 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved • Space Academy: © 1977 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Space Sentinels: © 1977 Classic Media Distribution. All Rights Reserved. • Sport Billy: © 1980 Sport-Billy Produktions. • Star Trek and related marks are TM & © 2012 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. • Tarzan: TM and © 2012 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Used by Permission. • Tom and Jerry and Droopy and all related characters and elements are TM and © 2012 Turner Entertainment Co. • Treasure Island: TM & © 2012 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. • Wacky and Packy: © 1975 Classic Media Distribution. • The Emmy® name and the Emmy® statuette are the trademarked property of The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. All reproductions in this historical overview of Filmation and related productions and products are copyright by the respective copyright holders, and are used here strictly for historical purposes. Attempts have been made to properly attribute copyrights and secure permissions for use in this book; if you are a valid copyright-holder and have not been properly credited, please contact TwoMorrows so that this can be corrected in any future printings. The viewpoints expressed in the text are the opinions of the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the co-author, the editor, or of TwoMorrows Publishing.
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com © 2012 TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All rights reserved under international and Pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical. Photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-044-1 • ISBN-10: 1-60549-044-X First American Edition 2012
• Printed in the USA
For a full listing of Filmation projects, titles, and airdates, go to www.twomorrows.com/media/filmationlist 2
LOU SCHEIMER: CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION
CONTENTS... PREFACE ..........................................5
chapter seventeeN ......149
Anthologies and Expansion (1978–1979) chapter one .............................7
Wherein My Father Punched Out Adolf Hitler Years Before Captain America Did (1928–1946)
chapter eighteen .....161
chapter two ..........................17
chapter nineteen .....171
Driving Japan Crazy (1946–1948) chapter three .................23
Carnegie and an Early Proposal (1948–1955)
The Year of Legal Discontent (1979–1980) Silver Bullets and Soccer Balls (1980–1981) chapter twenty ..........179
Forced To Runaway (1981–1982)
chapter FOUR .....................3 1
chapter twenty-one ....189
Clowns, Cats, Rockets, and Jesus (1955–1965)
A Farewell to Networks / The Last Man Standing (1982–1983)
chapter five ........................43
And Who, Disguised As A Real Animation Studio…
chapter twenty-two ....197
We Have the Power! (1983–1984) chapter six ............................51
The Super Superheroes (1967)
COLOR GALLERY ..............209
chapter seven .................59
The Fantastic Shrinking Bat-Teenager (1968)
chapter twenty-three ....215
Morals and Media Battles (1984–1985) chapter eight ....................69
Gold Records and Witches (1969)
chapter twenty-four ....223
Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves (1985–1986) chapter nine ........................75
Hey Lady! More Monsters & Music! (1970–1971)
chapter twenty-five ......235
Let’s Go Ghostbusters! (1986-1987) chapter ten .........................81
Funnies, Games, and Fables (1971)
chapter twenty-six ......241
Brave New Future? (1987-1988) chapter eleven ...............87
That’s the Way They All Became… the Cosby Kids! (1972–1973)
chapter twenty-seven ....253
The Last of the Red-Hot All-American Studios (1988-1989)
chapter twelve ...............95
Exploring Strange New Galaxies (1973–1974)
chapter twenty-eight ....261
Starting Over (1989-2004) chapter thirteen .....105
Dorothy, Gilligan, and Captain Marvel Walk into a Bar… (1974–1975)
chapter twenty-nine .....275
Getting To Know You… The Filmation Generation (2004-2010)
chapter fourteen ...1 15
Satire, Lawsuits, Legs, and Balls (1975–1976)
chapter thirty ............285
Afterword chapter fifteen .........129
Of Apes and Arks (1976–1977)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND CREDITS ..........................................287
chapter sixteen .........139
Holy Space Adventures, Batman! (1977–1978)
ABOUT THE CO-AUTHOR .....288
CONTENTS
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Wherein My Father Punched Out Adolf Hitler Years Before Captain America Did
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s many have said before me, it’s best to begin at the beginning. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 19, 1928, at the Passavant Hospital. I don’t remember much about it other than I was coming through a tunnel. I was 13-and-a-half pounds, and my mother was very short. I was her first child. After that birth, needless to say, I was also her last child. I mean, there was nothing left of my mother’s uterus! My Hebrew name is Yisroel Lieb after my uncle on my mother’s side. What you take out of that is the ‘L’ sound in Lieb. The closest in English is something like Lou or Lonnie. My birth name, however, was Louis Scheimer, though it is amusing to note that on the birth certificate for me filed on October 24, 1928, I’m just listed as “_______ Scheimer” as my parents had apparently not settled on the name yet. Given that they misspelled my mother’s maiden name on the same form, though, maybe they were just having a bad day. My mother, Lena Kessler, was originally from Russia, where she was born sometime in July 1895 in Annapol, Russia, in an area which was sort of an amorphous section somewhere betwixt Poland and Russia. Her father left Russia and came to the United States before the beginning of World War I beOpposite: cause he didn’t want to get stuck in the Russian army. By the time he got out of Lou in 1931 there, though, the war had started. My mother, her sister, brother Lieb, and her mother were still in Russia. They didn’t have a grosh to their name (that’s about a Above: penny in Russian form). Lou as a baby, 1928 In Russia my mother’s family somehow got a letter from the United States, CHAPTER 1: WHEREIN MY FATHER PUNCHED OUT ADOLF HITLER YEARS BEFORE CAPTAIN AMERICA DID
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1946–1948 C
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was in the Army now, post-war, at 17. My official entry date was September 25, 1946. They sent me to the closest camp for training, in Maryland. That’s the first time that I ever left Pittsburgh really. The war was over, so they didn’t even need to train people very well. At the camp was a corps that took care of machines, which was not really the place for me. But, they were sending people to the camp closest to where they had enlisted. They gave you eight weeks of training to go overseas. They just needed bodies at that time to replace the guys who really fought the war. It was a miserable eight weeks in basic training. The beds were assigned up and down. I tried desperately to get a top bunk; I didn’t want any little squirts up above me irritating me at night. But I didn’t get what I wanted. Instead, I got “Tiny.” Let me tell you, Tiny was the biggest person I had seen in my life outside of Bobo in high school. Tiny must have weighed at least 800 pounds. He was a nice guy, but I was sleeping in the bunk underneath him. When he would climb in, his bunk would sink down and land on me; I couldn’t turn at night. I think sleeping underneath him frightened me more than anything else in the Army. The closest I came to death was sleeping under Tiny. The second closest I came to death was from the Southern guys who were saying, “We are going to kill that Jew.” I was the only Jew there. There were songs made up every night of them killing me; anti-Semitism was everywhere. The eight weeks went by amazingly fast, and then because I was going overseas I got to go back to Pittsburgh for a few days. My mother had gone to live with my Aunt Sarah. I spent a couple days with my mother, my Aunt Sarah, and my Uncle Lou. They had their two boys by then, and I played around with them for a while. From there I went to Fort Lawton in Seattle, which is where they shipped personnel to Japan. That was the end of 1946. Some of the streets at the Fort were made of dirt, and because it rained all the time the dirt would turn to mud, and I got to spend my time mopping it up. I never saw Seattle as anything but a city of mud. I ended up with a miserable cold when I departed on December 10, 1946, aboard the U.S.S. General LeRoy Eltinge. It was a transport ship that had been used by the Navy and recently transferred to the Army. I arrived in Japan on the 27th of December. The rumors were that half of
Opposite: Lou in Japan, 1947 Above: Lou’s Army photo, 1946 CHAPTER 2: DRIVING JAPAN CRAZY
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1965-1966 C
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he studio was now down to two employees—myself and Hal—and a shutdown was imminent. Norm was doing his best to try to raise money from someone, somewhere, somehow. We did have one other “person” in the office, but we never paid her, and she didn’t say much. At the front of our office was a desk, and behind it we had a secretary. She wore glasses and a hand-me-down dress from Jay, and sometimes when we would have visitors they would talk to her for a moment or two before they realized that she was a mannequin! We had 24 empty desks and some equipment gathering dust. We didn’t have a Moviola to sell, or it would have probably been gone already. One day the phone rang, and Hal answered it. A moment or so later his eyes got wide, and he said, “Louie, maybe you’d better talk to them!” Knowing we didn’t have any money to pay bill collectors, I said, “Well, what is it? Did you tell....” He had a peculiar look on his face, “He says his name is Superman Weisinger calling from DC. He’s looking for Prescott!” I said, “Let me talk to him. Is it long distance?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Is it paid for?” He said, “Yeah.” So, I got on the phone and said, “Hello, Mr. Superman, are you calling from a phone booth?” I figured it was a prank call. The voice on the other end said, “Mort Weisinger here. I’m the story editor on Superman, and I’d like to talk to Norm Prescott.” I said, “Well, Norm’s not here right now. Is there anything I can do to help?” He said, “No, I’ve got to talk to Prescott!” I explained to him that Prescott was in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard and was going to leave for New York the next day and told him to call him shortly. I hung up and quickly called Norm and said, “There’s some guy going to call you, and his name is Mort Weisinger. He’s got something to do with Superman, but I don’t know what in the hell is going on. It may be some kind of work for us. I won’t close up the company until I hear from you.” He said, “Well, I know who the guy is! He’s the story editor at DC Comics. The reason I know him is that I went up to see him when I was doing Pinocchio and talked to him about the story to get some suggestions!” So, Weisinger called Norm, and it turned out that Fred Silverman, who had just started at CBS, had decided that he
Above: Norm Prescott, Hal Sutherland, and Lou in 1965 Opposite: The super-hero who saved Filmation CHAPTER 5: AND WHO, DISGUISED AS A REAL ANIMATION STUDIO...
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o animation studio worth its cels is going to stay content doing one project, and, even as we were working on Superman, we were working on other projects. The money from Superman allowed us to actually complete a few of them while others never got beyond the development stage. Since the seven-minute segments worked so well for Superman, all of the pilots we did produce were that length. Our next deal was announced in the trade papers in February 1966. It was set to be The Marx Bros., a new comedy series. It was supposed to have 156 seven-minute shorts, and Groucho Marx had signed on as the technical advisor. Miles Films was going to distribute us, repped by Jerry Liddiard as sales director. Jay Burton, Mort Goode, and Mike Maltese were the writers, and Hal Sutherland directed the pilot short, “A Day at the Horse Opera.” I believe that I designed the characters, and I did all the layout. We had two guys do voices for this pilot: Pat Harrington and Ted Knight. Pat was Groucho, and Ted did the other voices, except Harpo for obvious reasons. Well, there was an old vaudeville guy who played the Indian. Groucho was a lovely man, a really sweet, gentle man, but he couldn’t do the voice. One day Groucho called. He said, “Lou? I’ve got a perfect voice for you, to play me.” And I said, “Well, who is it, Groucho?” He said, “You’re talking to him.” It was Pat Harrington, Groucho’s friend. He was the perfect Groucho. He was also the nuttiest guy in the world. He seemed like he was straight and forward, but boy could he get strange. I’ll tell you some stories about him in a bit, but you’ll have to send the kids out of the room. We also announced an animated musical special called Three Billion Millionaires, which was based on an album that had been released in 1963 that benefitted the United Nations. Norm had made a deal for us to adapt it as a public service kind of show. People who had contributed to the album—and were thus going to be on the show—included Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Terry Thomas, Carol Burnett, George Maharis, and Wally Cox. Judy sang a song in it called “One More Lamb,” and others sang as well. Bob Allen was the songwriter and album producer, with book and lyrics by Peter Farrow and Diane Lampert, and the story was about a six-year-old from the land of Goo who comes to the United Nations as a delegate in about 2015. Ray Ellis conducted the music, and he would later come on to do most of Filmation’s stock music library. I don’t know why this never happened, but it was one of the many deals that Norm came up with. There are a lot of them that never got to the drawing boards, but, like many studios, you make deals and announce things, and sometimes they fall through. Opposite: By August 1966 we were working on four other short pilots: A montage of Filmation’s animated superheroes Bulldog Bonnd, Dick Digit, The Kid from S.P.Y., and The Green Lantern. We were negotiating with National to do other DC characAbove: Image from The Marx Bros. pilot ters, but that was the first one we announced. CHAPTER 6: THE SUPER SUPERHEROES
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1972–1973 C
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n mid-January 1972, Warner announced an expansion on their agreement with us from the previous year, with ten feature animated films—each budgeted at $1 million and set at 90minutes—announced as a co-production. The three-year project was noted in trades as being the largest deal of its kind in animation history. The tagline for the series of films was “Family Classics,” and Warner held network and syndication rights. Titles announced were: Oliver Twist, Cyrano De Bergerac, Swiss Family Robinson, Don Quixote, From the Earth to the Moon, Robin Hood, Noah’s Ark, Knights of the Round Table, Arabian Nights, and Jack London’s Call of the Wild. All of the works were based on books or concepts in the public domain, but not animated by any other studio. Warner was owned at that point by Kinney Services, a cable TV company, and with us owned by TelePrompTer the cable market—and the eventual home video market—was being closely eyed for these films as a continual revenue stream, not unlike Disney’s features. For us it meant we could employ an animation team of 400 people year-round!
A potential change in unions occurred in February 1972, when the Writers Guild of America filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to represent animation writers, who had previously been under the cartoonist’s union with IATSE 839. It was seen as a smart move, as many of the writers we were using—as well as those Hanna-Barbera was using—were WGAW members. Plans were that when the IATSE four-year contract finished on January 31, 1973, WGAW would take over. Nobody really objected… at first, but, by late March, IATSE 839 had voted to oppose the petition, citing the difficulty in separating WGAW-style script writers from “old animation-style” storyboard writers, who often wrote segments as they boarded. IATSE 839 ordered all writers and storyboarders to stop working on Hanna-Barbera’s Funky Phantom, causing some trauma to that series as it entered preproduction. WGAW struck back in April, filing a new petition that would cover all animation companies in the Animated Film Producer’s Association, not just the TV producers. The AFPA, by the way, included Filmation Associates, Hanna-Barbera Prods., MGM, UPA Pictures, Walt Disney, Walter Lantz Prods., and Warner Bros. Meanwhile, back at Filmation, in mid-February we announced more on our bold expansion into liveaction syndicated television, with five new series to be offered through TelePrompTer cable. They were Guest of Honor, Judgment, The Origins Game, The Heroes, and another show not yet revealed.
Opposite: The cast of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
Above: Lou, Bill Cosby, and Arthur Nadel
CHAPTER 11: THAT’s THE WAY THEY ALL BECAME... THE COSBY KIDS!
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n February we made a deal with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Records to release the soundtrack to Fat Albert, and Ringling was considering concert and fair appearances. It was supposed to be through their Wheel Records label. In March Norm gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter, boldly proclaiming “Disney Yesterday—Filmation Today.” It was hyperbole, but at that point we were riding high. Our production deal with Warner meant the films we were doing had funding; on the boards at that time were Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn. And our production deals for Star Trek and My Favorite Martians became public knowledge as of this article. At the end of March, NBC announced their new fall schedule, decimating their previous line-up. Seven first-season shows were cancelled in an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging that the network was feeling on Saturday mornings. They finally bought a series from us: the aforementioned Star Trek. William Shatner, who had already worked with us on several previously mentioned liveaction projects, agreed to reprise his voice as Captain James T. Kirk, which gave us a powerful chip in dealing with the other actors and the sure-to-be-vocal Star Trek fans. Nichelle Nichols signed on in May. A few weeks later, ABC and CBS both announced their schedules. ABC was keeping The Brady Kids and adding new episodes, as well as picking up Lassie’s Rescue Rangers and Mission: Magic! as new series. CBS dropped Sabrina from the schedule, but kept Archie under a new title, Everything’s Archie—although no new episodes were ordered, making this a rerun season—in addition to keeping Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and adding My Favorite Martians. That meant four new shows, two returning series with new episodes, and one all-repeat show, on all three networks. To put it mildly, we were doing well. In June CBS stole our consultants. By now Allan “Duke” Ducovny was director of children’s programs for CBS, and he liked our use of consultants on Fat Albert so much that he hired Dr. Gordon Berry and Dr. Roger Francesky to oversee the development, planning, and concept for all of CBS’s kids shows. Berry credited Filmation in interviews, noting that we had responded well to any changes or critiques
Opposite: Presentation art for Star Trek Above: Image of the animated U.S.S. Enterprise CHAPTER 12: EXPLORING STRANGE NEW GALAXIES
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ur announcement of first-run syndication on He-Man was almost immediately echoed by new company DIC, which announced that they would also do a new first-run series for fall 1983 daily syndication, called Inspector Gadget. DIC was a French company at that point, and partnered for the series with Nelvana in Canada. DIC was very antiunion; they did their writing, designs, storyboards, and some other things in the U.S., but they outsourced all the animation work to Japan’s Tokyo Movie Shinsha and Taiwan’s Cuckoo’s Nest Studios. Like He-Man, they were offering 65 new half-hours, but they didn’t have the track record that Filmation did, and so sales weren’t as brisk.
Gadget’s creator and DIC’s chairman and CEO was Andy Heyward, a former Hanna-Barbera writer. On January 27th, he wrote a piece for Variety extolling international co-productions as a way to “maximize production income and secure a quality of production otherwise unavailable.” Glossing over the loss of jobs for American animators, he discussed how subcontracted foreign labor was cheaper—even if costs were rising—and how the rise of computer-assisted animation would get rid of “the time-consuming process of inking and painting individual cells (sic).” He also talked about working with licensing companies and manufacturers early in the creative process of a show, citing DIC’s work with Bandai and Filmation’s work with Mattel as examples. Nowhere in the article did it state he owned one of the companies discussed. Nor was he privy to exactly what our relationship with Mattel was. More on that in a bit. As we began marketing our library internationally, some of our ads pointedly included a new tagline: “All made in the U.S.A.” Alice Donenfeld traveled to Monte Carlo in February, repping Filmation at the Group W booths. She signed Rete 4, a major Italian station, for He-Man. Other markets soon followed. By the time of March’s NATPE conference, we had presold He-Man to 38 markets, domestically and internationally, and started discussing a major deal with RCA-Columbia Home Video. We also licensed five titles from our library in the U.S. to Family Home Entertainment (FHE) for home video distribution: The Lone Ranger, Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, The New Adventures of Zorro, Blackstar, and Shazam! They reOpposite: leased the five as one-hour titles in the spring at $29.95 each, which, Image and character art for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe in the early days of the market, was an excellent price for a kid’s video. Above: FHE had broken records with their sales of Strawberry Shortcake Castle Grayskull CHAPTER 22: WE HAVE THE POWER 197
Some treasures from Lou’s Career
Above: (left to right) Portrait of Jay Scheimer by Lou Self-portrait by Lou Presentation art for DC heroes The Blackhawks with Aquaman The cover of a neverreleased Filmation theme song record from 1977 Lou in his home office Filmation appears in Everything’s Archie #1, May 1969 Lou’s ANNIE award The Emmy Award for Star Trek Filmation folder cover from 1974 210 LOU SCHEIMER: CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION
Above: (top to bottom) Filmation 25th Anniversary Poster Original Filmation title card Logo for Lou Scheimer Productions He-Man’s friends vs. foes DVD postcard art by Mike McKone
COLOR GALLERY 211