History TroubledProduction / WesternAnimation

** According to [[https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/6jekz1/creator_of_be_cool_scooby_doo_comments_on_the/ this account by one of the main writers on the show]], production for ''WesternAnimation/BeCoolScoobyDoo'' was an utter nightmare full of ScheduleSlip, frequent staff change-ups, and [[ExecutiveMeddling executives at WB playing favorites with the crew members and generally meddling with the show to hell and back]].

*** The execs arbitrarily replaced the show creator and the main writer with an inexperienced writer in the middle of Season 2 and gave the former two no credit for what they actually did during said season. The show creator eventually gave up and left the show due to how nasty things were getting behind the scenes and how the execs were treating him.

** One of the biggest problems during production was a classic case of [[TooManyCooksSpoilTheSoup too many cooks in the kitchen]]; the staff simply couldn't make up their minds on what kind of cartoon this series was supposed to be. Studio head Phil Roman was most comfortable with the plot-and-dialogue-driven approach used in his commercial successes ''WesternAnimation/GarfieldAndFriends'' and ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', and had given this series what seemed like a guarded blessing, but then there was one group who wanted a Felix like the Creator/OttoMessmer shorts, one group who wanted [[Creator/MaxAndDaveFleischer Max Fleischer]] surrealism, Don Oriolo, the current owner of Felix, wanting it to be like his dad's made-for-TV Felix cartoons (which most of the staff working on the show was against; they ultimately, but begrudgingly, added certain elements from it into ''Twisted Tales'', like the Magic Bag), one group who wanted the show to be WesternAnimation/RenAndStimpy-esque (understandable, since some of the artists on the show were former ''WesternAnimation/RenAndStimpy'' artists), and one director who wanted a Creator/RobertCrumb influence! The end result of this gave the show a very helter-skelter direction in tone and content, with Felix himself often getting swamped in importance by a large cast of supporting characters and his chaotic world.

** In July 2003, DIC formed a joint-venture with Stan Lee's company POW Entertainment to create an animated series titled ''Stan Lee's Secret Super Six''. After a while, nothing else was heard from this partnership, and the show never materialized until 2010, after DIC co-founder Andy Heyward founded a new company called Creator/ASquaredEntertainment (now Creator/GeniusBrandsInternational), who would start production on the project under the new name of ''WesternAnimation/Mighty7''. Since then, a comic book franchise and an animated TV movie have been made, but no TV show.

* The 1973 [[Creator/DePatieFrelengEnterprises DePatie-Freleng]] show ''Bailey's Comets'' was a production nightmare due to the massive cast. The show was a ''WesternAnimation/WackyRaces'' [[FollowTheLeader clone]] featuring 15 rollerskating teams, each with six members. Because everybody was rollerskating, this meant that ''dozens'' of characters had to be constantly moving, something hard to achieve with the tight television animation schedule. [[note]](By contrast, ''Wacky Races'' was able to keep the animation costs down by having everybody inside a car, thus only having to animate the wheels and only animating the characters moving when the script called for it.)[[/note]] Even creating the stock animation of each team rollerskating was a headache on its own. In order to ensure they could finish the show in time, [=DePatie=]-Freleng had to hire a night crew (mostly people moonlighting from Hanna-Barbera and Filmation) to paint the cels. In the end, the show not only went overbudget, but received poor ratings, prompting Creator/{{CBS}} to move the show to Sunday mornings after a few months. One animator claimed that the series nearly broke the studio.

** One major problem during production was that they couldn't make up their mind what kind of cartoon this was supposed to be - studio head Phil Roman was most comfortable with the plot-and-dialogue-driven approach used in his commercial successes ''WesternAnimation/GarfieldAndFriends'' and ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', and had given this series what seemed like a guarded blessing -there was one group who wanted a Felix like the Creator/OttoMessmer shorts, one group who wanted Creator/MaxAndDaveFleischer surreality, Don Oriolo, the current owner of Felix, wanting it to be like his dad's made-for-TV Felix cartoons (which most of the staff working on the show were against; they ultimately, but begrudgingly, added certain elements from it into ''Twisted Tales'', like the Magic Bag), one group who wanted the show to be ''WesternAnimation/RenAndStimpy''-esque (understandable, since some of the artists on the show were former ''Ren & Stimpy'' artists), and one director who wanted a ''Creator/RobertCrumb'' influence! With so many cooks in the kitchen, the direction of the show tended to be all over the place, with Felix himself often getting swamped in importance by a large cast of supporting characters and his chaotic world. On top of that, per word of Mark Evanier, the studio had a terrible time finding a voice for Felix, saying they may have set a new industry record for most actors auditioned for one role (to where even staff of the studio were trying to audition for the role), and they wound up recording the show with a "scratch" (temporary) voice and animating to that. The final voice was only selected a few weeks before an episode aired and was dubbed in.
** Another problem was that in addition to having a month to storyboard, design, and do layout work on each short, they could not learn from their mistakes, because by the time film began to come in, the season had been wrapped up. Some directors could handle writing and boarding a good cartoon, while some couldn't. The artists had no say on retakes in animation either, which was left to Phil Roman to decide - and unfortunately, the overseas animation on the show tended to be rather sluggish. This only got worse for Season 2, with Korean company [[Creator/PlusOneAnimation Plus One]] having to rush episodes through, resulting in sloppy artwork and very bad animation timing (with "Nightmare on Oak Street" being one of the worst examples in the second season). On top of that, they were behind schedule, so they couldn't order retakes to correct any mistakes.
** Eventually, Phil Roman and Don Oriolo found the "Cartoonist Driven" approach of the first season to be too taxing on them, and not even worth the trouble since, despite being one of the most expensive shows that Phil Roman's studio had made, the first season turned out to be a flop in the ratings, due in part to a terrible time slot - it was sandwiched right between sports shows and then-ratings giant ''WesternAnimation/XMenTheAnimatedSeries'', making it very hard to establish an audience for the show. On top of that, Don was just unhappy with the weird direction of Season 1 having almost nothing in common with Joe Oriolo's Felix, so the second season went through an extensive {{retool}} - while the first season was storyboarded while working from a basic outline, and was absurdly surreal in its premises and animation, the second season decided to take the series into a direction more in vogue with the Joe Oriolo Felix cartoons and shift production to make the show a more standard TV cartoon, with scripts replacing the all-storyboard approach (usually provided by the writer of ''WesternAnimation/GarfieldAndFriends'', Creator/MarkEvanier, [[OldShame who has remained silent on the series ever since]]), resulting in much more linear plotting and less surreal humor and more emphasis on wordplay and one-liners, as well as bringing back some of the Oriolo-era characters like Poindexter, Master Cylinder, and The Professor while forcing most of the new side characters to be scrapped in turn. This move was met with outright hostile reception from the shows staff, particularly the producer of the first season, who knew Don's meddling would only make things worse and [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere bailed on the show]] just ''two weeks'' into the second season's production. They even tried to have the writers voice direct the actors instead of the directors, but after a couple weeks of trying that, the results were so disastrous that the studio was forced to drop that and hand voice direction back to the cartoon directors. The staff retaliated by [[WriterRevolt writing whole episodes that took jabs at the second season's toned-down retool]], such as "Attack of the Robot Rat" (which infuriated Don Oriolo for being a [[TakeThat ruthless parody]] of his dad's made-for-TV Felix the Cat cartoons), "Phoney Phelix", and "The Fuzzy Bunny Show". The first few scripts they received were followed closely, but the shows new producer finally fought for the artists to have more storytelling and creative control on the show, and they were able to completely scrap the scripts and write their own shows, ironically giving the crew ''more'' freedom than they had in the first season. Some episodes were tightly scripted and some were not. Unfortunately for them, the VP of Children's Programming, Judy Price, who wanted the show picked up in the first place, got fired, and Felix the Cat Inc. was so unhappy with the show in general that they refused to renew the license for Phil Roman to continue using Felix, guaranteeing a third season wouldn't happen. To make matters worse, the second season turned to be an [[GoneHorriblyWrong even]] ''[[GoneHorriblyWrong bigger]]'' [[GoneHorriblyWrong flop in the ratings]], and it ultimately got the show canned, with Season 2 [[CutShort ending after just 8 episodes.]] The second season was considered a disaster in the eyes of everyone involved in it (especially Don Oriolo, who is barely willing to acknowledge the existence of ''Twisted Tales'' these days) and the show's failure ultimately put the Felix the Cat cartoons on ice yet ''again'' (having already gone through it with [[WesternAnimation/FelixTheCatTheMovie the 1991 movie]], which was a box office bomb), with only low-key revivals coming of the series after the fact and the character's 100th birthday in 2019 passing by with little to no fanfare; the show itself didn't even see a full DVD release, forcing fans to KeepCirculatingTheTapes until it was added to streaming service Peacock upon it's launch in July 2020.

%% NOTE: Real life examples only. In-universe examples go on TroubledProduction/FictionalExamples.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow'' was, in its original run, one of the most talked-about shows on television, and one of the biggest hits for the then-fledgling Creator/{{Nickelodeon}} network. It's now counted alongside ''The Simpsons'', ''WesternAnimation/BeavisAndButthead'' and ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' as a revolution in TV cartoons, and one of the key shows of UsefulNotes/TheRenaissanceAgeOfAnimation. However, right from the start, it was fraught with production troubles that ultimately destroyed it. Years later, Bob Camp summed it up as "the best of times, the worst of times" and that "the whole thing was fucked from the beginning."
** Nickelodeon green-lighting their first original show from a studio that had never produced animation (up until this time, Spumco had been an illustration company) turned out to be the blind leading the blind. According to Bob Camp, there was poor communication regarding creative control from then-network head Linda Simensky, who outright told the crew that they had carte blanche on content under the incorrect assumption that they shared a consensus of just how far "too far" was. The result was constant disagreement and confusion between both parties on an issue-to-issue basis. The executives also didn't understand the show's particular brand of absurdist humor, like jump cuts or {{gross up close up}}s, when shown the storyboards, forcing the crew to overexplain most of the more bizarre gags (this [[DontExplainTheJoke obviously didn't help the network's faith]]). Because of Creator/JohnKricfalusi's insistence that the show not use scripts, only storyboards, he had to fly to New York every time the network needed to approve stories. Each storyboard took two months to complete and be approved. Bob Camp admitted that the crew had too much of a "shitty 'fuck you' attitude" that the network wasn't prepared to deal with.
** Many of the season 1 episodes were massacred by bad outsourcing, due in part to work from Creator/FilCartoons, a literal sweatshop studio in the Philippines with poor working conditions and such dismal pay that employees were forced to sleep there. The studio handled ink-and-paint work for the entire first season, and more often than not, heavily ruined many scenes due to their all-around cheap Xeroxing, ugly colors, and habit of "reworking" drawings or whole scenes of animation without Spumco's consent. There were even some unintentional (rather than purposeful) OffModel moments, such as Stimpy's eyes inexplicably turning black in the "Stimpy's Breakfast Tips" [[note]] It was supposed to be a placeholder for a separate level of animation photographed in front of it, specifically of Stimpy's actual eyes, but that bit of animation was thrown out, and John K found it funny upon seeing it and decided to ThrowItIn. [[/note]] and Ren accidentally having two elephant trunks on him instead of one in "Black Hole". [[note]] specifically, Ren's trunk is supposed to shift off to the side when he looks at his watch, but a mistake left the animated part of his trunk moving, but with a top drawing of his trunk kept still above it, making it seem like he now has two trunks. [[/note]] Carbunkle director Bob Jacques had to fight tooth and nail to get the studio to turn in acceptable work for episodes like "Stimpy's Invention" (and even then, the sporadic error slipped in, such as Stimpy's eyes floating off his face when he's showing Ren his new socks), and described the experience of working with them as "all damage control" and called them "the cheapest shithole studio [he's] ever had the displeasure to work at". The second season switched to digital ink and paint, presumably to avoid further problems like this, which came with its own set of problems, being such a new and still very rudimentary form of technology.
** One of the biggest sources of friction was over censorship. Nickelodeon was always uneasy with the show's gross-out humor, and sent constant revisions for every single episode. "Nurse Stimpy" had a good chunk of footage axed before it got to air (specifically a gag involving a leech being used on Ren), and they even kept one finished episode, "Man's Best Friend", off the air due to its violent and scatological content. As a general rule, anything that had to do with religion, politics, alcohol, or tobacco was put under a microscope by Standards & Practices. In particular, the character George Liquor had his last name removed from one episode, and made only sporadic appearances due to opposition from the network, right down to axing a scene with him from "Rubber Nipple Salesman", forcing Spumco to change a Liquor cameo in "Haunted House" into a parody of [[WesternAnimation/{{Doug}} Doug Funnie]] (which was edited out in reruns anyway) and rejecting an episode idea starring him (which prompted the crew to improvise the story for "Fire Dogs" in an afternoon). Meanwhile, "Powdered Toast Man", featuring the Pope, removed a cross from his hat and credited the character simply as "the Man with the Pointy Hat", and the ending scene of Toast Man carelessly using the Constitution and Bill of Rights as kindling for a fire was edited out after its initial airing, which ironically ruined the episode's satirical message of how easily authority and power are abused.
** In addition to his general unprofessionalism, John K.'s perfectionism was out of control. Spumco was largely understaffed due to his refusal to hire anyone who didn't meet the standards of the studio's founders (himself, Jim Smith, Camp and Naylor). Not only did this mean that the show had to be done by an incredibly small crew, but what few staff members ''were'' hired regularly had their drawings torn up if they didn't meet John K.'s exact expectations, despite his directions often being vague. One scene of Stimpy shaking his butt in "Stimpy's Invention" was re-animated '''sixteen''' times until it met John K.'s approval. Historian Jerry Beck distinctly remembers visiting the studio and finding out that John K. was so obsessed with finding the right color for the present that Stimpy hands Ren that the walls were lined with over ''50 different cels of the same present'' in different colors, likening it to a scene out of ''Film/TheShining'' (ironically, John K. ended up working with one of the initial color choices).
** Through a combination of the crew's perfectionism and the constant battles over what was acceptable to air, the show suffered from severe ScheduleSlip almost from the start. Nickelodeon only ordered six episodes when the show was green-lit and they still had to rerun the pilot episode in order to have ''something'' to show in what should've been the second episode's time slot; this helped the show build an audience but killed any hope for syndication. The second season was planned to have twenty episodes before getting cut down to thirteen. Only eleven were completed, with two held over for season three.
** Feuding between John K. and Nickelodeon over how long and expensive the production of each episode was reached its apex September '92, in the middle of the second season, when John K. told them point blank that episodes would "cost what they cost and take as long as they needed." Having had enough, Nickelodeon fired him and his studio from the series and continued it through their new in-house production facility Games Animation (John K. continues to insist that content was the deciding factor, specifically that in "Man's Best Friend," but nearly all sources say otherwise).
** The remainder of the series was finished by half of its original staff (those who weren't loyal to John K.) plus some newcomers. Despite their efforts to conform to the more traditional structure of TV animation production, deadlines were still missed. Both fans and much of the staff agree that there were more bad episodes of this era than good ones. Nevertheless, the show ended up running for three more seasons until 1995, at which point Nickelodeon put it on "indefinite hiatus."
** In 2003, John K. relaunched the show as ''WesternAnimation/RenAndStimpyAdultPartyCartoon'', part of an adult animation block on Spike TV. The censorship fights at Nickelodeon were inverted at Spike TV - John K. maintains that Spike TV pressured him to turn ''up'' the adult content farther than he was willing to go, though other crew members have disputed this. At any rate, Spike TV made the mistake of giving John K. complete AuteurLicense and the result was a combination of the usual production delays and excessive spending that had gotten him fired from Nickelodeon back in the 90s and the newfound license to refuse criticism from anyone and everyone over anything to an even worse degree than before. By August 2004, when Spike TV cancelled all of its animated projects, only three episodes were fully completed, after which John K. had to ''beg'' people for money in order to finish the last three episodes.

* ''WesternAnimation/ChipChilla'': If one of the top comments on B & B Productions' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYMWpkOfQZw video]] on the show is to believed, the working conditions were really bad for the animators.
-->"Not proud to say this, but I actually worked on this show. The animation company I worked for took this project on, but our boss didnt tell us that they were Daily Wire until a few episodes in. Right away, the animators and I said that this show is basically WesternAnimation/{{Bluey}}, but didn't complain too much.\\
"Now... the characters themselves weren't the issue. This show was hell to work on... We were not given proper assets, or props, and a lot of the [=BGs=] had to be manually fixed by the animators. We also were not given walk cycles, hand poses or anything of the sort, we had to do that all by ourselves. (Which was not told to us until problems started to arise). The animators worked overtime, the clients were extremely picky and constantly told us the wrong things, and will change their minds weeks onto the animation process. Everyone on my team hated working on this show, and we only found joy in the strange glitches and rig breaks that happened."\\
"Basically... we got the shit end of the stick when working on this show. And I am so glad that it is over. (The show was supposed to come out early spring, but thanks to the clients... tons of things needed to be pushed back)"

* If one of the top comments on B & B Productions' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYMWpkOfQZw video]] on ''WesternAnimation/ChipChila'' is to believed, the working conditions were really bad for the animators.

* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyDog'' was sunk by its less than ideal production cycle. Besides Creator/BradBird, who created the original ''Series/AmazingStories'' episode it spawned from, [[DisownedAdaptation feeling that the concept wouldn't work as a weekly series]], production suffered from a series of delays over objections from producers Creator/StevenSpielberg and Creator/TimBurton to the animation quality, which led to the original thirteen-episode slate being cut to ten while Creator/{{Nelvana}} was hired to fix the work. Creator/{{CBS}}, who had to eat two years worth of wasted production costs, not to mention the failure of ''WesternAnimation/FishPolice'' in the interim, lost faith in the series and [[ScrewedByTheNetwork left it for dead on Wednesday nights in the summer of 1993]], over two years after it was supposed to come out, where it was slammed by critics for its weak production values (especially given the pedigree involved) and unlikeable characters, and died a quick death against summer reruns of ''Series/UnsolvedMysteries''.

** Episodes were originally written to be 30 minutes long, but the decision was made to cut them down to 20 to keep the attention span of the audience. Before airing, the episodes were cut down ''again'' to 15 minutes, leaving several subplots and even entire characters cut out. The reason fans have access to the 20 minute cuts of "Sunshine", "Pirate", "Regatta", and "Munitions" is because they were released to VHS before the series had started airing in an attempt to recoup the high production costs.