August 23, 2004

Over on Cartoon Brew, the fine website he operates with Jerry Beck, Amid Amidi has posted this message in which he says...

It's easy to make fun of TV animation execs, but it's even easier to make fun of the twits who work at the networks' Broadcast Standards & Practices divisions. These low-lifes have done more to ruin TV animation and suck fun and entertainment out of cartoons as anybody else has since the Seventies. Speak to anybody who has worked in TV animation and they're likely to have countless stories about the inane changes and arbitrary cuts that S&P people like to make.

He's right, and I certainly have as many of those stories as anyone. However, whenever anyone dumps on Broadcast Standards, I feel I should toss in my own observation that one of the main reasons they get away with mauling our stuff that way is that producers let them. When I've worked on live-action TV shows and the Standards folks handed me a list of fourteen changes, I could always talk them out of at least half and it didn't even take a lot of effort or debating skills. On the remaining alterations they demanded, it was usually possible to work out minor alterations that retained what I wanted to retain but satisfied their complaints. And, truth be told, I often decided that a change was immaterial or even that they were right. I didn't like the process at all but it was certainly possible to minimize the damage.

Alas, some of the animation producers for whom I worked over the years didn't like to fight, perhaps didn't want to fight. When I was story-editing Richie Rich, Bill Hanna was always rushing to move episodes from the script/storyboard stage into the layout/animation phase. The worry was usually not that a show might not get finished by its air date but rather, that there might be artists on staff with nothing to do. If production was behind on Super-Friends (let's say), Hanna would give that show's crew Richie Rich layouts to do, lest they sit around on the payroll for an hour with nothing to draw. There were times when on Monday, the ABC Standards lady — who took pride in being the toughest in the business — would give me notes on a Richie storyboard. It would take until Tuesday for me to connect with her and get her to back down on most of her points...but by then, Mr. Hanna had made all the changes and shipped the episode off to Korea for animation. I liked Bill Hanna in many ways but when he gave interviews and complained how the networks were ruining their shows with stupid changes, I thought he was omitting a very significant, self-inflicted part of the problem.

I worked for another animation producer who, I came to realize, didn't fight Broadcast Standards because he liked the wholesale laundering of his product. Why? Because he was counting on making serious cash in the decades to come when the shows we were doing were rerun in syndication. Okay, nothing wrong with that...except that he believed there was more danger of a show not selling in the future because it was too "violent" than of it not being "violent" enough. (I put "violent" in quotes there because what passed for "violence" there was one character throwing a pie at another, or bank guards having guns even if they never drew them.) Anyway, a lot of "violent" scenes and hard-edged gags got into the scripts and storyboards because they were being produced initially for one of the networks and that's what that network's Programming Department wanted.

But then when their Standards and Practices said something had to go, this producer was eager to comply. He got his shows laundered down to a level that he thought would be more saleable and then, when the Programming Department complained (or the writers and artists who worked on the show bitched), he could say, "Don't blame me. Blame those idiot censors who ruin our shows." It is probably worth noting that the shows in question have not done that well in off-network syndication.

Just so we're clear: I am not saying Broadcast Standards changes did not and does not harm shows. They've done and continued to do some absurd, illogical things to all forms of television programming. But it's not always just a case of innocent artistic types having their work trampled by cavepeople in the censor business. It is often a case of the folks who have money on the line being stingy or timid.

And in fairness, I should mention that in the eight years I wrote Garfield and Friends, we never had a single Broadcast Standards note that I felt was unreasonable or harmful. Early on, the gent assigned to us by CBS gave me a list of about ten no-nos: Mentioning brand names, choking someone by the throat, having someone stick their finger in an electrical outlet, etc. They were pretty minor caveats...things I probably wouldn't have done anyway. As long as I avoided them, we got along fine...so it isn't always an obstacle.