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What a Cartoon!
File:WhatACartoonTitle.jpg The What a Cartoon! Show logo
Created by	Fred Seibert
Starring	Various voice actors
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	63 (21 shows)
Production
Running time	Approx 0.30 (0.07 per segment)
Original release
Network	Cartoon Network
Release	February 20, 1995 – June 13, 1997

World Premiere Toons (later known as What a Cartoon! Show, now known as The Cartoon Cartoon Show), was the mid-1990s animation showcase that appeared on the Cartoon Network. It served as the launching point for several original cartoons including Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, The Powerpuff Girls, Ed, Edd n Eddy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Mike, Lu and Og. The Big Cartoon DataBase cites What a Cartoon!/World Premiere Toons as a "venture combining classic 1940s production methods with the originality, enthusiasm and comedy of the 1990s." What a Cartoon now airs on Boomerang.

World Premiere Toons was an animation project conceived and produced by Fred Seibert, the original creative director of MTV and Nickelodeon who served as the president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc., prior to founding Frederator Studios. Its mission was to return creative power to animators and artists, by recreating the atmospheres that spawned the great cartoon characters of the mid-20th century. Each of 48 short cartoons mirrored the structure of a theatrical cartoon, with each film being based on an original storyboard drawn and written by its artist/creator.

Each of the show creators worked with the internal Hanna-Barbera "Creative Corps" Art Director Jesse Stagg and designer Kelly Wheeler to craft a series of high quality, limited edition, fluorescent art posters. The Corps launched a prolonged Guerrilla mailing campaign, targeting animation heavyweights and critics leading up to the launch of 'World Premiere Toons. The first poster campaign of its kind introduced the world to the groundbreaking new stable of characters.

The first World Premiere Toon to be broadcast in its entirety was The Powerpuff Girls' Meat Fuzzy Lumkins, which made its world premiere on February 20, 1995 during a television special called the World Premiere Toon-In (termed "President's Day Nightmare" by its producers, Williams Street). The special was hosted by Space Ghost and the cast of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and featured comic interviews and a mock contest with the creators of the various cartoons. The Toon-In was simulcast on Cartoon Network, TBS Superstation, and TNT. The special, without the Powerpuff Girls cartoon or any of the clips from the other WPT cartoons featured in the special, was later included in the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast Volume 3 DVD. The version with the other WPT cartoons was later included in the Powerpuff Girls Season 1 DVD, with Meat Fuzzy Lumkins included as a separate special feature. Most of the WAC shorts that were voted into shows had more than 1 short. In fact, Cow & Chicken and Courage The Cowardly Dog were the only exceptions. Shake & Flick (a WAC short set in Rome about a conceited poodle and a ferocious flea) almost got voted into a series.

There were also a large number of animated shorts created by several cartoonists such as:Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter's Laboratory (4 cartoon shorts) and Dial M for Monkey), David Feiss (No Smoking, which introduced the siblings Cow and Chicken), Van Partible (Johnny Bravo (2 cartoon shorts) and Jungle Boy), Craig McCracken (Meat Fuzzy Lumkins, which introduced The Powerpuff Girls, and Crime 101), Butch Hartman (who did a number of one-shot shorts, including Pfish and Chip and Gramps), Seth MacFarlane (Larry and Steve, which were prototypes of Peter Griffin and Brian of Family Guy), John R. Dilworth (whose Oscar-nominated Chicken From Outer Space introduced Courage the Cowardly Dog), Zac Moncrief ("Godfrey and Zeek"), and countless others. Also included were works from veterans like William Hanna (Wind-Up Wolf and Hard Luck Duck), Joseph Barbera (shorts featuring The Flintstones' Dino), and Ralph Bakshi (Malcolm and Melvin).

The What a Cartoon! experiment introduced many of today's top animation talent and was repeated several times. A similar program, also created by Fred Seibert, was introduced on Nickelodeon in 1998, titled Oh Yeah! Cartoons.

The WAC shorts always ended with clips of what happened in the cartoon squeezed in with the credits and sometimes the cartoon's full title would show up along with the clips above the credits.

Trivia

• A WAC short entitled Strange Things was computer animated, making it the only WAC short that didnt use the traditional 2 dimensional animation.
• Cartoon Network signed on for a 2nd season.
• Cartoon Network's What a Cartoon! project, which was assembled into a half-hour series, The What a Cartoon! Show (later re-named The Cartoon Cartoon Show), featured over 52 new seven-minute cartoons, starring 42 new characters.
• "Mina and the Count" shorts were also featured on the Seibert-produced Oh Yeah! Cartoons on Nickelodeon, making it the only cartoon to be featured on both shows.
• In the short "Buy One, Get One Free", Top Cat can be seen mingling in the party.
• The name of the WAC short The Ignoramooses is a mix of the insult "Ignoramus" and "Moose".
• In the WAC short Gramps, the aliens can be seen with masks of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble from The Flintstones.

Similar shows

• Oh Yeah! Cartoons (Nickelodeon)

External links

• What-A-Cartoon! at IMDb
• What a Cartoon! at TV.com
• What a Cartoon! at Frederator

• Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network Studios series and characters
• Shows on Cartoon Cartoons
• Animation anthology series
• 1990s American television series
• 1995 television program debuts
• 1997 television program series endings