INTERVIEW: Cartoon Curator Bill from MeTV’s “Toon In With ME”

INTERVIEW: Cartoon Curator Bill from MeTV’s “Toon In With ME”

January 25th, 2021

Jerry Beck

Since January 4th, the cable network (and over-the-air broadcast sub-channel) MeTV has been running a weekday hour of classic cartoons from the MGM, Warner Bros. and Paramount Popeye and Betty Boop libraries. Telecast at 7am and formatted as a vintage kids show, hosted by “cartoon curator” Bill Leff and his puppet companion “Toony, the Tuna”, Toon In With Me has already found instant success with animation fans – as well as MeTV’s core “classic TV” audience.

Jerry Beck: Hi, Bill, nice to talk to you. I’ve been watching you pretty much everyday for the last three weeks.

Bill Leff: Oh, you’re the best, and I have to return the compliment. I am the proud owner of a couple of your books, and they’re the bible. They should be in hotels in a drawer.

JB: (LOL). I don’t even have a comeback for that.

BL: Someone should jump on this because I really think it’d be better for people to just read your books in a hotel. I really do.

JB: So, let’s talk about you. Who are you? What’s you background?

BL: Well, it started out when I was in college, one of my teachers worked at Second City, and I was a huge fan of SCTV and of Saturday Night Live, and always thought, “Wouldn’t that be great to do improv on stage at Second City?” And I did that for a while, and that led to stand up comedy, which I did for 10 years, and that led to radio, which I did for two decades. Just up until last year, had been working at Chicago radio stations – but I’m just a person who’s a fan. I mean, I’m a pop culture fanatic. I grew up just watching tons of television, especially cartoons, loved cartoons, wanted to be a screenwriter, but just through everything else I did, there were just opportunities for standup and for radio that were also so much fun. It all kind of built, and built, and built, and here we are.

JB: That’s pretty cool. Now, how did this particular situation come to you? Did they call you up or… or what? You’ve got the cartoon buff’s dream job, actually.

BL: It happened in such a fun way. I’m a toy fanatic. I collect toys and action figures and MeTV has been doing a show called Collector’s Call for the last couple of years. And they did an episode with my action figure collection. And I kept in touch with everybody who worked on the show. I thought those guys were just so much fun to work with.

They told me about six or seven months ago that they’d been working on a cartoon project for years. That even though the virus is the worst thing that we’ve all encountered, maybe in our lifetimes, in a way, it opened up an opportunity to do a show that was like a throwback show. And they said based on what we know about you and what we’ve seen, we’d love you to just audition, come in and audition. And that led to a callback, which led to a second call back, which led to a read with the other actors that they were considering. The process was daunting, but it ended up that it worked. We all had the same sensibility, That magic we all felt on Saturday mornings as a kid needs to come back. They felt it, and I felt it, and it just synchronized.

Me-TV now has the library of restored Warner Bros. cartoons – which includes the Paramount Popeye cartoons, and MGM’s Tom & Jerry, Tex Avery and Harman-Ising.

JB: This was a question I wrote down, I think, the first week the show was on, but I want to hear the answer. Who is this show is aimed at. And I’m not saying that with any sarcastic way.

BL: No, of course.

JB: It’s just that it’s a kids show, but it’s got some humor that’s a little adult. And then you’ve got commercials for walkers, prescription drugs and second mortgages… you know what I’m saying?

BL: I do, I do, I do. MeTV’s audience, it’s the boomer audience, and the baby boomers, which I guess at this point would be mid-thirties to mid-sixties, and maybe a little beyond. It’s really strange. We want to play to the heart of MeTV audience, but when we come up with ideas for the show and writing, we go, “Oh, kids will love that,” and then 10 seconds later, we’ll go, “Kids will never get that, but their parents are going to love that,” and then five seconds later we go, “Nobody’s going to get that, but it’s really funny, so let’s see what happens.” It’s really an interesting process.

What’s in our mindset whenever we’re writing the show – and doing the show – is baby boomers. We want to pay tribute to those cartoon shows of the past. The ones that used to be on in the mornings, and hopefully after school, too. In Chicago, we got a double dose. We had Ray Rayner in the morning, and Bill Jackson’s cartoon town in the afternoon. We want to pay tribute and parody those shows, but if kids are watching, we hope they love it. If adults are watching, we’d like to think they’ll dig it too. Something for everybody in the family.

JB: You are the front man, the “cartoon curator” of the show, but are there others behind the scenes who screen all the shorts and suggest which ones should air?

BL: Well, basically, there’s really a staff of people. Neal Sabin, who runs MeTV, is a huge, huge fan of animation, just gigantic. The idea came to him about eight years ago to carry on the tradition of these shows. Nobody was doing it, and everybody was asking, “Why isn’t anybody doing it?” It was such a happy part of our childhoods. Somebody needs to pick up the mantle. So, he went and he just bought up libraries from various producers. He’s still working on it. There’s more cartoons coming. He’s got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, but he wants more.

What happens is, is that before we even formulate an episode, the curators watch through the cartoons, they pick themes, they put groups together. We want to have a pretty good variety of the various characters that we have on the show. They always find a Tom and Jerry, or a Daffy Duck, or a Popeye, whatever. And if we can find some sort of a theme, great.

It doesn’t apply to all the shows, some of the shows are theme-free, but it really is a team of people. And we all have free rein to say, “Hey, you know which one I really like that I haven’t seen in a long time? This one, or that one.” If you can find a place to put that in, we’d love it. It really is, it’s the ultimate group effort.

JB: So, you just implied that MeTV is looking for more classic cartoon libraries to add to the line-up you have now. That was actually one of my questions, if MeTV is planning to acquire more cartoon shorts from other studios. So Neal is going for it?

BL: Yeah, he is hell bent, or I guess we should say heck bent, on acquiring as many properties as he can. The library now is incredibly impressive. I don’t know anybody on television that has a wider variety, but he’s just getting started. I don’t know if you collect things…

JB: I certainly do…

BL: You do, so you know there’s that thing in the back of your head which says, “This is ridiculous that I want to obtain this many things,” but you only live once, so let’s go for it. That’s kind of the attitude.

JB: Since you are aware of my books, would you ever consider having an animation historian on the show for a split second to give some background about a cartoon that’s about to come on? One of the things we love about Svengoolie is that he has that little segment where he talks about who the actors are in the movie…

BL: The answer to that is yes.

We’ve done some factoids in a couple of episodes, but we really want to make that a regular fixture. We have so many plans. Like I said, this was first hatched eight years ago and the virus has allowed it to happen. Neal’s thought was if this was ever going to happen, this is the time. We need to escape back to those days. And one of the ideas is exactly what you just said, which is to bring in people, they don’t have to be in studio, we could certainly tape something and beam it in and run it on the screen. But I love that. I think that every added dimension to the knowledge of these cartoons is nothing but a positive.

JB: I love it! By the way, how many segments have you shot?

BL: We’ve shot about 40 shows, 38, 39 shows so far, and we go back into the studio tomorrow. We usually knock out about two a day, and then we shoot some green screen stuff that can be used down the line. The fun part is right now, there’s just three of us enacting all the characters, and it really is a tribute to Kevin and Layla who worked on the show that whatever comes up in the script, between the three of us, somehow we’ve got it covered. It’s really fun to watch.

JB: From the audience point of view – I certainly agree. Thanks Bill and keep up the good work.

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Jerry Beck

Writer, cartoon producer and author of more than 15 books on animation history. A former studio exec with Nickelodeon and Disney; currently on the faculty at both CalArts in Valencia and Woodbury University in Burbank, California.