Bill Kopp on The Record

You’d think that animator Bill Kopp would be a happy camper. He will be voicing some of the characters he helped create on the Fox Kids Network’s Eekstravaganza for another three seasons, and several publications have announced that his hit new series The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show has been picked up by Disney for a second season. But things are not quite as they seem.
    Apperantly, as of this writing, Kopp has not gotten a firm commitment from Disney for a second season of Shnookums and Meat. Meanwhile, many of the carefully selected teams of artists who worked on it were laid off after completing work on Around the World with Timon and Pumbaa, the television spinoff of Lion King.
"The only reason they were staying on [with Disney] was kind of waiting to see what was going to happen to Shnookums and Meat."
    Kopp calls reports of a renewal in publications like Wizard and Hero illustrated, "a myth… I wish it were true. I really do, because we had a great team assembled and I don’t know how we’re gonna pull it all back together if they decide to pick it up. In their eyes, [they have decided that], ‘Well, lets just wait, and then anybody can come in and do it.’ But the problem is, no, it was a very precise congregation of artists that made this thing work, and now its been disrupted.
"It would be like trying to put the Beatles back together. It just will never be the same. It’ll be different, and your guess is as good as mine as to whether it would be better than what had gone before."
    "Sometimes I have to pinch myself. It’s like the show was made by ghosts. We did all this work; we put it out; it turned out great. It turned out far better than I ever thought it would… far better. We’re being utterly ignored by everybody. It’s like we didn’t do anything."
    "It has enough leverage on a ratings level that if it was, for instance, a Fox show.. we’d be jammin’ through our second season by now. I don’t know what they are waiting for."
    Considering the effort that Disney usually puts into merchandising their characters, the lack of Shnookums and Meat tie ins seems to bode poorly for Kopp and company. Aside from a line of pastas, nothing is currently available.
    Contrast this with the massive campaign supporting Gargoyles. There are action figures, T-shirts and posters. The first five episodes are already out on video! Even the Disney Stores, which traditionally do not carry much merchandise for the Disney Afternoon shows, have jumped heavily on the bandwagon.
    The Shnookums and Meat cast is conspicusous by its absence from the theme parks as well. Kopp notes that he had initially heard that costumes of his characters were being made, but apparently all that stopped at Christmastime, before the show even hit the airwaves!
    "It was just all of a sudden ‘poof’. We couldn’t get an answer from anybody. It was like the CIA. ‘Shnookums and Meat? Covert operation! We don’t talk about that anymore!’"
    Another item of note: As of this writing, the Shnookums and Meat gang are the only Disney Afternoon characters that have yet to appear in comic book form, except for some full page advertisements announcing the January 2 premiere.
While obviously displeased with the current series of events, Kopp freely offers that, "I praise [Disney] for having the courage to do it in the first place. It’s really unprecedented."
    "I don’t want to sound like I'm down on because they gave me a great opportunity, and they really held up to their word. They told me, 'We're going to let you do whatever you want to do. Here's a box of money. Now go make the show.' And I did, and they really did stay out of the way. There was never anything said about them picking up another season or anything."
How much freedom he was given? "Aside from the occasional [problems with] BS&P, I was absolutely free to do whatever. It was rare me to ever have to do a second draft of a script."
    In fact, ANIMATO! readers who watch Shnookums and Meat may have recognized censored Eek episode title, "There Are Spiders All Over Me," [see the interview with Savage Steve Holland in ANIMATO! #27] as an episode title for Tex Tinstar: Best of the West.
    "Well,"laughs Kopp,"I figured we couldn't use it there, so I'd use it on Shnookums and Meat. There are no spiders in the episode, of course."
    Actually, there was one area where Disney did step in. They criticized the Kopp for his treatment of women, which resulted in an unexpected metamorphosis.
    "On the Tex Tinstar stuff, I had a character called Monica Betty Lou Sue Veronica, and she was to be kidnapped from the town of Bonehead in the first episode, and to be sort of the McGuffin throughout the whole story. And Disney hated that. They said, 'You can't treat women like that.' Even though I had her kicking the Wrong Riders' asses the whole time!
They said 'No, you can't show a woman in jeopardy. She's got to be able to deal with it.' You know, the whole thing is about cliches, and they're throwing away one of the most prominent cliches in a Western to the wind. So she turned into a safe and I wrote her out because there was no way to deal with it."
    Kopp maintains that he is frequently asked why there is no "gal" in Tex Tinstar. He replies that she's turned into a safe "as some girls will."
    Spoiler Warning!!! If the show does continue, viewers may yet get to see the lovely Monica Betty Lou Sue Veronica. In the next episode, Kopp would have had someone finally open the safe that the luckless Wrong Riders have been unable to crack in the previous 13 installments. Then out would step Monica Betty Lou Sue Veronica, who'd apparently been hiding there all along!
    After passionately kissing Tex, she would unzip her outfit and be revealed as Clem, the unwashed man-mountain of the Wrong Riders!
    This would not only set up an interesting anomaly, but presumably also send Tex off in search of a good mouthwash! End of Spoiler Warning.
    Kopp dealt with the criticism of his fernale characters by introducing an unlikely role model: Pith Possum's overzealous grandmother, Pearl Possum. Eek fans will notice an uncanny resemblance between Pearl and the Old Lady who nearly killed Eek with kindness in the pilot episode, "Misereek." Both are even similarly voiced by Charlie Adler, although Kopp had him give Pearl a slight Louisiana accent.
    However, their personalities couldn't be further apart. While Eek runs himself ragged to keep the 0ld Lady out of danger, Pith practically has to rescue the baddies of Possum City from tenacious Grandma Pearl.
    "I've always loved that kind of thing," he says, "making an elderly character either somebody who's oblivious and needs to be rescued, or, and to my mind this is the funnier thing, is what I did with Pearl, which is making the character superior. Everybody goes, 'Oh my God!' and they're getting their butts kicked by this old lady."
    "I felt kind of vindicated by that one because Disney gave me a hard time about how I dealt with females in my cartoons. They were always putting me under a microscope. I felt heroic when I came up with Pearl Possum, because not only did I put women on a pedestal, but elderly women at that!"
    If the show gets renewed viewers can count on the return of Pearl Possum.
    While awaiting the fate of Shnookums and Meat, Kopp has been developing a spinoff of Pith Possum: Superdynamic Possum of Tomorrow for Disney, starring Ralph and Al, a bumbling bear and dog who framed Pith by badly impersonating hun and his sidekick, Obediah the Wonder Raccoon during a crime spree.
    Meanwhile, he is looking to the future. Betty of the Jungle, which he had in development as a late night series for Fox several years ago, may finally see life as a feature film. [For one of Kopp's early sketches, see ANIMATO! #26.) If it gets off the ground, it will take his career a direction he feels is inevitable: Adult oriented features.
    "Somebody's going to come along at some point and give somebody a whole bunch of money to do a project like Betty and it's going to kick the door open. It's going to do like what happened with the TV animation. There's just going to be an influx of everybody trying to ape or mimic or whatever, but that does matter as long as one gets made."
    "We've got to stop pretending that cartoons are just for kids, and once we get over that kind of prejudice, then a lot more stuff will start to happen."
    One of his pet peeves in the feature arena is a lack of distressing lack of creativity in the use of arguably one of the flexible mediums available. "Disney," he says "stands alone [in feature animation], and God bless 'em. Disney consequently has become an American institution.
    "We don't even call it a 'Disney animated feature' anymore. Before it's even out, they call it a 'Disney animated classic.' It may very well be, but they can afford to spend $50 million and five years on a feature. And there's nothing wrong with that, but don't try to ape that!"
    Bill wants to see the rest of the studios to respond to Disney's success by creating a wide variety of films. He likens this to the 1930's, when the upstart Warner Brothers gang at Termite Terrace countered Disney's Mickey Mouse with the anarchic Looney Tunes gang. However, he laments that currently, "Everybody still thinks that animation has to be a fairy tale, and you have to have a magic orb that the princess has to find and get a hold of .. And at the end, everybody’s happy."
"It's going to take a long time to retrain the industry, because everybody says they want to make something wild and crazy, but they get very cold feet when it comes to plopping $20 or $25 million dollars down.
    "Jim Carrey is a cartoon. And if he can make $200 million, then why not make [a cartoon comedy] ... Animation, still, friends, is an 'arcane' art form and people are scared of it because they don't understand it. And they think that the people who do are a bunch of insane maniacs who can't hold it together, which is totally false!
    "I made 39 cartoons last year, and I wrote every one of those scripts. Savage [Steve Holland, Kopp's friend and frequent collaborator] has been writing Eek for the last two years. We're very capable individuals. I made six hours of cartoons last year. I think I can pull off 70 minutes."
    As we talk about feature animation, the conversation eventually turns to Don Bluth, which prompts Kopp to relate a tale from his days as a student at Cal Arts. "I remember when [Bluth] broke from Disney and we all went to the New Art to hear him talk. We all expected to hear this great revelation about how he was going to lead us into the future. And we were all so hungry. We were just kids. I was like 20. And all he talked about was going back in time to Snow White.
    "And that's when the schism happened. And it happened at Cal Arts. There was a shaft that broke between the character animators who just wanted to get a job at Disney and guys like me in the film graphics area that wanted to make real films. And we were never the same again after that second year at CalArts when we heard that. There were the 'Disney Guys' and then there was us."
    And yet, he gladly gives the Disney feature department their due. "[Many recent animated features] have no soul. Disney has a soul to draw on. They have a history. . Their film vocabulary is very, very sophisticated."
And while he bides his time waiting to see what happens to Shnookums and Meat and Betty of the jungle, "The other thing that's on my mind these days is getting back together with Savage."
    "Savage is the whole reason I got into animation. He was this guy I met at school-I was a painter and he was an animator. He was the guy who turned me on to the world of animation. 'Hey, you don't have to draw like Bob Clampett to make a good cartoon... Here, look!' There was this whole world of offbeat weirdness that could be made into [cartoons]."
Although Kopp left Savage Studios to work for Disney, the two remain as close as ever, and both miss the unique collaborative relationship they've fostered over the years.
    "It's obviously some penance that I owe that I keep getting sucked into Savage Steve Holland Hell," he quips, tongue definitely in cheek. "I must owe something back to the universe if I keep getting sucked back into it all the time. I really don't mind, though. " [Holland, for his part, jokingly tells the curious that he still sees Kopp all the time, "unfortunately" before inevitably singing his pal's praises. Holland will be best man at Kopp's December wedding.] "I'm longing to get back into cahoots with Savage," he adds, "because going off on my own has shown me that yes, I can do that and I can put a good team together, but I miss the core brilliance that Savage and I had on the first two seasons of Eek together.
    "It's like Abbott and Costello or any great comedy team. There's no substitute for it. And I don't want to put any of the people that I've worked with on Shnookums and Meat. down. I'm not doing that. That was great, but I miss working with Savage."
    He notes the differences in their writing styles as one of their strengths as a team. "Eek is much more cerebral, much more social commentary, where Shnookums and Meat is much more pithy [pun intended], much more dealing with a domestic situation and turning it inside out, going for the physical comedy."
    Kopp has a reasonably modest view of his own talent. While he has proven himself a master of slapstick as writer on Shnookums and Meat and the Roger Rabbit shorts, his resume also includes co-writing chores on the classic Taz-Mania episode, "Mishap in the Mist," in which a female anthropologist studies Taz and his family. It's a masterpiece of verbal gibes.
"The beauty of those first two seasons of Eek was that we were able to have such a beautiful marriage of these themes of comedy, the physical and the cerebral, which is a rare combination. And I think that it's an imperative now that we are both missing that aspect of each other." He points out that the ongoing success of Eek stands as a testament to Savage's considerable talent as a comedy writer.
    Although he considers his Shnookums and Meat partner Jeff DeGrandis "a brilliant cartoon director," Kopp says that it was a compartmentalized partnership, with Kopp writing and DeGrandis directing.
    "Savage is the only one I can write with. . . We write together twice as fast as any human. And we both really miss that." He guesses that they will be working together on a project within the next year.
    Another old school pal that Kopp worked with recently was Pat Ventura, with whom he helped write the Roger Rabbit shorts. Ventura was working on a cartoon called "ShortOrders" for the Cartoon Network's World Premiere Toons series, and he was searching for a voice for its star, luckless waiter Yuckie Duck.
    The two animators met for lunch one day. "We were getting obnoxious-or I guess I was getting obnoxious-and he said, 'Hey, that would be a great voice for my character, Yuckie Duck.' And the next thing you know [feigning embarrassment] I'm Yuckie Duck. I was happy to do it for him." The finished product "Short Orders" has proven popular enough for a sequel, which recently aired on the Cartoon Network.
    Kopp enjoys doing voice work, but he did very little on Shnookums and Meat. "I had such good actors that I was just happy to sit in the room with them and direct their follies."
    Apparently, none of the individual voices were cast before the recording sessions. The script was there, but no character voices. Whoever jumped on it on an improvisational level kind of got the part." Occasionally, Kopp would contribute a voice for one of the smaller parts, most notibly one of the Polite Coyotes that ate safecracker Crusty Rustknuckle in Tex Tinstar.
When asked if he would consider doing some voice work for hire, he jokes that he'd "work for just about anybody. I'm not proud. I mean, anywhere anybody gives me any money at all, I'll go."
    He notes that similarities between the early episodes of Shnookums and Meat and Ren and Stimpy were due to the participation of former Ren and Stimpy staffer Lynn Naylor, who was heavily involved in the first five episodes, which aired as part of the CBS series Marsupilami.
    The look of Shnookums and Meat evolved gradually as the work progressed and it developed what Kopp calls "a life of its own.. The temperwnent of Shnookums and Meat changed. Not by virtue of trying to go away from Ren and Stimpy, or trying to be Ren and Stimpy."
    "I love Ren and Stimpy," he adds. "I love what it's done for the industry. But my humor is different and I just think it branched out from this difference."
    All three of the show's segments changed over the course of the season, but the part that changed the most radically is Pith Possum. Originally a spoof of the Superman cartoons of the Fleischer Studios, the early episodes followed that format,"where you had Clark and Lois, and the crime happens, then Clark changes into Superman, and this and that...
    "By episode 4, we were pretty much away from that permanently." He says that there were so many gags and so much character stuff between Pith and the other characters that there just wasn't time to devote to Pith's mousy alter ego, Peter Possum.
    "Peter Possum just petered out," quips Kopp. [Ouch!) "He became more of a Batman character, which is more of what he was making fun of in the first place. Batman used to be Bruce Wayne and you kinda sorta see that sometimes, but the meat of the matter is when he's Batman."
    One Pith Possum gag turned out to be a nightmare for Kopp and DeGrandis. The titles, which all feature some variant of the word "dark." had nothing to do with the stories.
    "You don't know what's going on!" He laughs. "You'd get to post production and somebody would ask, 'On The Dark Quest of the Dark Night of Darkness, do you want the bass up on the music?' 'What show was that? There's no way to tell." They took to carrying around sheets with the titles and synopses in order to keep the episodes straightl
Kopp enjoys watching the adventures of another animated superhero, The Tick. "It's a great stab at superheroes. It's like what I try to do with Pith, but Pith's more over the top comical. I like the fact that his supervillains stay at a Motel 6 and stuff. And I really think that it's just one of the funniest shows on the air."
    Although he was a few hours from seeing a completed episode at the time of this interview, he also admires the production design of MTV’s The Maxx. "If the show's as good as the drawings look, Man! It just looks cool."
He is also partial another MTV superbeing, Aeon Flux, which was created by yet another of his Cal Arts classmates-Apparently they had one amazing graduating class that year-Peter Chung.
    "Peter needs to be making features ... He can draw so good it makes you cry," he says. He admits, though to being a little disappointed that future Aeon Flux episodes will be done in English, rather than the garbled fictional language that's been used to date.
    When half-jokingly asked if he'd consider doing a voice for Aeon Flux, he half-jokingly answers, "I'm sure I could, but it would be better if it was [mumbles briefly in Flux-speak] like it used to be."
    The thought immediately causes him to ponder an Eek the CatlAeon Flux crossover, and he pipes up in his Eek voice, "Jeepers! Hey lady, are you cold? Can I get you a sweater or something?"
    It's that trademark ability to find the bizzare in every situation that makes Bill Kopp stand out from most of the dozens of animators who've been given a shot at stardom during the current boom in television animation.
    And whether he chronicles the adventures of Shnookums and Meat, Betty of the jungle, or some other looney creation, let's hope that he'll be sharing his unique perspective with us for decades to come!