jean maccurdy

And that’s a wrap!

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ Leave a comment

I think everybody always pictured us having some big watch party and celebration when the show finally aired, but in the end it wound up being kind of anticlimactic.

Back when the rough cut had arrived in September, the note with it said we’d hear from them about the final air date. We were expecting a phone call, but instead Mom opened the newspaper one day in October and saw an article with a picture of us as cartoon characters, giving the air date as November 18. Apparently they’d decided to release it to the AP without telling us.

The next surprise happened during the interview blitz before the premiere. CNN came to shoot a story on us, and they’d already gotten a copy of the final episode and wanted to film us watching it for the first time. (Not sure if they knew we’d already seen the rough cut.) After having to get word about the air date secondhand, I was a little irritated that they’d wound up with a copy of it before we did. So the three of us ended up seeing the finished product on November 13, and it didn’t get much space in my journal:

Anyway, CNN did come today. Nothing really fabulous happened, nothing worth mentioning. Except that we saw the final version of the cartoon.

Besides mentioning the different dialogue (at that point, it was just Sneezer’s line that had changed), there was nothing else said.

Monday, November 18, 1991

Well, it’s over. The cartoon has aired.

They changed another line for the worse, in the Karl Malden scene, from “Hey! That guy ripped us off!” to “Hey! That guy’s nose is huge!” In the words of Jean MacCurdy (who called a few moments ago to see how we liked it), “Tom [Ruegger] and Sheri [Stoner] decided to get witty at the last moment.” (To this I replied, “Comedy in the wrong hands really is a dangerous weapon.”)

In the end, after having TV producers and hosts and camera crews in our house countless times over the previous months, it was just my family members gathered to watch the show, with others calling afterwards to offer congratulations. Looking back on it now, I think truthfully we were all kind of tired by this point. There would be one more TV interview in December, for a kids’ news show called Not Just News, but since we were never told when our segment would air, Amy was the only one who happened to catch it, and I found that by then, it really didn’t matter to me whether I ever saw it or not. (I just noticed that there are apparently a few episodes of it floating around the Internet, so feel free to investigate if you like.)

Well, I guess what you’re wondering now: what’s going to happen next. I have only one answer: I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

It had been a wild ride, and now we were moving on, to the rest of high school and whatever lay beyond for us. And as tired and somewhat cynical as Fourteen had become, she still had to admit at the close…

Anything’s possible.

The final countdown (November 15-16, 1991)

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ 1 Comment

With the episode fast approaching its air date, publicity ramped up again. In the week leading up to the show’s premiere, I did so many phone interviews for local and regional news outlets that I sometimes lost track of which place they were even for—my journal mentions things like “did an interview for a radio station” or “some newspaper in Fredericksburg” or “that Rob guy never called back.” If I were doing all that now, I’d be exhausted and overwhelmed, but as far as I can tell, Fourteen took it all in stride—world history homework, phone interview, English paper, phone interview. No big deal.

Our last travel opportunity took us to familiar territory: Washington, D.C., where we’d had numerous field trips through the years. We went to a studio there to do satellite interviews, one after the other, some live and some recorded. Not being able to see who we were talking to, and yet knowing we were on camera, took a little getting used to, and of course we had a few minor audio glitches (getting our voices echoed back to us in the earpiece, or when we couldn’t hear the reporter or they couldn’t hear us). But as Fourteen noted, “by and large it went pretty well,” and we also had time to do some shopping and sightseeing.

The next day we were all up early again for another event, though this one was much less demanding: The three of us and our families had been invited to the grand opening of the Warner Bros. Studio Store at the Fair Oaks mall in Fairfax, Virginia.

Yeah, we weren’t turning down a trip to a mall.

A (blurry) snapshot from the Studio Store opening in Fairfax, Virginia.

We were actually supposed to see Jean MacCurdy there, something I’d forgotten about until I re-read my journals, but in the end she had to cancel because she had a lunch date with Barbara Bush (something to do with the then-First Lady’s literacy campaign).

The opening was a lot of fun. I’d been looking forward to it ever since I’d seen a news segment about the opening of the one in L.A., though at that time I hadn’t thought there’d ever be one so close to home.

They had a few tables set up, with Yosemite Sam’s Ranch House coffee, orange juice, cookies in the shape of the Looney Tunes, and even white chocolate in the shape of Bugs Bunny’s head (which, by the by, cost $6 in the store).

So we made off with as many as we could without being too obvious. Those things were heavy.

Polaroid of me with the Buster and Babs costume characters at the opening.

Apparently I also signed two autographs while we were there, on the tags of the Babs plushes that were in our gift bags. (I always sort of wonder what happened to the autographs I signed back then. Did people actually keep them? Have they run across them now in a box in their basement somewhere and gone “Who the heck was that, anyway?” and tossed them? Anyway…)

It all made for a busy Friday and Saturday. We had Sunday to rest and for me to catch up on my journal, and then Monday would bring the culmination:

Tomorrow the episode airs. Almost a year’s worth of work (including our work on the original story), and it all comes down to about 22 minutes of animation at 4:30 tomorrow afternoon.

Well, see ya there!

The Grand Tour (Monday, January 21, 1991 – Part Two)

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ Leave a comment

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Me, Sarah, Tiny Toons executive producer Jean MacCurdy, and Amy.

After we left Amblin, it was time to go to the Warner Bros. studio lot. After a tour, we had lunch at the commissary, then called the Blue Room (where we noted that Dixie Carter was eating across the room from us), and then stopped in for souvenirs at the company store. Not that the three of us needed much in the way of souvenirs, since our publicist, Valerie, had just handed us each a Bugs Bunny tote bag full of stickers, stationery (including Tiny Toons Valentines), figurines, a hat, a beach towel, and fifty of those Tiny Toons enamel pins to give out at school. (As Thirteen noted, “I think WB doesn’t know how to do anything except make movies and cartoons and give people stuff.”)

After we finished our shopping, we continued with the tour of the backlot. We saw where they record the music for Tiny Toons and Dallas. (It was also where the music for all the WB cartoons was recorded.)

We saw the street from The Flash, and got to meet John Wesley Shipp. We also saw the Mogwai store from Gremlins 2, as well as streets from Dick Tracy and the sets of Life Goes On.

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Meeting John Wesley Shipp.

For some reason, out of the entire trip I have the least memory of our time touring the backlot. I can’t even remember now whether we were walking around all the time (probably) or in the bus, or what. I’m guessing it just got overshadowed in my mind by the story meeting that morning and then the afternoon at Warner Bros. Animation, which was obviously of more interest for a teenager now wanting to be an animator.

There, we saw more of the people from the story meeting — like Sheri Stoner, who modeled Ariel in The Little Mermaid. (She was really cool.) Plus, we saw the background designers (and some of the backgrounds from certain episodes), the cel painters, and of course, some of the animators.

Throughout the studio, we saw all these pencils stuck in the ceiling. Frustrated animators. Amy said she could picture me doing that.

We even got to meet Charlie Adler, the voice of Buster. We went around this corner and all of a sudden we hear, “Hi, Toonsters!” We all expected to see a blue rabbit standing in front of us, but instead we see this guy.

Thirteen wasn’t quite able to capture that sense of disconnect (“this guy”?), but you have to realize that this was pre-Internet, of course, and back then you just didn’t have as much opportunity to know what a character’s voice actor looked like, unless they already happened to be a celebrity. So there really was this odd looking-glass feeling about it that took a few seconds to reconcile.

When told that Buster was supposed to have a fear of flying, Charlie commented, “That’s not far from the truth.” Then, as Buster, “I burrow underground.”

We also hung out in Jean’s office for a while, watching two Tiny Toons music videos from an upcoming episode (more on that in a later post) and a promotional video for The Elmyra Show — which made Amy happy, since Elmyra was one of her favorite characters.

Valerie and Jean walked us out to our bus then. They hugged us and said goodbye. And I can still remember Valerie’s parting words: “You’ll be back.”

Then we went back to the hotel for our last night in Los Angeles.

We had to get up at 4:30 the next morning to get to the airport, which is a time of day that technically does not exist at age thirteen, never mind that we were all exhausted by that point.

All of us met sleepily in the lobby of the hotel, then climbed into the bus. Tim turned on the radio to try and wake us up, but we would have fallen asleep were it not for the astonishing fact that Tim took us directly to the airport without getting us lost.

Our trip home was uneventful, and we knew we had more interviews and events to look forward to for months — most notably, getting our payment, seeing the 20/20 segment, and of course, the airing of the episode itself.

Looking back on it now, that trip to L.A. loomed so large in my memory for so many years, I would have assumed it had been a week long at least, but the entire trip lasted just from Friday to Tuesday — basically a long weekend. Not until my engagement and wedding would I have that feeling again of weeks’ worth of life-changing memories packed into such short spans of days.

And in nearly every journal entry for months, Thirteen was dreaming of, longing for, and grasping at any shred of hope of, going back.

How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen L.A.?

From Hollywood to Waynesboro

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ Leave a comment

A couple weeks or so had gone by when Jean called again — and this time asked to talk to Mom.

They had decided to use the material we sent. In other words, they were making our story into a cartoon. That alone was enough to get us excited.

But then they said that they were flying into Washington for some sort of other business. And that they would then fly from Washington to Charlottesville and then drive to Waynesboro — our small hometown. (And when I say small, I mean small.) They said that they would be coming next Thursday, which was December 13th.

We were stunned. But the bigger surprises were yet to come.

Everyone — which in this case meant the three of us, our moms, Jean MacCurdy, and Barbara Brogliatti (senior vice president for publicity and promotion) — gathered at my house for the visit. They’d brought a few gifts for us — character plushes, buttons, figurines, things like that — which had been in the suitcase that had not gotten lost. (As for the one with all their clothes in it, well, I’m assuming it caught up with them eventually.) Amid coffee and probably ham biscuits and pizza rolls (our go-to snack), Jean made the announcement.

They said that we would go on an airplane (all expenses paid, of course) to L.A. and then literally watch the story be made into a cartoon. She also briefly mentioned that there would be a press conference and a story meeting with Steven Spielberg. Steven, she said, was filming a movie in February, so he wanted to get all of this over before then.

The movie was Hook. And his side of it probably was pretty much over by then, but ours would go on for quite a while longer.

The followup letter provided the details. (It strikes me now how short and general that fine print is. Somehow I doubt it would be so simple today.)

I started my journal five days before we left on what I would come to mentally categorize as “the L.A. trip.” By that point, we had already done several interviews for both print and TV, so my journal has something of the feeling of a story I’ve told many times before. What surprises me now is that there’s very little in the way of emotional content in its pages; it feels as if it were written more for public consumption than as a private diary. Because of that, I don’t have much of a historical reference for how I really felt at this point. Were all this happening to Forty, she’d likely be more anxious than excited, but I don’t remember Thirteen being particularly nervous about any of it. The intensity may have simply faded out of the memories with time, but from what I can recall, from start to finish it just felt…

Well, like an adventure.

Up next: In the spotlight

 

Out of the blue

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ 1 Comment

Our package had made it to the desk of Jean MacCurdy, and since we never bothered to include a phone number on our letter, she had to hunt for one. Information wasn’t a great deal of help at first — there were a lot of Carters in our area — but she asked if there was a number for Renee Carter, and there was. This was because my parents, in their wisdom of having already raised two teenagers, had long since gotten the kids their own phone line so we weren’t constantly tying up the main one.

It’s a Friday night. Sarah was having a surprise slumber party for her birthday… Since I was sick, I didn’t go to the slumber party. And it was a good thing I didn’t. Because that night at about 8 PM, I got a call from Jean MacCurdy…

(Full disclosure: I may or may not have actually been sick, as I did have a history of using that sort of excuse to get out of slumber parties or other kinds of parties. The life of a teenage introvert often involves such ethical dilemmas.)

She said that our story had been sent to her, and that they liked it and that Steve — yes, Steve — had been thrilled with it. Then she said that they were planning future episodes. And then she said that they might be calling me back.

Well, Sarah and everybody else were at that slumber party. So I tried to call Sarah, but everybody wasn’t there yet.

So I hung up and literally paced my room.

I don’t remember much of that first conversation, though in the 20/20 interview, Jean playfully recounted my responses as an flat, almost underwhelmed “Yeah…?” When you tell a story again and again, as we had to when answering interview questions over and over, in time the story can replace the memory. (Remember, even this journal entry was written a couple months after that first call had happened.)

Sarah said that I was talking so fast, she could hardly understand me. But I got my message across.

“I don’t believe it!” she said.

Meanwhile, Amy and the others didn’t know what the heck was going on. Amy kept saying “What? What?” Finally Sarah turned around and told everybody what was going on. I could hear Amy screech in the background.

Thing was, we had never even told our parents what it was we sent in. So it was kind of fun, filling our parents in on what we had done. (Good thing we hadn’t robbed a bank, huh?)

Honestly, we weren’t really expecting another call. A week or so later, I got a little padded envelope in the mail with some Tiny Toons postcards and pins, plus a followup letter:

Letter from Jean

postcard and pin

postcard backAt that point, we figured that was it. We were all ecstatic that, yes, they had received it, and yes, they had read it, and yes, they had liked it. That was enough for us to feel awesome about the whole thing. Day by day the excitement died down, and we went on with our regular eighth-grade lives.

Then my phone rang again.

Up next: From Hollywood to Waynesboro

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

~ Renee Carter Hall ~ Leave a comment

(We’re back! New posts will be scheduled for the 10th and 25th of the month, with occasional bonuses in between. To make sure you don’t miss anything, you can subscribe using the “Follow Blog via Email” widget in the right sidebar of the website, or follow our Twitter account for notifications of new posts. As a reminder, or for those just joining us, the quotes in these posts are taken from the journal I kept in 1991 at age 13.)

 

Since other kids at school kept reading this stack of notebook paper and saying “You should send that somewhere,” or “You should send that to Spielberg,” we finally figured hey, why not, if we can find somewhere to send it…

Amy ended up finding the address for the Fox network in a magazine. It was one of those teen magazines where it gives celebrity addresses. I think it was there if you wanted to write to somebody on that show “21 Jump Street.”

I have a feeling that “somebody” was probably Johnny Depp. (Hey, Thirteen was pretty lousy at being a typical 13-year-old.) Therefore, let it be known that were it not for Johnny Depp, “Buster and Babs Go Hawaiian” might never have become an episode. Um… sort of.

Of course, we had no clue that Tiny Toons was a syndicated show (at that time, at least; it later went to Fox exclusively). The only thing we could think of was to send it in care of the Fox network where we watched the show, so that’s what we did.

By this time, it cost almost three dollars to mail it.

*waxes nostalgic about 1991 postage rates*

We never made another copy of it. We were going to, but Xeroxing it would’ve cost too much change, and we didn’t want to take the time to make another handwritten copy. We just figured that if it got lost in the mail, then it did. So we didn’t worry about it.

(We didn’t number the pages, either, so a few of them were missing when WB graciously sent us a copy.)

In a way, the story did end up getting lost in the mail — or at least, it took a winding path to its intended destination.

Our story was sent to Fox in Burbank. Jean [MacCurdy, executive producer] said that, under usual circumstances, it never would have gotten past Fox. It would have been stamped “Return to Sender” and sent back.

I think you’ve caught on by now that nothing about the next several months is going to involve “usual circumstances.” Bear in mind that sending an unsolicited story or script to a television show sets off a whole host of alarms from a legal standpoint — for example, if they were to inadvertently do a similar script in the future, we might claim they stole our story and sue — so nothing’s supposed to be opened or read.

However, the people at Fox opened the envelope. They took our story (and the letter that we enclosed) and put it in one of their envelopes. Then they sent it on to Steven Spielberg. Steven’s secretary sent it on ahead to Warner Bros. Jean said that the secretary probably figured if it got this far, it must be okay. She said that it was basically sent to people who didn’t really know what they were doing.

*polite cough* Which is not, of course, to imply that Steven Spielberg’s secretary was incompetent…

This was all told to us second- and third-hand and maybe some other hands besides, so it’s possible the timeline isn’t 100% accurate. The point, though, is that our package looked legit when it got where it was going, which eventually was the desk of Jean MacCurdy, the executive producer of Tiny Toons and, at that time, president of Warner Bros. Animation.

And she picked up the phone…

Up next: Out of the blue