Geekscape Interviews:Tom Cook, Animator Of Your 80’s Childhood

If you walk up to Tom Cook’s booth at a convention, you won’t be able to help saying “This is my childhood. You animated my whole childhood.” When I did just that, he pulled out a notebook and added a notch. Turns out, he hears that a lot. Enough that he likes to keep a running count, just for fun.

He-Man. She-Ra. Scooby Doo. Flintstones, Jetsons, Captain Caveman, Roger Rabbit, The Smurfs…the list goes on and on. You name a cartoon from the 80s, and chances are, he drew for it.

Cook started out as a bus driver in Los Angeles, when he saw an ad for a comic book course taught by Don Rico, an illustrator for Hanna Barbara Animation. He saw Cook’s work and recommended he send some illustrations over to Hanna Barbara, where artists could take a free animation course with the recommendation of someone who worked there. They had plenty of people who could draw a character like Fred Flintstone, but they needed someone to draw realistic characters for the show Superfriends. He was hired and started out as an assistant.

He loved working for Hanna Barbara, but eventually he moved on; his favorite job was working for Filmation Studios. “That was a more relaxed atmosphere, no time cards, just come and go as you like, as long as you got your work done.

The main thing with Hanna Barbara was that they had a lot of the old artists from Disney who worked on the features I grew up with…getting to meet them was pretty cool.”

When Filmation closed it’s doors, Cook thought his time in the animation business was done. He then went to Mary Tyler Moore Studios to try to get a job, someone asked if he knew about the studio across the street, Baer Animation. It was run by an animator who had left Disney, and Cook ended up there next, drawing one of the most iconic animation characters ever, Mickey Mouse. “I got to work on some Disney products like Roger Rabbit and Mickey Mouse for Prince and the Pauper. So I didn’t have to work at Disney and still get to work on Disney products…and  everybody wants to work on Mickey Mouse because he was the first real cartoon.”

His favorite show to work on was Thundar the Barbarian. “Jack Kirby (comic artist and co-creator of Captain America) was one of the designers of the show, and it was more teenage than just [for] kids. It was a little bit more of and adult story line with a post-apocalyptic earth, and of course getting to meet Jack Kirby was great, too.”

The most challenging character for him was any of the women, because “if you don’t get the females just right they look horrible, so you had to be really particular when you drew Wonder Woman or She-Ra.”

I had to ask him about Filmation’s Ghostbusters, a cartoon from the 80s that seemed like a rip off of the film Ghostbusters, but it was really the other way around. “It was originally a live action show [in 1975] with the stars of F Troop…and we decided to do a cartoon version of it. In the meantime, we had sold the name Ghostbusters to Dan Akroyd so he could make his movie. The bone of contention was they called their cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, but we were the real Ghostbusters, they bought our name!”

Cook also worked on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and met Bill Cosby, whom he called a “frequent visitor” to the studio. “He was good friends with Lou Scheimer (voice actor for the show)…I met him a few times, but he usually came in to walk around, he did his schtick, it was always laughs when he came in…he was a really friendly, happy-go-lucky guy. It was always nice to see him when he came in.”

I asked Tom about cartoons today. His biggest disappointment is that they’re done overseas, and that they’re all done through computer animation. “You don’t really have to be able to draw anymore. It used to be, if you couldn’t draw, you couldn’t be an animator. Now if you know how to use a computer, it still doesn’t make you an animator, you have to know how things move. But it makes a lot of people think they can be an animator.” He said when he watches cartoons nowadays, they don’t always look like they’re moving realistically. He really misses the story lines of the cartoons he worked on, over the “stupid gags” many cartoons comprise of these days.

One of the few modern cartoons he likes is Spongebob Squarepants. “Other than that, some of the shows like Family Guy are too over the top. Sometimes they hit disgusting…they can be really clever, but then they go too far and it ruins the cartoon.”

When it comes to remakes, he isn’t a big fan either. He worked on over 100 episodes of He-Man and the Master of the Universe, and when the sequel came out, he didn’t even watch. “I heard enough about it. When they change everything and you’re a fan of this [the original] He-Man and you hear it’s going to be remade, you want it to be this He-Man. But they always change it up and for the most part they never do as good a job.”

During the interview at his booth, we were stopped on many occasions by people who, like myself, were in awe of this man and his work. As I said, he kept a running count of how many times he heard that from a fan in Philadelphia. I had to ask him what it was like being at a con where people come up to him and tell him how much his cartoons meant to them.

“It’s very humbling because I’m just a guy. I just happened to be lucky enough to work on this stuff. At the same time, it’s so nice that people really loved the stuff. I’m a fan of comic books, so I’m on the other side of the table talking to Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, so I can understand why they want my autograph, but at the same time I can’t understand why they want my autograph. So it’s surreal, but it’s very gratifying. It’s so nice to know that these cartoons have lived in these people’s lives and hearts for all these years.”

In the end, he easily had over fifty notches.