Hostility On The Set / Western Animation

• It's no secret that John Kricfalusi made working on The Ren & Stimpy Show a living hell. When he wasn't holed up in his office to avoid confrontation and leaving others to do the heavy lifting on his cartoons for him, he was an outright terror of a director to work for.
  • He frequently tore up artists' drawings for no reason other than it wasn't exactly what he pictured in his head, and he forbid any deviation from his layouts. When he tore up one background because he didn't like the bright colors, calling it "fucking candy cane lane," several artists decorated the studio with a sign that read "Candy Cane Lane" and drawings of Ren and Stimpy with candy canes up one another's butts as a form of protest.
  • Billy West suffered damage to his vocal cords from the grueling recording sessions, to which Johnny would respond, "You're 98% there." West was not swayed by bullying (he had grown up with an abusive father), which enraged Kricfalusi even further. He also fired storyboard artist Chris Reccardi for dating John's ex-girlfriend Lynne Naylor. (Reccardi and Naylor later married and remained together until Reccardi's fatal heart attack in May 2019). He also chewed Bob Jacques out over the phone for hours over how "Disney-like" the work "Sven Höek" looked. Kricfalusi only began praising the cartoon when it became a fan favorite. Relations during the first two seasons became so bad that Bob Camp would invite staff members into his office to kick the wall (with a sign over it reading "John's Knees") to get aggression out. By the end of Kricfalusi's run, the wall had been reduced to a gaping hole.
  • "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksman" only credited Reccardi for directing it after Kricfalusi was fired from the show. Kricfalusi was so enraged that he threatened to sue Nickelodeon for millions if he wasn't properly credited on the episode; Reccardi relented and put his name on the credits. The day that most of the crew moved into Games Animation, he personally followed them around and verbally abused them.
  • This was also the case during the production of The Ripping Friends. Funbag Animation manager John Shaw explicitly told his staff to disregard John K.'s style guide and left it sitting on the front desk for weeks. When he came to the studio and found out, the two came dangerously close to blows. Kricfalusi apologized, but was banned from the studio the next day. As a result, he was forced to make most of his revisions from a nearby hotel.
• Tensions between the creators of Rugrats in the original 65 episodes run were quite real. Arlene Klasky and Paul Germain clashed on creative directions; the former wanted the characters to act more like realistic babies, while the latter favored strong characterization. Angelica was the big point of argument - Arlene Klasky not wanting an antagonist and hating how mean she was, Paul Germain instead wanting to show Hidden Depths and explore why a child might become a bully. He ended up leaving the show before the episodes even aired. Arlene Klasky continued to be unpopular with a lot of the animators; she would speak to some of them in baby talk to illustrate how she wanted the Rugrats to act, and they made a Running Gag out of Didi's obsession with the terrible advice of Dr Lipschitz specifically to mock her - as she was a great believer in such parenting books.
• Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo: According to Mark Evanier, Lennie Weinrib was undergoing problems in his personal life at the time and could be quite difficult as a result. Part of the reason Scrappy was recast after this season was because Weinrib didn't get on with voice director Gordon Hunt. It got to the point where Weinrib would be willing to return if Evanier would take over as voice director, but this didn't work out.
• The infamous "Thief in the Night" episode of The Transformers had another problem besides driving the late Casey Kasem, who was of Lebanese descent, to quit the show in disgust of its depictions of Arabs (including naming a nation "Carbombya"): it led to a nearly three decade-long disagreement between Maurice LaMarche (who voiced Six-Gun) and voice director Wally Burr over the latter's style of directing. That said, before Burr's passing, while LaMarche stood by some of them, he did state most of his criticisms were out of line and reconciled with Burr. ^note The Transformers wiki explains that Burr was a perfectionist, who often held sessions up to the maximum allowed at the time (a whopping 8 hours). Townsend Coleman is quoted as saying Burr would insist on prolonging recording sessions, whether "it was necessary or not." LaMarche was of the opinion Burr was a Prima Donna Director who wanted the actor to parrot the lines back to him as he himself would have performed them. The wiki does point out that "Thief in the Night", as mentioned above, is also the episode where Casey Kasem walked out and offers that that might also have been a factor in LaMarche's bad experience.
• The Simpsons:
  • Season 1's "Some Enchanted Evening": In addition to this episode's infamously Troubled Production, James L. Brooks (who wanted more realistic animations on the characters and objects) called the original animation "shit". This did not please Gabor Csupo, who got into a heated argument with Brooks; Csupo (who wanted the animation to be Off-Model and over-the-top) denied that there was anything wrong with the animation and instead claimed that "maybe this shit isn't funny". When the show won its first Emmy (albeit for "Life on the Fast Lane"), Brooks made it a point to mockingly repeat Csupo's own line back to him at the ceremony.
  • Chris Latta, credited as Christopher Collins, was the original voice for Moe and Mr. Burns. Throughout the first season he irritated Matt Groening and other staff members with his obnoxious behavior. The specifics are unclear, but Groening and Sam Simon have indicated that Latta was "difficult to work with" and "just a dick," picking fights with cast and crew on a regular basis. Once the first season concluded, Latta was fired and his roles recast with Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer. Adding insult to injury, one of Latta's already-recorded episodes as Moe was re-recorded by Azaria.
  • Season 3's "Homer at the Bat": Jose Canseco didn't get along with the cast and crew. He disliked his original part, felt that his cartoon self looked nothing like him (though he had a point in that respect) and insisted his character be rewritten, and the writers grudgingly made him as heroic as possible. He was originally slated to wake up in bed with Edna Krabappel and miss the game (in a parody of Bull Durham), but Canseco's then-wife, Esther Haddad, objected. Al Jean admitted that he found him to be intimidating.
  • Season 6's "A Star is Burns":
    • As described in John Ortved's book, there was an incident when showrunner David Mirkin and writer Bob Kushell got into an argument about the episode, saying it hurt the integrity of the series. Mirkin replied, "That's why you're an asshole." Stunned, Kushell proceeded to chew out Mirkin in front of the writers present and stormed out. He was convinced he was going to be fired for it, and although he wasn't, he wasn't given any writing assignments either. Kushell also mentioned that many writers came up to him privately and thanked him for standing up to Mirkin. (Mirkin, it should be noted, stepped down as showrunner after the sixth season.)
    • There was a well-publicised feud between Matt Groening and James L. Brooks over the episode. Groening saw it as a shameless commercial for The Critic and took his own name out of the credits, in part because he didn't want people associating The Critic with him. Brooks, in response, stated that he is "furious with Matt, he's been going to everybody who wears a suit at Fox and complaining about this," and "his (Groening's) behavior right now is rotten."
  • Season 7's "Marge Be Not Proud": Then-showrunners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein described Lawrence Tierney's appearance as Det. Don Brodka as "the craziest guest star experience we ever had". In addition to yelling at and intimidating employees of the show, Tierney made unreasonable requests such as abandoning his distinctive voice to do the part in a southern accent and refusing to perform lines if he did not "get the jokes" (for example, he refused to do the answering machine gag as written since he didn't understand why Brodka would keep talking despite no one being on the line, so Weinstein had to stand in the recording booth and adlib some responses from Marge and later edit them out).
• According to Steve Blum, while he greatly enjoyed working with Josh Keaton on The Spectacular Spider-Man, Blum has less than fond memories about working with Drake Bell on Ultimate Spider-Man (2012), as the actor was more focused on his phone and created an uncomfortable tension in the studio.
• Following Justin Roiland's firing from Rick and Morty due to domestic abuse charges in 2023, sources close to the show told The Hollywood Reporter that Roiland's relationships with co-creator Dan Harmon and the writers had been fraught behind the scenes going back to Season 2. It reportedly got to the point that, by time of his firing, Roiland had not been on speaking terms with Harmon and members of the writing staff hadn't interacted with him, even over Zoom, in years.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964): There wasn't much drama behind the scenes, except early on when Larry Roemer was supposed to direct. According to Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Making Of The Rankin/Bass Holiday Classic, even though Roemer got screen credit for directing he did very little work on it due to causing problems early on, with sound engineer Bill Giles saying he thought everyone was doing everything wrong. In the end, Arthur Rankin Jr. became the de facto director. Roemer's relation with Rankin and co-producer Jules Bass continued to degrade and he would ultimately leave the company not long afterwards.
• Allen Gregory was one of Rachel Bloom's first credits in the industry, and she has nothing positive to say about her experience as a writer there. This mostly came down to how the otherwise all-male writing staff treated her as if she didn't have anything valuable to contribute, belittling her ideas constantly. It wasn't until she joined the staff of Robot Chicken when she realized that writing rooms aren't inherently designed to put others down and can actually be encouraging and engaging spaces in the right hands.
• The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat had quite a story behind its Troubled Production, and part of it included Creative Differences between Don Oriolo (who wanted it to be like his father's version) and most of the writing staff (who hated that incarnation of the franchise). In Season 2, Oriolo pushed to make the show in his image; many of the directors just flat-out quit, while the writers actively fought back against it and took snipes at him whenever possible with episodes like "Attack of the Robot Rat" and "Phoney Felix." Predictably, these episodes did not sit well with Don Oriolo at all.
• Walt Disney and Art Babbitt famously did not get along, due to the fact that the latter was one of the leaders of the infamous Disney strike of 1941. Even though Walt was ultimately forced to take him back after the fact, he still looked for excuses to get rid of Babbitt, and even told director Jack Kinney to let him know if Babbitt gets in his way. After a few unsuccessful attempts to fire him (one of which resulted in a lawsuit that went up to the Supreme Court, where Babbitt won a huge settlement), he left the studio on his own terms in 1947.
• Looney Tunes: Bob Bergen hated the shorts made in the 2000s and stated that he had an awful time working on them before being fired and replaced with Billy West as the voices of Porky Pig and Tweety. He let director Larry Doyle know that he wasn't comfortable with the adult humor present in the shorts, but it didn't do any good (ironically, the higher-ups at Warner Bros. took out all the adult humor in the shorts after Larry was fired). As if that wasn't enough, Larry wanted Bob to change the way he played Porky - he slowed down a bunch of old Porky shorts to how Mel Blanc sounded before they sped him up, then told Bob to "do" Mel, then they would speed him up to the same percentage. Despite the fact that Bob does Porky fine naturally and has done it that way for years. In addition, as Bob pointed out his voice is much higher than Mel's was - and the microphones used in those days were much different than the ones they were using on these shorts... and on top of that, Larry slowed down those original Porky shorts too much. When Bob attempted to do Porky the way Larry wanted and was sped-up, the results were unsatisfactory. Bob finally decided to call up his agent and quit the project, with his agent telling him that he had just been fired.

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