Well, that’s a Hornswiggle. The big, goofy rhino in the picture above. In fact, that’s the Hornswiggle. In case you haven’t guessed, “Hornswiggle” is a new cartoon short I’ve written for Frederator and Nickelodeon. It will appear on the all-new 4th season of “Oh, Yeah! Cartoons”, which, if I’m guessing correctly, is going to be renamed “Random Cartoons”. Jerry Beck is producing and he’s already done an excellent job of chronicling the production process from the very beginning to the film-in-the-can on the Frederator Blog site. There is also an “official” Hornswiggle site where you can see two very cool “lobby cards” as mocked up by the talented Leslie Cabarga.

But, for all you would-be writers or creators out there, I thought I would fill you in on what we had to go through to get this little film green lit.

Jerry is very fond of the Terrytoons and has been trying to resurrect them for years, either by getting the original cartoons shown or by doing new versions of some of the characters. He put together a pitch with one of the Terry characters and I did a little polish on a script that he had someone else write. There was some interest in the project, but it never quite got off the ground.

When the new season of “Oh, Yeah! Cartoons” was announced, Jerry went back to Fred Seibert, head of Frederator and pitched the idea of doing a Silly Sidney cartoon. Sidney the Elephant was one of the “newer” Terrytoon stars (newer than Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle, anyway), first appearing in 1958. Jerry had a script written, again by someone else. This time, I took that script and did a major rewrite on it. Jerry took this story and pitched it to Fred. They went back and forth on it for a while and finally, Fred suggested that Jerry might want to do an original character that he could own, rather than doing someone else’s character.

Jerry and I met at The Coral Cafe, a Burbank diner hangout for a lot of animation people. The idea was to come up with a new character that we could basically plug into the script that was already written. Jerry was thinking about a rhinocerous, but he wasn’t completely sold on the idea yet. We batted around a bunch of ideas, but ultimately, I thought the rhino was the best bet and Jerry agreed.

I went back to rewrite the script. It wasn’t as simple as just exchanging one name with another for the lead character. Sidney’s friends, Carol the giraffe and Stanley the lion, had to be replaced. Fred also suggested that we keep the number of characters to a minimum, so I combined the two friends into an Oxpecker, or Tick Bird, those little birds that sit on the heads and backs of rhinos and hippos. I named him Birdsdorf Goodman, which was kind of a play on the New York department store Bergdorf-Goodman, although we never use the last name in the cartoon.

There was also a Hunter and his assistant in the original Sidney script who had to be eliminated. It really turned into a second major rewrite.

Where did the name Hornswiggle come from? More on that in my next post.

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