"Ironically, my first job at an "entertainment studio" came a decade and a half later at the dreaded Filmation. They hadn't changed their style or approach in all that time. They believed in boredom. They went on throughout their 30 or so year life span barely changing their monotonous bland ways. Working there, I finally saw why and how. You literally were not allowed to draw anything unless you were in the model department. In layout, animation and assistant animation you had to trace the model sheets. Or xerox them off the model sheets. Each character had maybe 3 pre-designed poses and if the show went on for 10 years, you'd have 130 half hours of the same 3 drawings of each character."
My first week on HE-MAN, the cleanup crew were given model sheets of "Ram Man" where the designer had drawn his thumbs on the wrong side of his hands. In his "full front" pose and side pose, the thumbs were right, but in the rear pose, they were drawn incorrectly, it was an obvious mistake. When we pointed this out to the clean up supervisor, she went ashen and told us we had to follow it anyway, until the proper protocol had been addressed to look into the problem. Whenever he turned his back, we had to have "Ram Man's" thumbs inbetween around to the wrong side of his hand to be perfectly "on model." I swear to God I am not making this up. It took a couple of weeks, but we were eventually given new "corrected models" and the crew went into overtime to re-do all the incorrect clean up we had been doing in the interim. If Kafka had ever written pure farce, even he could not have topped FILMATION."
—Disney animator Will Finn, on what it was like working for Filmation
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