"One Woman Is Responsible For Starting Nickelodeon's Golden Age Of Cartoons"

[IndigoErth]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/1...n_6257232.html

It seemed like Nickelodeon didn't have any plans to start work on animation before Vanessa Coffey showed up in 1988. When she reached out to them for a job after nine years working in development at Marvel, and then Murakami-Wolf-Swenson, they asked Coffey why she wanted to visit the studio. "To talk about animation," she said.

There was almost no original animation in the late '80s. Everything was modeled after pre-existing comic strips or, far worse, essentially just a vessel for selling related products. "At that time animation was almost entirely commercials for toys," Coffey told HuffPost Entertainment. "After all the Hasbro shows including the 'Transformers' and 'G.I. Joe,' which is what we were doing at Marvel, I kind of just decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. It just felt like I was working on commercials."

Tired of the lack of originality across the industry, Coffey left MWS, where she was helping to develop "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," and moved to New York City. She thought she was done with animation. That is, until she realized what she needed to do: bring back original cartoons.

After Nick gave the green light for "Rugrats," much of what came later should be attributed to Germain, Csupo and Klasky, along with the rest of the "village" brought on to make all three shows work. The brilliance of Jinkins and Kricfalusi's work can't be ignored in looking back at that iconic hour-and-a-half of children's programming that Coffey made possible. Although, none of it could have happened without her.

There were so many elements that needed to align for that period at Nick to flourish the way it did. While the cartoon golden age continued well into the decade, it's interesting how things fell apart once Coffey left. Behind all the heartbreak lies the troubling impact of bureaucracy on the creative process.

Pondering the current state of cartoons, Coffey spoke about how things have changed since that magical moment at Nick in the early '90s. "I think in general it’s more committee-based," she said, sounding an awful lot like the executive-hating Kricfalusi. "I didn’t have to have 10 people sign off on what I was doing during pilots or even series. I did things based on my own gut, my own creative gut ... I picked everything based on if it made me feel something. I don’t think that you can do that anymore."

Nick and the cartoon industry need more Vanessa Coffeys and give them the freedom they need to create great things.