Hanna and Barbera aside, the two most important producers of Saturday Morning TV animation have been Joe Ruby and Ken Spears…and theirs is a fascinating story. They met when working as film editors and made that unlikely shift from cutting film to writing the shows that were recorded on it. Eventually, they were also producing…first at Hanna-Barbera, then at other studios and finally at their own. Along the way, they were the creators or at least the showrunners of so many of the most successful shows of the sixties, seventies and into the eighties — and they're still producing stuff. Plus, shows they launched are still around. They created Scooby Doo, for instance — not only the most popular property ever conceived for non-primetime animation but the template for so many other programs.
Wednesday, they're the guests on Stu Shostak's popular Internet radio show. Stu usually does his show live on Wednesdays but this one was recorded last Friday because his co-host for the week (me) has to be somewhere else. So I can tell you that the program went very well, though we only got through about a third of the Ruby-Spears story. We talked about them working as editors, about them starting out writing short segments for Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear, about them becoming full-fledged writers on shows like Space Ghost and The Herculoids and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. We got about as far as when they left H-B to go start their own studio…and then the rest will have to wait for another webcast.
You can listen to the show for free tomorrow (Wednesday) when Stu "airs" it at 4 PM Pacific Time, which is of course 7 PM Eastern Time…and if you live anywhere else, you can figure out the time based on that information. It runs about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Just go to the Stu's Show website at the proper hour.
And should you miss it, fear not. You can then go to the Stu's Show website at any time and download it as an MP3 for a measly 99 cents. In fact, while you're there, download a few more shows and get Stu's bargain rate of four shows for the price of three. They're all a lot of fun but this one is one of his best.