Let it be great

…it was the very same Matt Taylor, who at Kidscreen 2008, asked me when the heck the show was going to be on television. I very flippantly assured him, with complete confidence, that the series would be in production within six months. There were absolutely no facts behind my assertions, because at that moment we’d been rejected virtually everywhere we’d visited; everyone loved the short and no one wanted the show.

Well, my bluster got picked up by the influential Gwen Billings in Cynopsis: Kids! the very next day. Our phones started ringing and the ball was in motion so I wouldn’t be accused of being a liar.

Matt Taylor got that ball rolling and for him we are forever grateful.

This post was written by Fred Seibert, Executive Producer/Head Honcho of Frederator Studios. Fred’s career has been long and illustrious having launched MTV in the 80s with its famous series of animated IDs, breathed life back into Nickelodeon in the 90s and most recently his position as Executive Producer for a slew of hit shows on Cartoon Network including Adventure Time and the Regular Show. He is notorious for doing things in an unconventional manner, his Burbank animation studio for example is filled with the cream of the indie comics scene rather than seasoned animators, and while in New York I was keen to meet him.

I wrote him an email out of the blue in April in Los Angeles reminding him of a question I’d asked him at a session in Kidscreen 2008 about Adventure Time. He wrote back a minute later saying “Oh so you’re the one who started all that.” and we arranged a time to meet up in August when our schedules aligned. Our meeting was suitably odd – an 11 year old son of a friend of his from Salt Lake City sat in on it, and Fred was incredibly interested, honest and enlightening. Afterwards we took each others pictures to post on our respective social networks and I walked back out into the sweltering New York summer heat.