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dalt20 · 1 month ago

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Tooning In. 21 Greg Bailey part 8 of 10

DL:So, you directed the controversial episode of Arthur, Mr. Ratburn and the Special Someone. Where Mr Ratburn marries a chocolatier. Many fans and parental/religious groups were upset at the episode and stated that Ratburn wasn't gay but an effeminate man (I.e. Metrosexual). What are your thoughts? And the process of creating the episode?

GB:Ratburn is most definitely gay and now he is married. There was always some discussion in the fan groups wondering if he was gay and we never addressed it one way or another. You remember we did that episode Sugar Time in the Postcards from Buster series where the kid being visited Buster lived with his 2 moms. Same sex marriage was already legal in Canada by that time so it was not really an issue here but that episode really blew up in the US. It cost the head of PBS kids her job. There were interviews all over the place in the Us about that show . I did an interview here with CBC news about it and at the end of the interview the reporter turned off the camera and said to me "It really isn't any kid of news issue here but we are covering the story because it was a big deal in the US." It was actually a local story since it was coming from Vermont and Montreal is kind of the local big city for that part of Vermont. Anyway 10 later and we were having the story meeting for the last season of Arthur. My main interest at that meeting was to try to wrap up all the questions that fans had and other loose ends that we had in the series after all those years. One of the things was that some people I know had suggested to me that Ratburn was gay. At the meeting I tossed out that idea of doing a show about Ratburn coming out and getting married. I really did not think the idea would get even the least amount of traction and it was almost a joke considering all the trouble we had been in for the Sugartime episode. Everyone kind of laughed when I pitched it but the producer Carol Greenwald immediately said " Sure we could maybe do that now if we were pretty careful with how it is handled/ " I think Peter Hirsch nearly fell off his chair when she said that. It was just agreed that time had changed even in the US by that point. I think that non gay parents and people that claim they are involved with a church need to get out more and see the real world. I mean there are an awful lot of kids out there that live with gay parents and up until then we never really gave them a nod even though we covered so many other social and health issues that kids are living with. We had a lot of positive feedback on that show from kids and parents. The kids still love their parents and television never really gives them examples of other kids living the same life they are totally familiar with. Everyone really liked working on the show including Arthur Holden who we worried might be bothered by it since he voiced that character all those years and he was never supposed to gay. But Arthur was immediately on board with it because he is quite open minded and saw it as big development for the character.

DL:How do you feel about the backlash from Alabama Public Television, who refused to air that episode alongside that Postcards from Buster episode, Sugartime?

GB:Well nobody in Alabama is gay. So I guess it's fine in that case. On the other hand I've heard Alabama is the gay capital of America.

DL:The irony there is amazing! How was 2018, When the series was ending? I heard that in 2019, you guys had a wrapup party celebrating the end of the show. How did you feel that the series was ending?

GB:For a lot of years I had heard that the show was going to end that season. Normally shows ended at 65 episodes when we started Arthur but we were winning Emmy's and a Peabody around that point. But I think every year after that the production company that was doing the show was pretty sure it would end that year. So finally Carol told me would end the show in that 25 season before we had our story meeting at the start of the season. Like I said I wanted to sew up the loose ends. I don't know why I was so concerned about that now but when your identity is so tied to your creative body of work like that series you get kind of obsessed with it. I probably should have quit before the end and gone onto something else because it was not as sharp as it once was and it never really looked the same once we went digital and each season brought one more thing that made it less good. Between changing production companies and animation methods and having less budget and schedule each year it was less interesting. Anyway, I didn't feel like I could leave the show before the bitter end because I wouldn't have directed every episode and special. I wished it had gone on a few more seasons but that is purely personal preference so I could finish up my career with it rather than trying to move on to something else. I realized that would be hard to do after directing such a well known show for so long. We did do a big wrap party at the end of the series. WE were still working on the last few shows at the time. It was a nice big party. Some of the people who worked on the show for a lot of seasons showed up so it was fun.

DL:So, How was the last episode, All Grown Up? Was it bitter sweet for you?

GB:It was funny that all through the season I kept saying that this was the last season and some of the older hands on the show would say that we said every year. So sometimes it was hard to get people to believe it. That last show was kind of sad to do for sure. We wanted to do something that was really big to actually end the series with a twist or a real cliff hanger. I keep thinking of the Bob Newhart series set in Vermont where he wakes up in bed and it was all a dream. The last episode was great though. Peter did a terrific job writing that last episode. Gerry Capelle, my main storyboard artist all those seasons did the storyboard and it was great as well. We still did the 2 specials tagged onto the end of the series and those were kind of drudgery when I think of them. It seemed like the crew was all leaving before they finished their job so I had to fill in a lot of missing pieces myself. We had missing designs and stuff. Some stuff was tedious though I guess I quickly learned how tedious some of the production had become and some of it was a good learning experience for using ToonBoom Harmony.

DL:Also how was bringing back the first voice of Arthur, Michael Yamurish to come back to play adult Arthur?

GB:That was fun. I had used Michael on some other parts over the years. Slink I believe. So I still spoke to him occasionally. When Peter wrote that ending with the kids being older I suggested we get Michael to do the role. It fit quite well there and made an interesting twist. It would have been great getting Michal Caloz to do DW but we had lost track of him after he moved to California about the same year he quit doing DW.

DL:So how was Marc Brown during this, What were his thoughts on the show ending? Did he say anything to you while directing or doing voicework in the booth?

GB:I imagine Marc was about the same as me though Arthur for him still continues after the series ends because he can keep making more books. I don't remember the voice session with him. Maybe he was recorded in NY or Boston. I forgot that he had a few lines of dialog in that show but it's true that he must have been in a booth somewhere. We often spoke during the course of the season about various things. He was also up at the wrap party at the end so we had some time to reminisce then. WE usually did the start of season story meetings at Marc's house or studio over the years. So we would touch base at various points. I even remember taking a quick swim in the ocean at his house at Martha's Vineyard one year. I didn't grow up near the ocean so I can never pass up a chance to do that even if it is a token swim.

DL:So, did you direct the Arthur PSAs that tackled Racism after the death of George Floyd in 2020?

GB:No I didn't.

DL:So that was done by a different person.

GB: It's the first time I heard of it.

DL:Which is strange because I thought you directed everything Arthur related

youtube

I show Greg the Arthur Short : Talk,listen and Act, which was not directed by him.

GB:Yeah I guess they found someone else. I see from what you just uploaded that all the characters are cross eyed. I just watched what you uploaded and it makes me kind of angry to watch it. The lip sync is terrible and the eyebrows are upside down a lot and they keep holding up their hands and pointing to the sky with their finger when making a point. WE even had a name for holding your hand up in the air like that . We called it "weighing air." It’s just a bad habit a lot of storyboard artists have that don't know how to make the characters act. If you watch most low end tv animation they do this all the time because they don't know even the basics of acting. We did our best to avoid the weighing air and pointing to the sky all those years. It looks really badly boarded and animated. It must have been done at Oasis from someone that doesn't know the show very well. They used the rigs from the series and reused some old back grounds. The cross eyed eyes drive me crazy just looking at the still image from YouTube. One other thing I did not direct was the 3D CGI Arthur movie. It was made back around 2001. It was also terrible. It was called, My Missing Pal or something like that.

DL:That was called Arthur's Missing Pal and ended up being done funnily enough in Vancouver at Mainframe Entertainment, the same guys who did ReBoot! You know Mainframe?

GB:That's right. We pitched to do that but it was pretty clear that it was only a token that they let us pitch even though they were going to put it through Mainframe. Even when pitched the producer Lion's Gate in Vancouver was part of the project. So they just put the job in their own production company. I think there was also something about the production being from the US, because a few of the actors violated the union rules and worked on the show without authorization from the union. The director I believe was from the US. We were working on a way to do the show using mocap which would have been really suitable I think . Pal obviously could not be mo cap. About that same time we did this bizarre thing called You are Arthur. You could send a photo of your kid to this company and they would put your kind on the body of an animated character so it would be in the cartoon. It was really weird looking and I believe they didn't pay the bill in the end. We did the animation part of it and the character had a cross hair of the cursor to position the photo head onto the character. It was not a highlight of my career.I remember watching ReBoot. It was the first CGI tv series I recall. I knew some animators that I went to school with that worked there.

DL:A lot of VAs except for Arthur,DW and Buster in the film were replaced by Anime voice actors from Naruto and Cowboy Bebop from the US. It was directed by the Director of the Beavis and Butthead movie and storyboarded by Dan Haskett, Larry Leker, Lenord Robinson and Rich Arons!Like some very big names were in this film!

GB:I liked the B&B Movie. I don't know why they made such a cheap Arthur movie. It looked really cheap. It was shocking. I don't know those storyboard artists. Again they could have just used the storyboard artists that already worked on the series. They are all freelance and would have been available if it was off season or maybe even have done it if the pay was good. If they had such good talent why did it come out so incredibly bad? I don't think it's just me. I showed it to other people not connected with the show and they said it was unwatchable. Something must have been happening behind the scenes for them to produce that. Did you think it was ok?

DL: boring plus I felt that it was disconnected from the show. Also those Storyboarders were from Disney and Warner Bros. Dan Haskett animated Ariel and Belle from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast for crying out loud!

GB:It's funny about the feature. When we won the first Emmy I remember sitting with Ron Weinburg and saying that we should make a feature. It didn't even need to be fancy but we had all the ducks in a row at that point. Joe Fallon was still working on the show and we were animating at Akom and we had an incredibly large fan base. He wasn't really well connected to find funding for a feature but if we had just made a large size tv episode at that point it would have been amazing and really true to the series.It's funny about the feature. When we won the first Emmy I remember sitting with Ron Weinburg and saying that we should make a feature. It didn't even need to be fancy but we had all the ducks in a row at that point. Joe Fallon was still working on the show and we were animating at Akom and we had an incredibly large fan base. He wasn't really well connected to find funding for a feature but if we had just made a large size tv episode at that point it would have been amazing and really true to the series.An animator from Disney does not necessarily make a good storyboard artist. It may look pretty with nice drawings but its really a different thing. Sometimes a person coming from one part of production like animation makes a bad storyboard guy because they draw scenes that are fun or cool to animate and they avoid other things that are hard but that doesn't make a good film. It's like a good layout artist does not always make a good BG designer. It's hard to stop trying to make the job easy for the layout team. That's why often the storyboard artists come from illustrators and comic book artists. Does that make sense?

DL:How was winning that Daytime Emmy back in 1999? Were you up on stage getting the trophy or was it Ron or Michelle? Also were they with you?

GB:Definitely I was up on stage. It was incredible when we won that first year. I don't think Micheline came. I remember I was so excited that I ran down the aisle with my arms up over my head screaming. The next year on the Emmy commercial they showed that clip of me looking like a crazy guy. I even got a mention in IMDB for that little 2 second long shot of me in that commercial. WE really didn't think we would win. The fans loved us but we weren't from LA and shows from there always won before that. We also didn't have such an amazing budget as the other finalists. I remember watching the little clips they show when the names of the finalists and our clip looked so boring compared to these big music extravaganzas that the other shows had from WB and Disney. I think that was the year we also won the Peabody and got the award on the same weekend. The Emmys were fun in those days when you were with all the soap opera stars walking down the cordoned off street in NY on the way to the gala. Later years they just put the kid's shows in with the craft category awards, such as the best hairdresser or nail technician in a talk show. One year we had to eat dinner in a back room at Madison Square gardens and it absolutely stunk because the circus was just in town and they used that room as the barn for the elephants. I don't know if you ever smelled an elephant but it's pretty pungent.

DL:You got the clip? Because I need to see it.

GB:Not sure. I think I once had it on a vhs at best. I tries finding the clip online once, but with no luck

DL:Ah ok, so you were a supervising director for HouseBroken for FOX and Bento Box.How was communicating from Montreal to Los Angeles?

GB:That's a bit a jump in my timeline but I loved working at Bento Box. Unfortunately I wasn't the supervising director. I was an animation timing director. It was during the covid days so I think most everyone was working from home at that time. At least the department was all working online.Sorry I'm all over the place. I just found the daytime Emmy award clip from 2000.

youtube

Greg shows me a promo for the 2000 daytime Emmy’s on ABC. Greg is the man throwing his hands up at 0:14.

Yes that’s him!

I guess I exaggerated. It's more like 20 frames long, not 2 seconds.

DL:Were you the guy in the crowd? No wait, are you the guy who's throwing his hands up?

GB:Yeah I'm that handsome guy putting his hands up coming down the aisle.

DL:You musta felt great like you won the Super Bowl!

GB:Yeah I looked pretty crazy there. Everyone else in all those clips look so well behaved and composed but I think for me it really was a surprise. I felt like none of the others in our group could believe it and no one was moving even though the time restraint of getting up there for the award is really tight. Everyone just seemed frozen so I jumped up and raised my arms hoping to get energized enough to get up on stage and get it over with. The next year I did the acceptance speech and that's another highly embarrassing moment. I was so incredibly nervous and it showed a lot. I could hardly speak and I remember looking out at the crowd and a woman was gesturing upwards. I thought she meant to speak louder but she really meant that I didn't need to lean over and put my mouth beside the mic. I think if she hadn't distracted me I probably would have passed out instead.

DL:Can you describe to me what an animation timer is? What does it mean?

GB:Remember I mentioned working in Tokyo when I was young working on sheet direction and dialog. Anyway the animation timing director indicated frame by frame on the x-sheet how long the animation for each movement takes. So everything from walking footsteps to the length of a turn how many frames for a blink or whatever moves. Effects or characters or when the pans or zooms happen. So on Housebroken the big thing was that they always had a million characters on screen at once. It was the trademark of the series. So each character is timed in a separate column and if the characters interact then they need to be coordinated. The shows are pretty closely timed out by that stage so you cut the scene to the right length and time each scene. In the old days of traditional animation all series had to do timing and also lip sync because the work went to Asia. Now it is only some high end shows for primetime that still do animation timing. And lip sync is only provided for shows that are animated by non native English speakers. The big difference now from when I didn’t this earlier is that the timing on House Broken was done using Harmony so you could add or change the drawings in the panels on the storyboard. which was a nice addition of control for the timing director. It also makes it harder to find someone to do the job.

DL:Also, What did you think about the show?Did you like the concept of a dog running a therapy group with pets?

GB:I really loved that series. For one thing it was an adult (as compared to children's) and it was prime time. So the quality was really good and it was a really good change for me after a lot of years of doing kids TV. The writing was super and the acting was quite amazing. Lisa Kudrow is one of my favorite TV actors ever since that episode of Kimmy Schmidt where she played Kimmy's delinquent mother. The animation was painful because of all the crowd scenes but if you just accept that on day one it's fine. It was the thing they were going for. I liked the humor because it wasn't just sophomoric style of humor like most current adult shows. The platonic relationship, (because they are neutered pets), between Honey and Chief made for a really interesting buddy type relationship. It was funny to hear the pets all speaking in English and describing all their neurotic issues and it made a lot of sense considering the weird life that house pets need to live. It's a pretty unnatural way for these animals to live with people that expect so much from them. You knew something was going to be kind of messed up when Lisa Kudrow was playing the part of group therapy leader. She always acts like she is one step away from the loonie bin herself and to be the advisor to the group was pretty funny in itself. It was a really good show and had a lot of good comedians.

DL:I like that show because I thought the animation was good and that the character designs were cute and appealing. Compared to other series like Family Guy and Rick and Morty which every adult animated series based their style on nowadays.

GB:Agreed! Though I just saw an article from 11 days ago saying Fox has canceled the show. Not too surprising because it's been shut down for a few years now. It stopped at the start of the writers strike which was the end of the production season by coincidence. Too bad. I liked it because it was better humor than just everything being too fast and constantly gross jokes. There aren't many shows like that for adults. Like I said, most stuff is very sophomoric.

DL:Weird because I remember that there was a hiatus in like 2022 and season 2 was coming out in 2023.Guess they backtrack on that then.

GB:My work ended on Nov 1 2022. They would have still been animating for a few more months after that. So it must have wrapped somewhere around Feb 2023. I hope I have my years right. The numbering was confusing to me. Season one had already aired when I started and they were almost at the middle of this combined season 2/3 when I started. There was no break between 2 and 3 for production but I thought they were going to roll out a season 3 by separating those shows. I'm not really sure and would not be the person in the know for that.

#animation #animation interview #tooning in.#greg bailey #90s cartoons #arthur #fox #bento box #housebroken #pbs #mr ratburn #gay #lgbt #emmy awards

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