So when I went back with MTV Networks I was a great advocate and proponent of using television production techniques, which Disney had brainwashed the critics and studios into believing was a low-class method that could never succeed in movies.

I was a great supporter of MTV Networks of putting Beavis & Butt-Head and Rugrats on the screen using those déclassé methods. The results are almost $200 million in box office — just on the first two movies. I continue, in the face of conventional wisdom, that the only animated movies people now like are computer-generated movies —to think that, it’s complete hokum.

JS: It’s the stories, the characters.

FS: And as a partner of mine here says, there are no little budgets, there are just little movies. I really believe that the low budget animated movie is an underestimated opportunity. The Rugrats-type movies cost more than $20 million to produce, but I think there’s still an opportunity at lower budget levels to have big hit movies.

JS: You didn’t work on the Rugrats films.

FS: That’s Klasky Csupo, and God bless them, they’ve done a fantastic job. It’s not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t know how to do what they do.

I’m a cartoon guy not an animation guy. They’re animation people, you know. Right now I’m in development on five family-oriented features at this low budget level. They’ll use television techniques, overseas studios, but stunning talent to do it.

Simultaneously, on the exact flip side, I have another theory: I believe that you have in the generation of people who are the key movie-going people between 15 and 30 years old, a unique opportunity related to animation. We have for the first time an adult generation that has grown up with animation aimed at them in every developmental period of their life. With you and me, by the time we were12, we were out of the animation game, and that was it.

JS: Not me.

FS: Well, you’re the exception. For most of us, it never ever came back, unless you would include The Simpsons. Occasionally people would try: the Fritz the Cats, the Cool Worlds, but let’s be real. What you and I know at our age is that cartoons are for kids. No matter what evidence is in front of us, cartoons are for kids.

It’s very rare for me to go to an animation movie, even for business purposes. If I’m flipping through the newspaper and I see an ad for one, my first thought is, ‘Why would I go see that? That’s not for me.’ My 29-year old partner Emil is exactly the opposite: when he flips through the newspaper and sees an animation movie, he goes, ‘I wonder if it’s any good?’

Animation is not his issue; it’s not a gating issue. What that means to me is that there’s a huge opportunity the movie studios don’t understand. They’re not making movies for that audience. So we’re developing five or six movies that I’m defining as PG-13 or R-rated movies with $1-3 million budgets.

JS: I read something about this recently…

FS: Not from me.

JS: It may have been about Kricfalusi.

FS: John is doing a series of $10 million movies with Ralph Bakshi.

JS: Also PG-13 to R-rated?

FS: Right.

JS: Is there a competition there or just ‘great minds think alike’?

FS: We talked. One of the things I like about Ralph and John is that they’re thinkers. They see the same thing I do, and by the way I wish them all the luck, because if they do it and succeed or I do it and succeed, it’s better for both of us, as it always is in our business.

But I’m developing my features at a much lower budget level than Ralph’s and John’s. My reasoning is the studios don’t want to distribute these movies, they don’t want to make them, so I need to make it as easy as possible for them. Again, commerciality has nothing to do with budget level. I’m interested in making commercial movies so we’re developing commercial movies.