Talk of the Town - Th-th-that’s not all, folks! March 11 2004
Art and animation in Ansley Park
He’s a little embarrassed to admit it, but the executive vice president and general manager of Cartoon Network Worldwide’s favorite childhood cartoon was “Casper the Friendly Ghost.” Now it’s “Family Guy.”
Fortunately, other than their involvement with Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, Jim Samples has very little in common with his favorite cartoon’s leading man, Peter Griffin. First of all, Samples is three dimensional, and aside from fighting with his wife about window dressings, he obviously adores his family. Not only did they build an inter-room passage for their guinea pigs, his stylish home features oodles of family paintings created by a friend.
Samples: This is from an old photograph of my grandfather who lived in North Georgia. You can tell here that I came from a hillbilly family and Margaret came from class.
The family room holds portraits of their children, stashes of games, and sexy curvy furniture, much of which they brought back from Argentina. Also adorning the family room are quirky old electronics, including a flea-market found rotary phone and a working 1940-something record player.
Do you have a collection of old records?
Yeah, most of them are Margaret’s grandfather’s. I love the way the old 78s sound. Occasionally on Saturday mornings, we play the records and my daughters dance right over there. So they call it old fancy music.
What did you do in Argentina?
I ran Turner’s regional office there.
How did you get into cartoons?
I started at Turner a little over 11 years ago, in sales and marketing stuff. But I liked to comment a lot about the content. So I think finally, to shut me up, they moved me over. At first I ran the Latin America networks, so I ran TNT and Cartoon Network.
Now more than a year old, the not-for-kids animation block Adult Swim has accrued not only a cult following, but climbing ratings even though it runs Sun.-Thurs., 11 p.m. till the butt crack of dawn (5 a.m.).
The reception has been tremendous — much bigger than we ever expected. We’ve created a unit that works in Atlanta. It started with “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and now it’s a national franchise, much of which is created here.
Do you get nervous going from kids’ programming to Space Ghost, who has said “shit”?
Oh yes. We were very worried about it in the beginning. Well, not worried, but cautious because you have the trust of parents and you don’t want to betray that trust. So we went out of our way to say that this isn’t for kids. We called it Adult Swim, and put a big warning on it. So you can look at “Futurama” and “Family Guy,” they certainly have more mature themes, but there’s not much in there that people would find really offensive.
My secret wish is to have Adult Swim on Friday nights.
You may ultimately get your wish. The people who run Adult Swim call that their manifest destiny.