An anonymous (to you, not to me) reader wrote to ask…
You mentioned that when you were at Hanna-Barbera, the quality of animation on a show varied because Bill Hanna would send one episode of a show to a sub-contractor in Taiwan, another to Korea, another to the Philippines and so on. That must have meant that some shows came back better than others. I see errors in animation all the time on those shows and I wonder how you dealt with that. Could you correct things?
Well, I didn't have to deal with that much because I wasn't the line producer on any of the shows I did there. But on every show, there was a producer who had to look at the animation that came back from overseas and deal with all the errors and bad drawing in it. You could usually spot these people in the halls of H-B because every time you saw them, even if you saw them ten times a day, they had less hair.
The show comes back. Things are wrong. So what you do if you're one of those increasingly less-hairy people is to call retakes. You essentially make a list that goes something like this…
Scene 3: Scooby Doo's nose is missing
Scene 5: Fred is missing an arm
Scene 6: Shaggy drawn to look like Indira Gandhi
Scene 7: Velma walking in mid-air instead of on ground
Scene 9: Daphne's dress the wrong color
Scene 11: Daphne should not be fondling a horse
And so on. You would be amazed how many mistakes there would be in some shows when they came back from Korea or wherever…often obvious things that you'd think anyone over there should have caught. Watching this process prompted me to write this somewhat notorious Garfield cartoon. See how many mistakes you spot, above and beyond the fact that this should have been taken down from YouTube by now…
So the producer calls retakes…and it was not at all odd for the order to be for 40% retakes or 45% retakes, meaning that percentage of scenes required fixing. Then the way the process worked, the producer was supposed to receive the corrected scenes, screen them and then be able to call for secondary retakes, meaning retakes of the retakes. In practice though on a network series, it was not uncommon for there to be no time for secondary retakes.
Once in a while, there was no time for first retakes…or if there was, not enough. A producer might fax the overseas studio a list of 50 retakes needed on a cartoon and say they had to be in by a certain date. The overseas studio might fax back and say they could only get 25 retakes done by that date…so please pick which ones were the most important. A few times, I participated in discussions of what we'd like to have fixed versus what we absolutely had to have fixed.
And once in a while, you got the idea that the overseas studio was deliberately delivering late so as to force us to only pick the most serious errors to fix. Retakes, after all, cost them money. There were occasional instances where a show would have to air the first time without all its retakes and errors would then be fixed for the second and subsequent runs. And once we started editing animation on digital video, it became possible to fix some errors at that stage.
Here's a story and no, it didn't happen on the Garfield cartoon I embedded above.
One time I was working on a series for an American studio but the animation was being farmed out to at a subcontracting studio in Taiwan. The operation there had what we'll call a Red Team and a Blue Team. The Red Team animated adventure shows full of giant robots and explosions and monsters. The Blue Team animated broad comedy and fuzzy bunnies. I was working on a show that was appropriate for the Blue Team and so it was animated by them.
Then a crisis erupted. The show the Red Team was working on had to stop production for some reason. Artists on the Red Team had nothing to draw. Some were under contract so the studio was losing money having them sitting around with no work. Some were not under contract and those folks would have to be laid-off. The head of our studio, the studio that employed me, was approached by the head of the subcontracting studio in Taiwan. Would it be okay, he asked, if the Red Team took a crack at animating an episode of our show? That would save the Taiwan studio some money and save the jobs of many of its artists. It would also get our show a little ahead in production, which is always nice.
The head of our studio here said it was okay to try it…but when the footage arrived from Taiwan, our line producer screened it and for the first time in the history of our studio or any other I'd ever heard of, called for 100% retakes. Every single scene had something wrong with it, he said.
The head of the studio in Taiwan was aghast when he heard this and it wasn't so much about the expense. It was the humiliation. And maybe the possible loss of business if it got around the industry that his studio animated a cartoon that required 100% retakes. He called the head of the U.S. studio and complained about the producer. He said, "Please…go look at what we sent over. If you were to tell me it was 100% retakes, I would accept it but I am sure your producer is being too fussy."
The head of the U.S. studio went and looked at the film. Then he called back the gent in Taiwan and he said, "I looked at it and you're right. It's not 100% retakes."
The fellow in Taiwan breathed a transcontinental sigh of relief. "I knew my people could not do that horrible a job."
The studio head in the U.S. continued: "It's only 99% retakes. I found two scenes that are passable."
The decision was made not to have the Red Team attempt the fixes. When the Blue Team finished what they were currently working on, they would simply start from scratch and redo the entire cartoon. Also, a new show — an adventure show — had been found for the Red Team to work on.
But when the folks on the Red Team heard that their work was being rejected in toto, they felt disgraced. They went to the head of the Taiwan studio and asked if they could be allowed to redo the cartoon…and they were talking about doing it when they were not on the payroll. They would work a full work week on the new adventure show, then come in weekends and evenings to redo the cartoon that had been pegged for 99-100% retakes.
The head of the Taiwan studio called the U.S studio to ask…and the head of the U.S. studio asked me. Could I juggle around the schedule of which cartoons would run in the same half-hour and when they would air? I did some juggling and determined it was possible. The Red Team therefore had time to redo the cartoon in what otherwise would have been their free time.
They did…and I wish I could tell you that their second try was perfect but it wasn't. It was better but it still required more than 50% retakes. I think eventually the Blue Team wound up doing the final fixes on it. I was told that later on, on another series, the reverse happened. The Blue Team suddenly had nothing to do so they tried animating an episode of the adventure series the Red Team was animating and the result was a similar disaster.
In the case of that one episode of our show, there was time to redo everything…or almost everything. Still on some episodes, there wasn't…and that's one of the reasons TV animation is sometimes not as good as it should be. I once complimented a friend on an episode of a show he'd produced. He said, "You think that was good, imagine how good it would be if I'd gotten half the retakes I needed."