The number of people who've worked on DOUG whether its within Nickelodeon or Disney is staggering.
Some are there for each era, some have worked for both eras for the entirety of all 117 episodes,
And then there are some who are barely within the show for less than a Season or two.
One person who is of the latter is THOMAS WARBURTON.
Better known to us CARTOON NETWORK fans as MR. WARBURTON.
He's known for his famous CODENAME:KIDS NEXT DOOR Cartoon in Early 2000s CARTOON NETWORK.
Yes, I've watched this show before, as a matter of fact, It's a show I watched as a 6 year old back in 2004 when I was under the care of GREGORIA.
Anyway, it's not important for me to talk about this show now since it's not a dedicated KND post but rather it's connected to what I'm about to talk about.
The interesting thing I found out about MR. WARBURTON himself is that he was a layout artist on the first Season of NICKELDEON'S DOUG back in 1991.
Even ROGER is shocked about this Revelation.
And I have a photo of a drawing to back that up:
This is an actual drawing done by WARBURTON himself.
The inaugural 1991 Season of DOUG is a mixed bag for me due to a number of animation errors that pop up as well as the floatier animation of that Season but hey, someone's gotta start somewhere
WARBURTON however left after the first season so he never got to work on the later parts of the show during the rest of the Nickelodeon years or even the Disney years...... sort of.
While he did not work on the DISNEY version, he did work for an Internal Competitor within the network.
DISNEY'S PEPPER-ANN, a cartoon made by Disney's first female Creator SUE ROSE with MR. WARBURTON being the lead designer just because his art style was similar to ROSE's.
The funny thing is that PEPPER-ANN was originally susposed to be a NICKTOON but I guess in the aftermath of the firing of JOHN K. as well as VIACOM freezing DOUG's Budget in February 1994 which led to the SLIME FACTORY selling the series to DISNEY in February 1996,
NICK wanted tighter CREATIVE CONTROL with their newer I.Ps so PEPPER-ANN was instead pitched to DISNEY, they accepted and allowed CREATIVE CONTROL to remain with ROSE, and the rest is history.
One thing that didn't change was MR. WARBURTON preferring to remain in NEW YORK
This was common for people who knew they had to help with production but sometimes the production was in LOS ANGELES but I have a hunch late 90s DISNEY was flexible with WARBURTON to allow him to remain in NYC.
Even though COMPUTERS were advanced for TELECONFERENCING back in the late 90s,
it was still the days of DIAL-UP so nobody was using ZOOM or MICROSOFT TEAMS back in the late 90s so WARBURTON had to FAX his drawings to his employers,
often late at night due to the 4-5 hour time zone difference between NEW YORK & L.A.
I have a hunch WARBURTON must have been annoyed that DOUG, a former Cartoon he worked on in 1991, was with DISNEY when PEPPER-ANN premiered in September 1997......
But the funny thing is, that's Internet Logic where people on SOCIAL MEDIA are expected to discredit VIACOM's infamous 1994 budget freeze for the sake of perfect nostalgia.
But at least the people I talked to in person regarding DOUG have at least acknowledge the events that have happened since February '94.
As for MR. WARBURTON, he's since moved to LOS ANGELES since 2009 and most of his newer work is with DISNEY with MUPPETS BABIES being his most recent work.
But for me, I'll always remember MR. WARBURTON as the guy who made KND for early 2000s CARTOON NETWORK.
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