Mar 13, 2015

"Home Movie" and "Dr.The soup2nuts studio that produced "Katz" has been closed [Update]

Soup2Nuts, the Boston animation studio best known for TV series like Home Movies, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, and WordGirl, has announced that it will cease operations at the end of this month.

Since 2001, when Soup2Nuts was acquired by children's publisher Scholastic Inc., the studio has operated as an in-house production unit of Scholastic Media, which is “restructuring.”

“We are realigning some of the operations from Scholastic Media,” Kyle Good, senior vice president of corporate communications for Scholastic, told Boston Globe's Betaboston. “We are restructuring that part of the business closer to our core businesses which are children's publishing and education.

The studio was one of Boston's largest; it had more than 60 employees as recently as six months ago, according to sources cited in Betaboston. As operations wind down, there are less than ten people currently working there.

Founded by Tom Snyder in 1993 as Tom Snyder Productions, the studio cemented its reputation on comedy-driven animation with its Comedy Central hit, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, which ran for six seasons, and Home Movies, which eventually ended up on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Both series utilized Snyder's quirky patented Squigglevision method of animation, although Home Movies switched to Flash production during its production.

Renamed Soup2Nuts in 1999, the studio was acquired by Scholastic in 2001, for whom it developed the multiple Daytime Emmy Award-winning PBS Kids educational series WordGirl.

The Boston Globe reports that the company had just completed work on seasons seven and eight of WordGirl and the first season of Astroblast for Sprout.

UPDATE: Dave Schlafman, co-founder of the studio CloudKid, has written a worth-reading blog post about the important role that Soup2Nuts played within the Boston animation community and why its loss is worth mourning: