Artists Fearing Fate of 2 New Cartoons

In the Filmation cartoon “Bugzburg,” the biggest threat is a menacing toad that appears every so often to disrupt life in the peaceful city of insects.

In real life, something far more complex has disrupted “Bugzburg”--the sale of Filmation by its parent, Group W Productions, to a French television consortium for about $30 million and the subsequent closing of the Woodland Hills cartoon factory. As of last week, about a year’s work on “Bugzburg,” scheduled to debut this fall, was being packed into boxes along with another incomplete cartoon, “Bravo,” about people who live underground.

Neither Filmation President Lou Scheimer nor representatives of the French buyer, Parafrance, returned calls requesting comment on the fate of the new shows.

Former Filmation executives said the group is quickly looking for a cartoon studio in the Far East to complete the work because the deadlines for the fall programming season are approaching quickly. The prospect of shipping the work to a studio overseas worries those who worked on the shows.

“If they do it like that, they’d really be insuring that it would be a piece of junk when it got done. It’s a comedy series with an American sense of timing for an American audience,” said producer Tom Tataranowicz.

“Bugzburg” (originally spelled with an “s” until it was changed to a “z” to mimic the noise of some flying insects) was introduced in a feature film Filmation produced, “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.” The main character, an optimistic “glow bug” named Gee Willikers, was introduced along with Grumblebee, a middle-aged bee with an English accent who belongs to the “Royal Air Bugs.”

Filmation had big expectations for its “Pinocchio” feature film, which it had hoped would help launch “Bugzburg.”

But the “Pinocchio” film was a bomb. Costing about $10 million to make, it grossed $2.7 million at the box office. In addition, critics panned it, comparing it unfavorably to Walt Disney’s classic “Pinocchio.”

Still, Filmation continued to be optimistic about “Bugzburg,” partly because it fit the trend in cartoons in the past two years toward “soft” animation, industry slang for shows that aren’t based on action-packed, super-hero characters.

Indeed, Petry, a New York company that acts as a consultant to television stations on programming, had issued a report calling it a “very promising” show.

Filmation was also spending money on top-quality animation. According to former employees, a half-hour episode was costing more than $250,000 to produce, compared to less than $200,000 spent by some producers who send work to low-cost cartoon studios in Asia.

Filmation was selling the show for first-run syndication, meaning that it would be sold directly to television stations for airing Mondays through Fridays instead of to a major network for broadcast Saturday mornings. Sixty-five episodes were to have been produced.

The show was a “barter” program, meaning that Filmation did not receive cash from the stations, but air time that it could re-sell to advertisers.

Despite its promise, the sale of “Bugzburg” to television stations has gone slowly, especially in the largest television markets. Filmation executives blamed the sluggish sales on stations’ reluctance to make commitments to new cartoons in a saturated animation market. Some stations had soured on animation, while others were more interested in other trends in children’s programming, such as game shows.

Still, at the time of Filmation’s sale to the French group, “Bugzburg” had been sold to enough television stations--covering about 70% of the U.S. market--to justify finishing production. Now, those who worked on the show are wondering what will happen to it.

“We were working very hard to make the new shows look better than anything from the Japanese or the other overseas studios,” said director Ed Friedman. “We’ll never get the chance to prove ourselves now that they’ve shut us down, but we were meeting our budgets and the quality was higher than it is on the foreign series. It was all for nil, unless somebody picks them up and continues--which I hope someone will do.”

Free-lance writer Charles Solomon contributed to this story.