‘Heck, I Even Look Like a Cartoon’ : Scott Shaw is one of the busiest, most successful animators in Hollywood and he <i> still </i> thinks he’s Fred Flintstone

Scott Shaw wanted to leave San Diego behind for Hollywood and, in the glittering lights, mix with the heroes of his childhood. He dreamed they would be just as they were when he first saw them, back when he was peeping through the bars of his crib into their colorful world.

And so it happened. And everything was just as he had hoped.

“That’s the amazing thing about cartoons,” Shaw said, standing in front of a framed, wall-mounted drawing of Huckleberry Hound in his Sherman Oaks home. “You’re pretty likely to be able to work with some of your heroes.”

At 38, the chubby, fresh-faced Shaw has worked with some of the best: Fred Flintstone, Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Miss Piggy and Kermit, even an animated version of Martin Short’s Ed Grimley character. In the 19 years he has worked as an animator, they have all formed around his pen or taken screen direction from him. For the past year, he has worked as producer/director of NBC’s “Camp Candy,” a Saturday morning series about a summer camp run by an animated version of John Candy. He also drew and wrote much of the show.

“You’re really the god of this little world on paper,” Shaw offered in explanation of his love affair with cartooning. “If you can draw it, if you can imagine it, it can exist.”

In Toontown, the buzz-cut San Diegan is hot stuff. He is one of the few animators in Hollywood able to negotiate a non-exclusive contract: While working on “Camp Candy” and other projects for DIC Enterprises, Shaw may take on any other jobs that suit his fancy. He recently began work on a syndicated project for Hanna-Barbera called “Monster Tails,” about the pets of famous Hollywood film monsters. Shaw is also working on commercials for Pebbles cereal and a combination animation/live-action advertisement for tourism in Mexico, and is writing a book about “The Flintstones” for Contemporary Books.

But Scott Shaw is as different from a typical hot producer as his cartoon world--with its ageless, malleable stars and endlessly variable reality--is from live-action programs.

Regular TV producers, at least by reputation, talk fast and move faster. They demolish million-dollar homes in Malibu to build multimillion-dollar homes.

Shaw talks so slowly you’d think he was being played at 33 1/3. His home is in a gentrifying neighborhood in an older part of the San Fernando Valley. He and his wife did remodel, but it wasn’t to erect a swanky new building: they added a room to hold Shaw’s toy collection.

Like many others in this somewhat eccentric field, Shaw’s life has always been focused on cartoons and cartooning. His father gave him his first comic book at the age of 2. He produced his first underground comic book at 16, the same year he graduated from high school.

“People who are cartoonists seem to know very young that’s what they want to do,” said Shaw, who taught himself to draw as a child, sitting in front of the television and whisking out pictures of his favorite characters as they went by. “It’s like we have some kink in our DNA.”

Shaw dropped out of Cal State Fullerton in 1972 and took a job as a salesman in a comic book store in Studio City. On the side, he drew comic books, first for his own underground publications and then for Marvel Productions.

“I took the job because it was near the animation studios,” Shaw said. “That’s where I made contact with a lot of people from Hanna-Barbera.”

The connection paid off: The cartoon company soon hired the 19-year-old to draw comic book versions of its characters, and eventually brought him on to work on a revival of “The Flintstones.” He has since worked on “Richie Rich,” “Kwickie Koala,” “Casper and the Space Angels,” “The Smurfs,” “Muppet Babies,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” “Snorks,” “Popeye and Son” and “The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley.”

“Heck, I even look like a cartoon,” said Shaw, who favors Hawaiian shirts and has been known to draw himself into crowd scenes in his cartoons. “I’ve kind of grown up to become Fred Flintstone; it’s some sort of strange genetic experiment. I stand out in the yard and yell for my wife like Fred, with the barbecue on fire. I’ve got a dog like Dino who knocks me down and licks me.”

“Scott’s whole persona is perfect for what he does--he just knows so much about the world of cartoons and comic books,” John Candy said. “He’s just a Peter Pan of sorts. He grew up in a lot of ways, but he’s still got that great edge of a kid.”

Behind the scenes, though, Saturday morning can be a pretty serious place, with little room for childlike romps through the imagination.

Shaw plies his trade in a network-controlled climate that has changed greatly from when the great animators of theatrical cartoons first switched to television in the 1950s. Gone are the days when characters such as Beany and Cecil would land their creaky ship on No Bikini Atoll: Today, network “pro-social message” advocates want to know why there are no women on Beany and Cecil’s ship, and think the name of the island is Not Very Funny Atoll.

Indeed, the programs designed to be bursting with youthful exuberance must be created in an environment that is generally a far cry from unbridled creativity. Network license fees--a fraction of their prime-time counterparts because the audience is so much smaller--dictate frantic production schedules and subcontracting most of the drawing to cheaper labor overseas. Animators produce in a matter of weeks programs that once were lovingly designed over the course of several months.

“Usually we’re so busy that we don’t even have time to read (would-be writers’) portfolios,” said “Camp Candy” story editor Judy Rothman. “So if they turn in a really good premise, they can have their chance. I’ve used students’ scripts.”

The networks’ limited financial support does not restrain their creative demands, however. To a large extent, those in the Saturday morning cartoon business say, the networks want programs that are safe--readily identifiable to children and socially acceptable to adults.

“Our major success for years was with original characters,” said cartoon pioneer Joseph Barbera, who with partner William Hanna brought forth “Tom and Jerry,” “The Flintstones,” “The Jetsons,” “Yogi Bear” and “Scooby-Doo.” “Today you have to either get a comic book that’s working somewhere, or a superhero that’s established a track record in comic books, or a takeoff of a character that’s in a hit (prime-time) show. We did a ‘Laverne and Shirley’ cartoon series, we did a ‘Fonz’ cartoon series. I guess it gives people, (network) officials, a feeling of security to work with something familiar.”

New for the Saturday morning lineup this fall, for example, will be ABC cartoons based on “Roseanne” and the New Kids on the Block, an adaptation of the film “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” for CBS and a show built around Rick Moranis (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”) for NBC.

Equally important, from the networks’ point of view, is that the children’s programs try to provide “pro-social” messages--an outgrowth of widespread criticism in the ‘60s that their programming was overly violent. The comic mayhem that had been a staple of “Bugs Bunny,” “Popeye” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons was largely eliminated and, to go one better, the networks took it upon themselves to ensure that the characters were good role models for children.

“I worked on a program called ‘Popeye and Son,’ ” Shaw recalled. “We had to show Popeye doing the dishes.”

He finds the restrictions frustrating and foolish.

“I only have my own experience to compare it to,” he said, “but when I was a kid seeing a character jump off the roof, or seeing Popeye punch Bluto, and he’d go through three walls or something--maybe I was an especially intelligent kid, but I never went out and tried to do any of those things, or thought that it applied to life. I’d just think, ‘Gee, this is a great cartoon.’ ”

Listening to Shaw handle a conference call with a network executive and a representative of John Candy’s company, it’s clear that staying alive on Saturday morning requires the ability to maneuver through corporate politics and do some ego adjusting.

Sitting there in his jeans and print shirt, Shaw is all politeness and respect. He incorporates every one of Candy representative Bob Crane’s ideas into the script. Yes, he agrees, the show shouldn’t have too much fantasy in it; no, he says, the conflict isn’t compelling enough in that script.

When the network executive wants a black character in “Camp Candy” to speak more in dialect, a move she feels would encourage black youngsters to be proud of their cultural identity, Shaw complies. When Crane feels that the plot of one episode is too fantastic, Shaw agrees to make the troublesome scenes into a dream sequence.

You have to choose your fights, Shaw explains later.

“You can’t lose sight of the fact that cartooning is a commercial art, and to reach the public you always have to satisfy somebody, even if it’s just your story editor.”

“Camp Candy” may have limitations, but at least it’s not saccharine like “The Care Bears,” Shaw said. He makes his impact where he can. In “Camp Candy,” that means injecting satire where possible and making the drawings more interesting.

And if you’re lucky enough to have a non-exclusive contract, you can even choose another project for yourself, which is what Shaw did with “Monster Tails.”

A few weeks ago, he withdrew as producer of “Camp Candy,” citing frustration with network control, as well as the stresses of overseeing budgets, hiring and other parts of the producer’s job. He will remain as the show’s “consulting producer” in charge of the show’s creative elements.

“Only being involved with the creative aspects makes it a little better,” Shaw said. “Also, ‘Monster Tails’ is for syndication, so you don’t have any network going over the stuff. You strictly have whether it works or not, as opposed to whether somebody finds it socially acceptable.”

Upstairs at DIC, away from the conference room and the suits, artist Don Watson is drawing new backdrops for “Camp Candy.” There one can see Shaw’s aesthetic at work--his love for the most “cartoony” of cartoons, where lines are stretched and exaggerated, and even the setting incorporates a gag or two.

“This is like Hanna-Barbera was back in the ‘60s, when we did ‘Atom Ant’ and ‘Magilla Gorilla,’ ” Watson said happily, drawing a jagged purple outcropping next to a mountain topped with ice cream and a cherry.

The idea, according to Shaw, is to trim back “cute” and add more “funny,” without going so far as to trip the network suitability sensors.

“It seems almost impossible to get a story approved by NBC, but once we do, then Scott comes in and starts breaking it down,” Candy said. “They quibble over the smallest things--the voice of a character, how the character looks, what the attitude is.”

As “Camp Candy” enters its second season this fall, viewers who watch closely will find that the drawings depict Candy and the children as slightly more eccentric, with exaggerated features and more distinctive clothing.

The backgrounds will be more colorful, with purple skies and scenes that have a surreal quality that, for Shaw, has been missing from cartoons for too long.

Shaw’s own favorite cartoons are “The Flintstones” and “Rocky and His Friends.”

“I like the ones that have a very definite hip and sometimes cynical opinion,” Shaw said. “I try to work on shows where there is at least the possibility of skewing some of the story lines and some of the performances so that adults could sit down and watch, and not be bored out of their skulls or offended at the treacly sentimentality.”

Parents should challenge their kids, he said, and encourage them to view programs that they might not understand in their entirety.

And the sophisticated cartoon may be coming back. While the networks may be slow and cautious, new cartoons are showing up in syndication and on cable. Fox hit a monster home run with “The Simpsons,” a prime-time animated show drawn by cartoonist Matt Groening, and is launching its own Saturday morning children’s schedule in the fall, including a new version of “Tom and Jerry”--complete with cat-bashing and sight gags--from Hanna-Barbera.

The big three networks, seeing Fox’s success, have started looking for cartoon vehicles of their own. Animation is so hot that officials at both DIC and Hanna-Barbera are predicting shortages of animators. Shaw has begun teaching a class at the Motion Pictures Screen Cartoonists Local 839 in North Hollywood in an attempt to train people for the anticipated work.

“I think cartoons and animation and comics are becoming hip again,” Shaw said. “I know a lot of adults who watch cartoons in the morning when they’re getting ready instead of the ‘Today’ show. When Bryant Gumbel gets on their nerves too much, they’d much rather watch Bugs Bunny.”

Besides “The Simpsons,” Shaw said, the rejuvenation of full-length animated features shows that the atmosphere for cartooning is improving.

“The best thing about it is the fact that animation isn’t being aimed exclusively at kids any more,” Shaw said. “Adults liked ‘The Little Mermaid.’ ”

Baby-boomers who grew up with Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle, Shaw said, are responding to animation drawn by 30-something animators like himself. And they want their kids to have as much fun as they did.

Ditto, he says, for the cartoonists themselves. “There are a lot of people in my generation who remember what it was like originally,” he said. “Matt Groening is one of them.”

To Shaw, that means the time is ripe for someone to sneak into the drafting room and put some mustaches and funny noses on the safe, cute characters that have dominated cartoons for the past two decades.

“All of us in my generation are kind of like time bombs in the business,” Shaw said, “ticking away, waiting to unleash something of quality.”