Hey, it's time to plug tomorrow's live webcast of Stu's Show! Tomorrow, Stu Shostak has a return engagement with two of the most important producers and creators of animation for television, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. The last time they were on, Stu only managed to cover the portions of their career where they met in an editing room, teamed-up and were soon the showrunners for many of Hanna-Barbera's top TV shows. Scooby Doo was just one of the properties they introduced.
In Part Two tomorrow, Stu will get into the story of how these two gents set up their own studio, Ruby-Spears, which challenged Hanna-Barbera for Saturday morn supremacy. I'm not sure most animation buffs understand the constraints and problems under which cartoon shows were produced back then. You had terrible budgets, terrible schedules, terrible censorship and (sometimes) terrible network executives. A lot of us wound up working on shows that almost by definition could not have been as wonderful as we wanted them to be. When I worked for Joe and Ken, I thought we/they generally managed to a better job than the competition, triumphing over some (not all) of those handicaps. Perhaps on the show tomorrow, they'll discuss the problems and how they overcame the ones they overcame with shows like Plastic Man, Thundarr the Barbarian and Alvin and the Chipmunks. I will be joining them via phone for a while at the top of the program.
You have a choice as to how you'll listen to Stu's Show and the way most of you will prefer will be the free way. Tune in while they do it live at 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM in the East, other times in other climes. The show runs at least two hours and sometimes goes longer. This is the best way to hear it because not only is it free but it somehow seems more participatory even if Stu doesn't get around to taking phone calls. Listen in at the Stu's Show website.
You can also listen to it the pay way. Go to that very site a half-hour or so after the live webcast. From it, you can download it or any of hundreds of wonderful episodes for a measly 99 cents each…and to get the real deal, order four for the price of three. Either way, I'm sure you'll enjoy Stu's Show tomorrow.