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dalt20 · 1 month

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Tooning In 13. Greg Bailey Part 4 of 10

DL: Well. So how was working with Hanna Barbera again with Young Robin Hood?

GB:It was fine. Kind of like going back to my roots as far as working in animation went. On Robin Hood I was running the timing department and lip sync included. I went pretty smoothly from what I remember. It was a good chance to bring the US Saturday morning standards to a Canadian studio.

DL:The Busy World of Richard Scarry for Paramount/Showtime/The Family Channel and France Animation? How did that come to be and how was working on that show?

GB:It was my first animated series to develop and direct on. It became quite a hit and really put Cinar on the map. France Animation was the minority on the project . The only did the Busy World segment. We did the other 2 story blocks as well as the musical interstitials , the opening, the post production so we really did the bulk of it. The Paramount connection was actually quite peculiar and lucky. The people that worked in a portable in the Paramount lot were actually making trailers and publicity and handling some licensing. They were not the film or tv executives. However they had the rights and connection to Huck Scarry (son of Richard Scarry) and they decided they had the power to put together an animated tv series without going through the regular tv and film sections of Paramount. It was pretty gutsy of them to do that and after the show went out and was a success they ended up having to relinquish some control of it to the proper departments over there. Cinar ended up selling the show in over 100 countries worldwide. I really loved the development we did on the show. The characters all had unique walks and lip sync models and we also kept the scenes really busy with lots of details moving around. We also had used a sort of isometric perspective or down shot for the entire show. We avoided all the trendy dramatic cartoon kinds of angles that were and are still popular in animation. Things that are far away are always higher on the screen. This was something from the Scarry books. We also used a lot of white in the background to achieve that kind of vignette sort of look. It wasn't painted solid side to side like typical Nelvana kind of shows. It was really a cool look and I think the stories all had a nice twist ending. It was an interesting show for young preschool kids because we had a lot of information and details they would never have been exposed to. It was very whimsical looking with the things like the pickle car and the banana car and Lowly Worms apple car. But we showed a lot of stuff like how the inside of a fire station operated and the variety of firetrucks they use. I think we had more time to develop different things on that series than most preschool series even dream about nowadays.

DL:Did you have any interference with the Scarry family?

GB:I don't know that I would call it interference, but I did work with Huck quite regularly. His dad was not in the picture. But we would send the models and scripts and storyboards rough cuts to Huck. It all went out by fax machine in those days. He would often be able to send a sketch the next day if he had a better idea for a model or some details on the model in order to keep it in the Scarry world. But he did go through all the material promptly. It is always a matter of getting non-animation people educated about now backtracking on things at a later stage when they finally notice something they want to change. Like, don't start changing the character or background when we send out the storyboard and you have already been shown the designs a few months earlier. I think Huck got used to those things over the course of the season and wasn't a big problem that I can remember.

DL:Also I believe that Richard Scarry sold the rights to France Animation first because he was living in Switzerland. And France Animation was close by in France and they called CiNAR to co-produce and Showtime/Paramount came to broadcast and finance the series.

GB:I didn't know that! We had already been working with France Animation on other shows before that so I figured CiNAR asked them to partner on it. But I understand what you are saying and it's quite possible. I wouldn't know.I am not surprised that Richard Scarry would sell off his rights in Europe. He moved out of the US a long time ago and always had nasty stuff to say about the US. He was super right leaning and rigid from what I know about him. He was avoiding living in a country where he would have to share his taxed money with poor people. I think it would have been pretty crazy doing the show with Richard Scarry.

DL:I never knew he was anti-American.

GB:He was American himself. I would clarify that and say he was anti -America. He was pretty anti-a lot of things.

DL:The Little Lulu show for HBO and Golden Books.

GB:Little Lulu was a series I developed between seasons of Richard Scarry. This time I wanted to do something with a different and strong graphic style to it. So we had these characters and backgrounds with incredibly thin lines. It was still all drawn in pencil or pen in those days so it could be hard to get the proper line sometimes in production. It looked very beautiful but I admit the format of the show with all those small bits and pieces was hard to watch for a whole episode. The stand up comic bits were not funny and were lame. One of the producers loved Seinfeld and was sure that copying Jerry Seinfeld's standup section would work in a cartoon. But how would you get an animation writer to write a stand up routine? It is something that comics try out and constantly refine by reciting it to a live audience. It was the one series that I actually went to do the pitch and sale at HBO. I did the pitch and Ron Weinberg did the sale that is. The HBO producers owed a favour to Tracey Ulman for something she did for free for them, so they insisted we use her to do the voice-over for Lulu as part of the deal. Again it really hurt the series because she sounded old and gruff. She was totally wrong for the part of Lulu. The initial sale was to do 5 specials. So we used her for those 5 shows only. The show went to a full series of 26 episodes before we even delivered the first special. There was a lot of stuff I liked about the show but it wasn't as much of a hit as Richard Scarry was as far as sales went. Also like I say it had some irritating aspects to the episode because of so many little pieces that were not funny or did not help the flow of the episode. I was introduced to some great voice actors on the show like Michael Caloz that did Annie, and Bruce Dinsmore that did Tubby. These were the best characters in the series and I worked with these actors again later on Arthur because of the Lulu Series. I directed the first 5 episodes then I was a supervising director for the remaining episodes. So I was less hands on at that point.

DL:Well I like Tracey Ullman's voice for Lulu as it fitted the character weirdly and also a youtuber pointed it out too about the Seinfeld bits.

GB:In hindsight, I think the way to write the standups would be to give a theme to a standup comic and have them improvise a 30-second routine on the subject. And record it while they do it. Write it down and give the recording and written script to the voice actor to try to copy the timing and natural speaking rhythm of the standup. Something like that. But to get an animation writer to write and script then expect a voice-over actor to attempt to deliver something with the stand-up comic timing was not a good approach. It is not spontaneous sounding. There was a series about a psychiatrist that used stand up comic routines for his patient sessions. I forget the name of the show now.

DL:Dr Gnudo I believe.It was a segment on The Tracey Ullman show.

GB:I was thinking of Dr Katz.

DL:Papa Beaver's Storytime for France 3 and Nickelodeon?Also, did you watch the original Little Lulu cartoons or read the comics?

GB:I did read Little Lulu comics when I was young and I remember the cartoons as well. When we did the new version I watched a lot of them again. The history of Little Lulu was very long as far as the comic but also as a cartoon. It was made by a lot of different studios over the years. So we were just one more part of the line that makes up the history of it. I have a couple of the old comic books from long ago.

DL:That's cool!

GB:I always called Papa Beaver by the French name Pere Castor because we were the minority partner on the project and that was the name of the project until they dubbed it. I was a co-director. I loved those shows at the time because the stories were based on classic folk stories from around the world. So they had good stories and we copied the visual style of each book we used. No 2 shows looked alike. The beaver and the children beavers at the start of each show were done in France by the main director. So we had a lot of fun on our side doing peculiar and unique-looking small cartoons. Some were really weird stories like a raindrop that falls out of the cloud onto the farm field and eventually goes into a river. The story could be any length we wanted as long as it was under 4 minutes. I have never worked on anything that did not have a fixed length before or after that series. It was a fun show to do until people started calling me Pere Castor. I think we did 26 of those stories.

DL:Well, is it because you're Canadian hence the name?

GB:It just sounded like I was so old. If I was American it could have been worse using your logic. I would have been Papa Bald Eagle

DL:LoL! Legend of White Fang for HBO/The Family Channel?

GB:That was my first job at Cinar/Crayon Animation. I was a posing supervisor. That is the posing department would drawn the key animation poses as well as the camera key for camera work and field so it could be sent overseas for animation. Mostly what I remember is that the studio was very disorganized at that point and it was hard to get enough work from the layout department to keep my really small crew supplied with work. they were on piece work so it mattered to them. I did that show for 3 months or so and then the series Bunch of Munsch started falling behind and I got a chance to direct on 2 of the Munch specials.We had a historian as an advisor on White Fang . It was Pierre Berton who every Canadian knew at the time as a regular on CBC. Anyway, the interesting thing he pointed out in one script is that the people could not have sent a telegram to get help from the Mounties in one of the shows, because telegram service was something that was only available along the rail lines. White Fang takes place in the Klondike gold rush which is in the mountains and a few thousand miles away from the nearest railway line. It all seems pretty obvious but you can see how animation writers left on their own had no problem putting in a story point like that which would seem idiotic to anyone that knew how telegram lines work. I remember we had a scene in White Fang where the little girl was being held in a cage by the bad guys in this remote cabin in the wilderness. It was kind of kinky looking. Anyway one day one of the layout guys left a drawing from a scene with white fang hanging by his leg from a tree in a leg-hold trap. It did look pretty grim. The producers were doing a tour of the studio for some daycare teachers, and they saw the picture which freaked them out. Everyone got a lecture about it the next day even though the artist was just following the scene in the storyboard that he was supposed to follow. So for the little girl in the cage in the log shack, we changed that so the bad guy slept outside in the snow beside the cabin. It looked totally insane and confusing. I believe the bad guy's name was Beauty even though he looked like a big thug. So weird stuff happens in animation and it isn't always the animators doing dirty drawings on the side.

DL:Oh well, so you scared some preschool teachers, I find that actually funny.It's weird and absurd.Caillou for Teletoon and PBS?

GB:Caillou didn't run on PBS in the first season. Cinar had joined with Astral and Nelvanna and created the Teletoon Cable station in that period. If I recall it was 50 Astral and 25% each for Cinar and Nelvana.Caillou was developed from a Quebec book property that was already popular in Quebec in French only. So we were working with a local publisher and artist that illustrated the books. I remember there was a lot of push to put hair on Caillou but it just wasn't the same character anymore and I didn't have much problem with him being bald figuring a lot of little kids don't have much hair at that point. Later on people would send letters thanking us for the show because they had cancer and lost their hair too. They believed we did it because Caillou had cancer. I am always happy to hear these little unintended things have good consequences for some people that can use any good news they can get. The show was more popular than I thought it would ever be and it took off and kind of spread, including to PBS. There was always talk of renaming the show because it was hard for English people to read the name. The kids never had any problem with it but it scared the parents. I guess it was good for having made a new word known to Anglophones because we never changed that nor did we give him hair. The name translates as Pebble so that name was already known from the Flintstones so that didn't catch on. I developed the show from a book series to a TV series and directed the first bunch of shows before I moved to Supervising Director on it. I believe we were doing Arthur by then so likely I had worked Caillou during the off-season on Arthur. Caillou got kind of messed up after a few seasons when they added some live-action parts to the show. I heard that the kids that had been following the show in the earlier years were having traumas and crying because someone turned off Caillou. They were actually crying because a producer or sales executive messed up a perfectly fine show for little kids by adding some marketing idea to the show. The kids finally got their way and they took that crap out on the following seasons. Some parents often complained that Caillou was too whiny and their own kids never whined. I think they never sat in a restaurant behind their own kids, however. They were probably whining because of the live-action scenes in the Caillou show.

DL:Did you supervise the lost grandmother scenes of Caillou?

GB:What do you mean? The storyteller?

DL:Yes it was the opening format for the show in season 1-4 as the caillou segments were stories she read to her grandchildren.And were animated in a different style then Caillou segments.

GB:I remember going to the record session for those parts. It was pretty brutal. The actress was a former grammar school teacher and was very stubborn about the way she was willing to act out the line even when it didn't make sense in the overall context of the scene. I don't think it would make the show worse to remove that section except that kids don't have time to go get a snack before the story begins.

DL:Animal Crackers for Alphaim, Teletoon and Fox Kids.

GB:I didn't have a lot to do with the show in the end. At that time I was head of the visual look of new shows in development. The show almost sold itself because it was well known from the comic strip and the look was popular. It still always needs to be developed for TV but it went through my hands pretty fast before it was sold for a series. I was a Supervising Director on it. but not very hands on. It was a cute show but it didn't run very long.

DL:Paddington Bear for Filmfair/TF1/HBO and ITV?

GB:Paddington Bear. Interesting history on that property. It came about because Cinar bought Filmfair. FlimFair made the original series that ran on PBS as probably their first animated series. It was probably on PBS in one of their first year of being. Anyway we all thought we had fond memories of that old series so we all rushed out to watch old episodes of the show. Wow, was it ever crude. Anyway Filmfair still owned the rights for television. Michael Bond was still alive and he was all excited to do a new series. So I read a book or 2 of his books of short stories. I realized quickly why I never read them to my daughter when she was young. The stories were not even stories and they were trite and sentimental. The stories didn't have an ending; they just waffled away into nothingness. Michael was very involved and kept his nose in the business of the scripts on the series. He did his best to make those nothing endings on the stories so that was a barrier to making a decent show. The illustrations in the book are very scribbly and drawings with no structure so they didn't offer anything we could use to base the characters on. I'm not too happy in the end with the look we got for the characters. They are terribly typical looking characters for a preschool show at the time. It looks very generic like Denise the Menace or any number of shows with no style. Michael Bond thought that every time Paddington would say marmalade that it was just hysterical so it is in every show and it never makes me laugh. It's the trite kind of thing I mentioned. I did visit Paddington station in London the one time I was in London for a few hours. The idea was that Paddington Bear got his name because he was found wandering around in Paddington Station. The station is a really amazing example of 19th century iron work. It was designed by Isambard Brunel the great inventor of iron ships and buildings. There is a cartoon short from the UK about him that is excellent.

DL:I didn't like Paddington either, but I like the live action film. Have you seen the film?

GB:No, I didn't. I'm sure it was better than the series. Does the story have an ending? We should have just let Film Fair make a new stop-motion Paddington. It would have been well received. Paddington had a very extensive licensing franchise. We had these licensing people come from the UK and they explained how the image has been used all over the world and how it goes out of popularity just as it becomes popular somewhere else for some totally unrelated product. Some places in Asia gave free towels in laundry boxes and other places like Holland made cookies with the image. It was really interesting to see how licensing makes money like that.