This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your

stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com. Again, go to Our American Stories.com. As far as

animators and visionaries go, Walt Disney is probably the most recognizable name in that space.

But to kids who grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s, some of the members of

this staff, another name brings back a flood of memories.

Butch Hartman created two of the most well-known cartoons of the last two decades, fairly

odd parents and Danny Phantom.

Here's Butch to tell us his story and how we went from the snowy shores of

Michigan to the sunny coast of Southern California.

One of my very first memories, I remember I was in a kindergarten and our teacher, I'll never forget

her name was Mrs. Shelley. And Mrs. Shelley asked all the the students to draw a picture of her and I thought, okay, well, I was like a kid, I drew a picture of her and just forgot about it and then she started making a huge deal out of my picture. Oh my gosh, this is the best picture I've ever seen and you know, she was raving about it and basically all the other kids, I think. But she's like, I'm putting this up on the wall. This is just amazing. And she put my picture up on the wall and I never forget. And I thought, wow, drawing is a real great way to get attention from adults. So I thought if I could just keep drawing and get attention from adults because you're a kid, right? you want attention so I thought I'm just going to keep drawing stuff so I just started drawing and drawing and

before I knew it I really liked it and I really realized that I had kind of a maybe a little bit of

a skill for it and just started training myself and growing up and I loved Saturday morning cartoons

a lot of us today maybe some of the older folks remember Saturday morning cartoons. A lot of us today, maybe some of the

older folks remember Saturday morning cartoons, but when I was a kid, the only place you could

get cartoons was on Saturday morning for the most part. And so I would get up and have my

big bowl of tricks or whatever sugary cereal I could get and watch cartoons from six in the

morning till 11 in the morning and then go outside and play. And, you know, I watched some of my favorites back then were the wacky races by Hannah Barbera, Scooby-Doo, again by Hannah-Barbera. Hannah-Barberra pretty much owned Saturday morning. The Jetsons and the Flintstones and Johnny Quest, Johnny Quest was one of my favorites. Never realizing later on in life, I'd end up working for Hannah Barbera years later. But yeah, those cartoons really influenced me. Then, of course, Disney, I'd watch The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights and loved movies, like Star Wars and things like that, and just really got a real fantasy mindset and a drawing mindset. And then I kept drawing the whole time, too. I wanted to draw superheroes and animate. I did that up until, uh, I did all through high school, all through school. I drew the cover of the, you know, the school year book and things like that. And I ended up meeting a couple guys that didn't go to my school. I met him through another friend. So these other two guys I met, they were a little

older than me and they were animation nerds like me, but they were better than I was. And one guy

was, the oldest guy was particularly great. He was a senior. I was a sophomore. And this older

...