Aug 15, 2022

Filmation began to produce its first major TV series with this one strange trick

Before Saturday morning comics became the norm, before superheroes became commonplace on television, CBS's The New Adventures Of Superman (1966) broke the mold and defined tv trends for decades.

Filmation, the studio that made the show, existed only a few years up to that point and never produced the series entirely alone. It was not. To win the job, a scrappy startup with only a handful of employees had to convince the network that they were an established studio with the ability to produce an entire series. This task required a little clever trickery.

When the call for Superman came, Filmation, co-founded by Lou Scheimer and Hal Sutherland, was set up in a bank building that was too big for purpose, which was almost completely empty. At the time, the studio was doing commercial work and scraping, trying their hand at some original works. The margin at which the company operated was very thin, and the debtors did not talk twice with the same person, because 3 bosses took turns to answer the phone.

One fateful day, Mort Weisinger (DC Comics editor for Superman of the 1950s and '60s, Aquaman, Green-Co-creators such as Arrow) phoned the studio, identified themselves as Superman Weisinger, and asked if the film was interested in producing CBS's new Superman series.

The boss enthusiastically agreed without seriously considering the conditions. CBS was offering a budget of336,000 per episode, but Scheimer said, "Of course, you can do it for that!"He recalls, but admits that in the same breath, he did not know if that number was enough. At the time they were desperate for a big project, so they would have done it forエ10 an episode, he jokes.

Hiccups: The rights owners of Superman wanted to jump out to see the Filmation studio directly to make sure their investment was done safely.

So, as Superman wears suits and glasses, Scheimer and his team dress up their studio, fill the building with bodies to friends and family, including his wife and siblings, and call someone with artistic talent into the eye line of visitors. They even managed to rope in George Raleigh from Hannah Barbera for the first half of the day. "We were desperate, and it brought creativity," Sutherland said.

He thought, "If we were walking them fast, we wouldn't have time to actually study what they were doing as long as [fake artists] were turning over papers.

Laurie faked a toothache because she needed to go back to the Hannah Barbera studio later in the day of work." He interrupted a meeting between Scheimer and the cbs team and asked for permission to go to the dentist. After being kindly obligated while Laurie was in the room, Scheimer turned sour after he was gone and indicated that he would doc Rowley's salary to take half a day. The shrewdness of pretending to be that convinced the men in the network that Filmation was "a small studio, but they're running a tight ship.""

With Filmation getting a deal to do Superman, as well as the right to finally make the show using some of DC's characters, the likes of Batman, Aquaman and Hawkman could be seen fully animated on Saturday morning. The studio took off and eventually became one of the largest in the United States.1 It has about 875 employees at its peak.

This story comes from the 2008 documentary animation Maverick: The Rucheimer Story, which lays out a colorful film history. 映画はに投稿されましたArchive.org And you can see below: