Profits

Out of the mouths of studio execs:

“The two most profitable TV series the studio has ever done are ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy,’ ” says 20th TV chairman and CEO Gary Newman, who joined the company in 1990, shortly after the yellow-skinned Springfield family branched off from “The Tracey Ullman Show” and became its own animated sitcom, battling NBC’s top-rated “Cosby Show” to a near-draw in its second season. A decade later, he worked with Seth MacFarlane to adapt his animated short “Larry and Steve” into what would become “Family Guy.” ...

The reason that t.v. animation is now booming in Southern California is because prime-time animated Fox shows, and animated cable shows for Disney, Nick, Cartoon Network, etc., etc. are playing around the world and making big profits.

And well-trained board artists, designers, writers, and the like are concentrated in L.A. so we still get a generous gob of that work.

Lots of live-action productions have departed L.A. County for places that offer big government subsidies (Viva Free Enterprise!). Animation, of course, doesn't have that problem because all of our television production vamoosed decades ago, and is (for the most part) still gone. What we live on now is pre-production and some feature production, but the global cartoon pie has grown so large that, even though we no longer have the whole thing, we manage to bite off our share of work.

So far.