Posted on November 14, 2024

Dragon Tales, 1998-99

When you find a sparkly dragon scale in your new house and hold it up to make a wish, be very, VERY careful what you wish for.

This one’s tough to write about, because it comes with a lot of mixed feelings.

I entered the TV animation business in 1996 because I ultimately wanted to turn my Grease Monkey comics into a series. Instead of getting a deal to do that, I got an offer to work on someone else’s series. From there, I found my way into a whole new career that paid WAY better than comic books. So even though I never got to run my own show, I got a whole new life out of it. Not a bad outcome.

In retrospect, it’s a good thing I didn’t get my own show right out of the box because I would have been completely unprepared for it. I didn’t know nearly enough about the craft of animation to make sound decisions, and after my experience at Malibu Comics I had zero appetite for office politics. You need to master both of those things to run a TV series. In 1998, I learned that lesson the hard way.

My employer was Adelaide Productions, a division of Sony that specialized in TV animation. (We just called it Sony Animation.) We were located right next to the Sony lot in Culver City, California, part of the L.A. zone. Our “feeder” was Columbia Pictures, from which most of our projects originated. When I joined up in December ’96, my first show was Extreme Ghostbusters. This was followed by Godzilla in ’98. Jumanji and Men in Black were also ongoing, and our first CG series Starship Troopers was on the horizon.

My productivity and quick learning caught the attention of Exec Producer Richard Raynis, who pulled me in on special projects like opening titles and the Maxine video special. Shortly after I got started on Godzilla, he told my supervising director “I’ve got other plans for Tim” and sat me down in his office to explain. I’d expressed great interest in Starship Troopers (SF space story, right in my wheelhouse), so I thought it was related to that. But it was very much the opposite.

Richard wanted to promote me to a supervising director position on a new series I hadn’t heard about yet: Dragon Tales. It was a coproduction with Sesame Workshop (formerly CTW) for PBS, and it would be a preschool show. My daughter had been through preschool and was now 9 years old, but other than picking out shows for her to watch, I had zero experience in this area. Richard didn’t see that as a negative; he’d noticed how efficiently I approached my work, how organized and forward-thinking I was as an episodic director, and decided I was qualified to take on this project.

It was not going to be a small undertaking. The first season would run for 40 episodes (with two stories each, so 80 scripts) and would take a year and a half to make. That was an unusually long time to be employed on a single series, and completely unheard of today. The balancing act, budget-wise, was for me to be a solo artist for the first five episodes and gradually other crew members would join the effort. My storyboarding efficiency was the key to this plan; I’d demonstrated over and over that I could thumbnail entire episodes on my own, which would then be passed over to other artists for expansion. That “super power” brought real value to the table.

This was very similar to the process that got me a staff job at Malibu Comics a few years earlier. They saw what I could produce on my own and brought me in as the centerpiece of a new department. I ran solo for a while until others were hired on. But this wasn’t Malibu. It was a huge animation studio, at the time the busiest in L.A. Office politics would be inescapable.

I still had an agent at the time, which turned out to be a very good thing, because Sony’s initial financial offer was NO additional money for a LOT of additional responsibility. Since this was going to be my first time as a supervising director, they didn’t see a need to pay me as much as someone who had already done the job. My agent worked over the head of the studio for a while and they finally relented. It wasn’t a huge bump, but it was enough. Taking on the job was going to be a big step forward in my career. If I turned it down, I could have gone back to my comfort zone and continued on other shows, but I probably wouldn’t get an offer like this again. So I said yes.

And that’s where all the trouble started.

Well, okay, it wasn’t all bad. But it sure as hell wasn’t easy.

First and foremost was the upper management situation. I essentially had two bosses: Sony and Sesame Workshop. Sony was represented mainly by Richard Raynis, who I directly reported to. Sesame was represented by two people named Jim Coane and Nina Bamberger. (Side note: I found out many years later that Mr. Wesley Eure had been involved in the development phase. Previously, he played Will Marshall on Land of the Lost, my favorite show as a kid. I sure wish I’d known that at the time.)

There were plenty of other people involved, but Richard, Jim, and Nina were the ones I regularly interacted with. And they didn’t always agree on things. This was the single hardest part of the job. In addition to managing the physical production of storyboards, I had to navigate a constantly shifting minefield to keep both bosses satisfied.

I’d be lying if I said I never stepped on a landmine. After one went off, it felt like a waiting game until I stepped on the next one. I didn’t think I had latitude to complain to Richard about it, so I kept quiet and smoothed things over as best I could. The only thing he told me that offered some comfort was, “They can make you miserable, but only I can fire you.” Gee, thanks a lot. But I never got fired, even when I did something to piss him off.

As the crew assembled around me, I found that I liked them quite a bit. The initial wave of hiring brought in a couple artists who didn’t work out, which was disappointing. I’d hoped to use my position to help some friends get their careers started, but had to relent to pressure from above when they didn’t turn out to be a good fit for the job. The replacement artists were much more experienced and helped to keep us on track.

Another effect of the tight budget (which felt like a bug rather than a feature) was that after I got through the initial five episodes as a solo act, all subsequent storyboards would be done by freelancers. This was cheaper for the studio than having employees, but it added to my burdens. Why? Because it removed my ability to review their work on a daily basis. I’d get to see it at key stages, but I couldn’t correct systemic problems until after they appeared. Especially if the artist was in another state.

This meant that, instead of drawing, most of my job was about making notes. Hundreds of notes. First on a rough storyboard, then on a finished one. Then the finished one would go to my bosses for approval and then came the revisions. We couldn’t pass the revisions back to the freelance artist, because they would be working on the next episode by then, so these notes went to our in-house revision team. Then there were revisions on top of revisions. In this way, 80 individual scripts were slowly, painfully, turned into pictures.

Once in a while I found a way to keep a storyboard entirely in-house. I kept one for myself, since I really liked the script. Other members of the team did a few. Unsurprisingly, those episodes always had the smoothest glide path to the finish line. It demonstrated that the freelancers were the weakest link in the chain. This was actually not their fault. Without daily interaction and a direct view of the process, they were going on guesswork a lot of the time. I did not have the ability to fix this, and every obstacle placed in my way by management felt like sabotage.

As you can imagine, tensions could get pretty high in an environment like that. I thought having a child and living the comic book life had given me a long fuse, but it wasn’t long enough to prevent an occasional firecracker from going off. I was barely on speaking terms with the Line Producer, which made things very difficult. We were supposed to be the mom and dad to the whole crew, but we basically just tolerated each other and there was no way to hide it. She complained about me to management, but I didn’t think it was my place to do the same. Richard actually complimented me on that at one point, citing it as a sign of maturity. That didn’t make it easier. At our worst point, we needed a mediator. There was probably a moment where a single heart-to-heart could have put us on the right path, but neither of us took the initiative. I’ll never stop regretting that.

I had to fill my space with things I liked to keep reminding myself there was more to life than Dragon Land.

Was there an upside to all this? Of course.

There were some excellent human beings on the crew. They recognized what a struggle it was and went the extra mile to help me get through the workload, even on days when I wasn’t their favorite boss. And despite losing people in the first stage, I made new friends later on. Two artists in particular, Jeff Allen and Mike Borkowski, asked me to speak on their behalf when their show was winding down and they didn’t have another one lined up. When I sent a glowing review of their work up to management they were transferred over to me without a second thought. That was a true victory for all three of us, and it’s still paying off today. I’ve worked with them both on one show after another, and we’ll be friends to the ends.

Mike and Jeff at “Dragon Tales” day in the Sony lot. My daughter and I joined them at right.

When we started to get animation back from our Korean studios, things turned in a whole new direction. Storyboarding was still underway, but now I had a new task: to review footage and request retakes, the first step into post production. I’d been exposed to the post process on Extreme Ghostbusters, so I had some idea of what was coming, but the sheer volume of it was staggering.

Viewing finished footage can simultaneously be the best and worst part of this entire experience. Seeing on screen what you previously saw in your head is pure magic. Learning that you successfully communicated your goals to someone on the other side of the world gives you the strength of Ten Grinches Plus Two. But in the very next shot, you might learn that you failed to do that. Maybe you missed some critical nugget of information that caused them to get it wrong. Sometimes it’s their fault and sometimes it’s yours. If they screwed up, it’s their responsibility to fix it. If you screwed up, it’s time to negotiate.

And remember, I still had two bosses looking over my shoulder with their own ideas (sometimes competing) of how a finished scene should look. The revision process was by no means over when a storyboard shipped out. The critical point is that the more retakes you ask for, the more it slows down the animators. That ripple effect can very easily derail the entire train and break the budget. There were times when I was forced to let some episodes limp away so that I could save the lives of others. Never a good feeling. It’s one reason we don’t like to rewatch the TV shows we made years ago. It just reminds us of the problems we couldn’t fix.

Various members of the production crew at “Dragon Tales” day (sound staff in the center)

Any more upsides here? Yep.

The next part of post production was picture editing. This brings us to 1999 and the exciting new world of Avid software. Nobody had to cut and slice film any more. It was all digital and could be a lot of fun on a good day. Thanks to the super cool editor I was paired with (a rock musician named Mark), I learned a helluva lot about how to save a show from disaster. The technology was full of tricks and tools that came to our rescue. The state of computing power meant we still had to sit through a lot of progress bars, but simple retakes could be entirely eliminated in many cases. Repeating frames, layering frames, or deleting a wonky frame went a long way to solving problems. Reusing shots from other episodes could fill time where it was needed. This helped me to appreciate how important it was for animators to draw on model, especially since we were getting animation from two different studios.

Then came the last phase, post-production sound editing. This took me out of our little shop entirely. For a few months, I could bicycle over to the Sony lot and spend half my day in a huge, luxurious screening room with an audio team putting the sound together. This had been set up behind the scenes without my involvement; sound design and music composing had been managed by Richard Raynis, so these elements were already in place when I showed up. Rather than dealing with endless revisions, now my job was to listen and advise, a process I thoroughly enjoyed. Every member of Sony’s audio team was a pleasure to work with and I looked forward to every session. It was like I’d steered a ship over a stormy ocean to end up in an island paradise where everyone’s job was to take care of me. How could I not fall in love with it?

My gift to the sound crew after production wrapped.

I even found that I had a knack for music placement. There was more than one moment where the editors were struggling to get a music track to cooperate with the picture and I’d suggest shifting it one way or another by a few seconds and it would work even better than the composer intended. It felt like a magic trick every time.

The downside of going into post production, though, is that after you ship out the last storyboard you have to say goodbye to all the people who fought alongside you to get them done. That’s the day they lose their jobs. If they’re lucky, they have other jobs waiting for them. But I can clearly remember that when the prospect of Dragon Tales season 2 came up, I was the only one who didn’t raise my hand in favor of it.

In the end, we got all 40 episodes in the can. There was a season 2, and then a season 3, but I was not involved. Despite making it all the way to the end without being fired, I was not everyone’s first choice to continue. And that was actually okay with me. After a year and a half, I had all the Dragon Tales I could take.

How do you get to Radio City Music Hall? First, rent a tux.

As I mentioned earlier, Dragon Tales kept me from working on the Starship Troopers TV series, but the next one on the calendar was Heavy Gear (quite a change). I contributed a few storyboards to Dragon Tales season 2 as a freelancer, but for me, the last word on the show came in May 2001. Believe it or not, season 1 was nominated for a Daytime Emmy and I was flown out to join the party in my first visit to New York City. That’s where I finally got to meet the actual creator of the show, a delightful older gent named Ron Rodecker. Apparently, he was discovered in a Southern California art fair, where his paintings of dragons lit the spark that brought us all to this point.

The festivities were held at Radio City Music Hall, and for the first time in my life I got to walk the red carpet (in the only tuxedo that has ever touched my body). This was the Daytime Emmys award show, so kidvid was barely on the meter. The real draw was the army of soap opera stars (excuse me, “daytime drama stars”) who commanded the majority of the attention. I had no idea who any of them were, while just a few yards away stood a crowd of screaming fans who would have traded places with me for any amount of cash I cared to name. At a banquet before the event, I was seated with a whole bunch of stars from Passions, a show I’d never heard of, so to me they were just a bunch of workin’ stiffs who fretted over what they were being fed and how soon they could go burn it off in a gym.

Left: my view from the red carpet. Right: the belly of the beast.

Dragon Tales didn’t take the Emmy (it went to Clifford the Big Red Dog), but that was no biggie. Once the pressure was off, I got to watch a parade of nominees for daily dramas that were so similar to each other in look and performance I couldn’t begin to tell them apart. It ran pretty much like the Academy Awards with clips from various shows that utterly blurred together. Even the people who made the stuff were laughing.

Hands down, the best part of that trip was getting to see the sights of New York in springtime. This was May 2001. Four months later, New York would be forever changed. I was very lucky to see it when I did.

Today, I am astonished with how far Dragon Tales has traveled in the time since my participation ended. The name always surprises me when it comes up. You could have pushed me over with a marshmallow when it got referenced on an episode of Upload, including a video clip that I myself supervised. It’s been well over 20 years since I directed season 1, time enough for the show to make a generational impact, and it sure did.

I remember it with mixed feelings because of the enormous effort and personal drama I had to endure while making it. But all of that was checked at the door when the series itself went out into the world to find its audience. It appears to have found more viewers than any other series I’ve worked on, before or since.

Without exception, every reaction I’ve ever seen has been positive. It seems to have made some lives better. It’s impossible for my feelings to be mixed about that.

Dragon Tales season 1 debuted September 6, 1999 and ran on PBS for 40 episodes. Seasons 2 & 3 brought the total up to 94, concluding in April 2005. There were books, music albums, four video games, a live stage show, and at least 15 DVDs, each containing 5 stories (the equivalent of 2.5 episodes).

First episode on Youtube

Season 1 and season 3 episodes on Youtube (numbers are correct, titles are not)

Wikipedia page

Wikipedia episode list

Unique episodes

The second half of Episode 6, titled The fury is out on this one caught our eye because it was done as a tryout by a studio in Korea. They went all out to give the animation some extra energy, and we on the crew thought it was the best looking show of the season. (Management wasn’t wild about it, though.) See it on Youtube here (at 12:45).

The episode I chose to storyboard myself was titled Staying within the lines. See it on Youtube here (at 12:45).