Notes from the A Podcast Named Scooby-Doo! interview with Tom Cook. It can be listened at http://scoobydoocast.libsyn.com/42-interview-with-tom-cook. Here are some notes I have taken of the interview that fills out details of being a stateside TV animator in the 1980s.
Tom Cook's run as an assistant animator at Hanna Barbera went uncredited.
He loved superhero comics, especially of Marvel (Spiderman)
He drew while growing up, but never thought he could work in comic books. He only liked drawing the characters and not the backgrounds, which is what he thought that the job would entail, with drawing both.
Grew up with early HB cartoons, 10 years old in early 60s
Especially loved Top Cat because TC initials matched his name.
He knew nothing about the animation industry or how to get in.
Was a transit bus driver in Los Angeles, went past the Hanna-Barbera building 2-3 times a day on his route.
Late 77/early 78: Day-off, got mail during lunch, pamphlet of extension classes for Cal-State Northridge
Summer Comic book class offered
Interested in comic books
Don Rico was teacher
Tom Cook recognized him for Captain America, he wanted to meet him.
Signed up for the class
His portfolio for the class at the time consisted of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Marvel
Rico (Story Director/storyboard artist for HB at the time) recommended Cook for a Thursday Night basic animation class at the HB studio taught by Harry Love to get him on Challenge of the Superfriends based on his good superhero artwork. Lack of animators at HB who could draw the realistic figures.
Harry Love was impressed with Cook's portfolio as well and called in Joe Barbera to see it as well. Barbera was also impressed and would guarantee that Cook would get a job when they would be done constructing a new building in the studio with more available room. This was the only notable interaction Cook had with Barbera, besides one other time at a company party.
4 out of 30 students were selected at the end of the class after three weeks, which included Tom Cook.
His first shows were The New Fred and Barney Show, Challenge of the SuperFriends, Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, Scooby Goes to Hollywood, Kwicky Koala, some opening credit scenes and some commercials that promoted the HB series. He was always in the assistant animator role at HB.
His first assistant scene was in the New Fred and Barney Show episode Haunted Inheritance when Fred is jumping all around Dino of his excitement of getting the inheritance. He got a cel of his very first drawing in the scene with a background.
He was the assistant (inbetweener/clean-up) animator to Rick Leon. Leon was really nice and patient to him, he realized that Cook was totally new to the job, and so never give Cook anything above his current skill level and provided detailed explanations to him on some of the harder scenes to do.
The full animators would draw in a light blue pencil that would get redrawn in a black pencil by the assistant animators such as Cook to prepare the drawings to be Xeroxed onto a cel, and to make an on-model clean-up of the rough animation by the full animator.
Full animators also set up a timing chart after figuring out the movement of the scene, which indicated where the inbetweens would go, which Cook also did.
Cook would say that it took him the first six months for him to fully realize animation and do a good job.
Cook would learn and study about the full animator's thought process and timing while as an assistant.
He became a full animator within the first three years of his career at another studio.
There was no choice of what show the assistants would be on in one given week. Assistants would try to endure the work on a show they didn't like and waited to get to the good shows, but the timing had to be right. There was nothing Cook worked on that bothered him. He found every show he was given to be new and exciting to work on.
Assistant animators didn't meet with their directors because the work had already been animated by the full animator. When assistants would run out of work, they would go to either their full animator if the animator's scene had been completed enough for the assistant to do their pass on or to the other animators for more work if their scene wasn't ready for the assistants yet.
He worked on the Groove sequence in Scooby Goes to Hollywood. He kept the drawings and redid one of them in color to give to Henry Winkler, who was the original Fonzie that the Groove was parodying.
Cook idolized David Tendlar at the studio due to his long experience and so went to learn from him as well. Tendlar was very short, in his late 60s, always wore a bow tie, dressed very good compared to the other animators who just wore blue jeans and t-shirts. He would always take the time and help Cook on his scenes. Cook also asked Tendlar for advice on harder scenes.
Jack Kirby was at HB also as a designer, another of Cook's heroes. When Cook first saw him walking between two of the buildings at a bridge, he stopped Kirby at the bridge. Kirby took his portfolio down, and the two sat down and talked for twenty minutes.
He maintained good relations with Bill Hanna, who was very friendly to him. Even when Tom Cook was at Baer Animation, Hanna still came over to celebrate the anniversary of the studio with Dale Baer. He talked with Hanna the most out of the HB leaders.
Cook recalled that Iwao Takamoto would day in his office all day and would not walk around to meet with other artists. He never made contact with Takamoto as a result.
George Singer was the best friend of Cook's dad. Cook got in good contact with him with that.
Cook saw Tex Avery from time to time. He was quiet and unassuming.
Any animator in their 40s onwards would help Cook on whatever problem he was struggling with when he came in their rooms. Cook felt that he did not meet many nasty people at the studios. He assumes that it was in their personalities to he helpful to the younger animators.
Cook feels that the veteran animators were so busy with the workload that they had to hire new animators with no experience in animation such as him by 1978. He feels that some of the new animators really should not have had the job. In the 60s, they wouldn't had to resort to this. Full animators were not encouraged to do their own inbetweens because they were encouraged by the studio to focus on the movement in the next scenes due to their talent being sought out, and leave it to others to finish the scenes up.
For all the studios he was at, the schedule was to start at 8:30, had a 10:30 break, had a 12:30 lunch for an hour, had a 3:30 break, and left at 5:00. It wasn't a union rule, but it was unofficial due to most people being the union anyway. There were no timeclocks, he just came in to the studios.
Cook joined Ruby-Spears for a short time working on Fangface, Plastic Man, and Heathcliff. He and the Heathcliff animation crew was laid-off in 1980 when Mel Blanc participated in a voice acting strike, preventing him from voicing the character. Ruby-Spears never hired the crew back, deciding to send the animator work overseas shortly after. Cook thought that RB were in over their heads.
Cook joined Filmation (as a full animator) when the other studios started rapidly moving to overseas animation. He agreed with Lou Schemer's philosophy that animation should reman in the states and credits him for saving his career as an animator. Cook blames the Animation Guild for wanting more money with pensions and healthcare, that had drove up the cost of network animation to a point that the networks could not afford making the shows anymore, mentioning about the 1982 strike. He used to say "What good does making 50 bucks an hour if you work zero hours?" in response to the Guild's practices.
The Filmation quota for an animator was eighty feet of film per week (1280 frames or 53:08 seconds per week). Animators would have to work on the weekends if they couldn't accomplish the limit during the weekdays. If the animator entered a day too stressed, then they would take a day to coast on the work that would be made up by working hard on the weekends. Some common scenes to get to quota would be a sequence of very short 4 feet scenes with quick cuts, an establishing scene with backgrounds, but with no character animation, but would still be counted among an animator's scene towards their quota. Establishing scenes could last up to 15 feet that an animator would take without having to draw anything within the scene itself. These scenes were given when an animator had other particularly difficult scenes to accomplish and would not be able to meet the quota otherwise. Later on in Filmation, when the animators were in a crunch, if an animator could do 160 feet a week (2560 feet or equivalent to 1 minute and 46 seconds of footage), the animator would be given two paychecks. If an animator got easy scenes to start off the week with, that would encourage the animators to work on weekends on the hard scenes to get the double paycheck and make extra cash. Contract work also allowed a certain number of scenes ranging in the 25-30 feet range could be done at the animator's home in the evening, in addition to the normal 80 feet quota. Animators also took this option as much as they could get due to the extra money.
Filmation shows had 10 directors who took the storyboard to do slugging (mathematically timing the length of each scene in the board, so that the time of the episode exactly matches up with each commercial break). The directors pin a number of scenes from the episode that can be completed in a week. They try to then figure out how to give each animator 80 feet worth of scenes to do. But if they give an animator enough scenes, then the animator would have to pick up more scenes from another episode to do to meet quota. Outside the directors' rooms, a little wheel would determine which director the animator would get work from. When the director ran out with giving the animator work, then the wheel would be spun again to determine the next director to pick up the work from. Directors would then announce the take home contract work to any animator who was interested. Younger animators mostly took home the contract work. Veteran animators would deny the opportunity for contract work based on their faster speed that allowed them to meet the quotas more often than the younger animators.
25% percent of all Filmation episodes had to be stock footage to lower the budget enough to allow the in-house animators to compete with overseas animation. Animators had to film mouths and eye blinks to go along with the rest of the already drawn scene.
Tom Cook did the work as a passionate fan of animation, something that he did not see other animators at the time agreeing with, who just treated it as a job. He goes on Comic Cons to represent the generation of animators on He-Man, to imbue others with his passion.
