Scheimer! And the Unreal Ghostbusters

There's an interesting discussion going on in the Cartoon Brew comments regarding Amid Amidi's dismissive post about Lou Scheimer's upcoming book (co-written with Scheimer's faithful Boswell, Andy Mangels). The comments start out mostly agreeing with Amid that this is "the book nobody's been waiting for," but Mark Evanier arrives to counterattack Amid for his snide tone, and other commenters point out the usual extenuating facts about Filmation: 1) It trained a lot of people who went on to help create the improved animation of the mid-'80s onward; 2) It was the only company that resisted the pressure to outsource the animation overseas; 3) A lot of people who worked for Filmation still have fond memories of the experience; 4) A lot of the shows were and still are beloved.

As a child, I was on both sides of the Filmation fence: I was addicted to He-Man, but Filmation cartoons were also the first cartoons whose shoddiness I really began to notice. (Once I realized that Filmation cartoons all had terrible -- or, really, nonexistent -- animation, I could move on to noticing the same problems in other shows. But Filmation's level of craftsmanship was so low that even a kid could become aware of it.) I don't think it's fair to say that Scheimer made the best cartoons he could with the resources and restrictions he had; if anything, Filmation was always coming up with ways to bring the level of Saturday morning cartoons down just a little bit further. Filmation may actually look worse from the point of view of a viewer than it does from the point of view of an animator. If you're an animator, at least it was a decent training ground. If you're a viewer, and you don't have a nostalgic fondness for these shows, then it can be argued that Filmation helped the quality of animation, voice acting and (especially) scriptwriting deteriorate even faster than it otherwise would have.

On the other hand, even if you think these shows were bad, Filmation and Scheimer have their fingerprints all over modern animation history. He may have made animation better and worse, in the sense that his shows drove the art form downward while many of his trainees helped drive it upward. So I don't quite get Amid's assumption that nobody would want to read a book like this; I'd think someone who wants to know what went wrong in animation would want to read it most of all (though Scheimer will talk as though it was all great, so we'll have to read between the lines).

But as someone who used to write posts entitled "things that suck" (and stopped because I realized it was nasty, and making the posts seem worse than they really were), I don't have standing to criticize Amid for his tone. So I'll end this post with what may be the first appearance of Lou Scheimer in comic book form. When Filmation started doing the (terrible) Archie TV cartoon, the comics did a story where the characters went to Filmation studios and met Scheimer (the man in the green suit), Norm Prescott (the guy with the pipe and glasses) and Hal Sutherland (the man in the black suit), whose name is misspelled "Southerland" by the comics' somewhat typo-prone letterer, Bill Yoshida.

The great Harry Lucey drew this rather sycophantic visit to Filmation (around the same time as another story that sucked up to music producer Don Kirschner), and as he often did, he drew the "real" characters in a less-cartoony-than-usual style. He makes the Filmation studio look better than Filmation made the comic characters look.