PL: I have some ThunderCats regrets. One is that I didn’t spend time in the recording studio. These guys were so talented and had so much fun. The office was fine – but not a lot of laughter. Here’s Mike Ungar:
ThunderCats was my first real audio job. I was in a band and we had spent plenty of money on demos that were of mediocre quality and I figured, heck I can do just as bad a job and so I set up and owned a small recording studio in NJ. 1979-1987. During that time, I met the studio manager at Howard Schwartz Recording through my brother, who used to commute into the city with him on the bus from NJ. We became friends and one day he told me there was a temp job to finish up a season of a cartoon called Thundercats as a dialogue editor. Would I like a 10 week gig? Once I found out what that meant I took what I thought would be a short break from charging local musicians $35/hr.
40 years later here I am still in the audio pre and post biz all thanks to that moment.
Larry (left) was amazing. A great mentor. Having come out of a ‘real’ studio system, he has a phenomenal wealth of knowledge. The same goes for Michael Laskow, from Howard Schwartz, who had worked at Criterion down in Miami recording Neil Young,CSNY and the like.
I have always had good ears and a good sense of how to put things together and Tony Giovanelli and I really began to click after a while. It was truly so much fun. Such a goof. “Into the ThunderTank!” the dialogue would demand and Tony would pick up a snarf model and hop in a tank and pretend to roar off, then turn to me and say “put in 7 seconds of leader tape.” And so it went. That timing of the action was crucial, an integral part of the “Rankin Bass system,” replacing conventional slugging (and the more modern timing by animatic).
PAC hated that we dictated that timing but Lee insisted on an American sensibility of timing. Initially, she timed all the episodes but after a while she trusted us and rarely gave many notes. It wasn’t simple a question of American sensibility. It was, too, a question of control, budget and schedule.
You’ll read elsewhere that Lee was under immense pressure and going through some unpleasant dramas. Despite that, she always had our backs and was a truly great producer.
Larry has so many outtakes that I think he started a website.
Record sessions were hilarious. I also had the opportunity to meet and work with one of the funniest people I’ve ever met: John Crenshaw. (Right)
He and I shared a special bond over early remembrances of Stan Freberg records our parents had. His sense of humor and mine were always in sync and together we got an opportunity to create some magic.
One of many stories: once characters were edited for an episode, reels had to be spun off for each along with a full guide track. Each were put into their own pre-labeled boxes. We were running late and had to get a stack of them out the door. We left the studio and started celebrating with some extra-curricular fun, happy to have gotten everything out to the office in time to make shipping.
Somehow, suddenly, we realized that when John had brought the shipping boxes in he had flipped them over when he put them down. Meaning that I had put the wrong reels in every box except the middle one. If they went out as was, every character would have gone to the wrong animation house and the production would be out tens of thousands of dollars.
We ran up to the office and since Johnny had been a messenger for them he knew how to get in. We broke into the shipping room, grabbed the reels and went into Lee’s office to spin the tapes off of the wrong reels and put them on the correct ones. Suddenly Lee walked in (and apparently sha had been celebrating too!). When she asked us what we were doing we said, just QC’ing everything before it goes out. She smiled and said “So dedicated” and wandered off. We quickly finished up and went back to the studio knowing we had saved the day and a huge amount of dough. All the more reason to go out and amp up the celebrating.
Another story: one day I was talking to Chuck about royalties. Jules had written the lyrics to the theme: Thunder Thunder Thunder Thunder Cats – Ho! (rinse and repeat). Lorimar was not hip to owning publishing for some reason. R/B kept it all and R/B was basically Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin. At one time, for about 2 years, the show was running somewhere in the world every minute of the day. I asked Chuck what that meant and he mentioned a six figure ASCAP royalty to Jules and Arthur. I asked him if Arthur even knew the words to the theme. Chuck said “absolutely not.” But six figures hit his mailbox every ASCAP quarter!
I have written dozens of songs for Sesame/Nickelodeon/ PBS Kids and many more but I have yet to walk down to my mailbox as Arthur did, look at a $90,000 check and say “Hmm I wonder what this one is for?” Nice work if you can get it.
PL writes: funny ASCAP story and it’s true that (at least in my experience) Arthur knew almost nothing about ThunderCats. It was Jules’ baby. But there’s a darker side to the story. Several people had backend positions in RB, not least Len and Lee. None of them – us – received a cent, except for Masaki who, if I remember, received one check for $10,000. He was like a son to Arthur and no doubt that’s the reason. Those ASCAP payments were part of the RB revenue stream to be shared. No such luck! But, of course, backend positions are closer to taking it up the backend than sharing revenue! Ironically, RB later went to war over revenues they alleged Warner Bros had hidden.
Mike: ThunderCats was the dream job (carrot to the mule) I have been chasing for 35 years!