Mitch Schauer and the Angry Beavers Ending Nickelodeon Shut Down

Mitch Schauer

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 18, 1955 Pawhuska, Oklahoma, United States
Occupation	Animator, producer and director
Awards	Emmy (shared) · Annie Award, Production Design in an Animated Television Production · Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Best TV Series

Somewhere in a pile of leaked storyboards and a bootleg audio track, Norbert and Daggett Beaver open their mail and learn that their show has been cancelled. They rant about the network, fret about syndication and work out, out loud, that they are cartoon characters. Nickelodeon approved that premise, then halted production partway through, because the channel did not let a series talk about its own ending or let its characters die. The segment was called “Bye Bye Beavers”, and it remains the most discussed thing Mitch Schauer never got to finish.

That half-made finale explains more about him than the trophies on his shelf. Schauer’s whole method on The Angry Beavers was to take a network note and turn it into the joke. When the standards department kept asking the crew to “make sure it’s kid-friendly,” he wrote a cyborg cowboy literally named Kid Friendly and set the beavers against him. “It seemed natural to write a story around the comment,” he said. The finale was the same move, pushed one step further than the network would follow.

He came to cartoons from Oklahoma, from Pawhuska and then Tulsa, raised on the television animation of the 1960s that he still cites as his foundation, Jonny Quest and The Flintstones among it. After finishing Daniel Webster High School in Tulsa in 1974 and a short spell at Tulsa Junior College, he went west to study in Disney’s character animation program at CalArts, then took a degree in advertising and illustration from ArtCenter College of Design in 1980.

He started at the unglamorous end of the pipeline, as a layout artist, the person who decides where the camera sits and where the character stands in each shot. Through the 1980s he moved into storyboards, background design and producing, including layout work on the special Garfield: His 9 Lives. By the early 1990s he was producing Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, a series whose first season was animated at Gunther-Wahl Productions, the studio that would later build his own show.

The two doors that mattered opened almost at once. At Nickelodeon he was drawing assistant storyboards on The Ren & Stimpy Show, the network’s loudest experiment in letting creators run their own cartoons, and in 1994 he made a pilot there about two beaver brothers who move out of their parents’ lodge. At Warner Bros. he produced the first season of Freakazoid!, the superhero comedy that executive producer Steven Spielberg had steered away from action and toward pure gag, and he voiced the werewolf Lonnie Tallbutt in one episode. The series won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program in 1997, an award shared by thirteen names with Spielberg’s at the top; by then Paul Rugg had taken over as producer and Schauer’s beavers were heading to air.

The Angry Beavers premiered on Nickelodeon in 1997 as the network’s seventh Nicktoon. Norbert, the smug and well-read older brother, went to Nick Bakay; Daggett, the manic younger one, went to Richard Steven Horvitz, picked from more than 300 actors because the two had chemistry the moment they met. Schauer’s credits go well past the creator line. He designed the look and the characters, wrote episodes and directed the voice sessions himself, and his daughters Stacy and Chelsea voiced the beavers’ little sisters. The Annie Awards gave him their production design prize for a television production for the episode “Born to Be Beavers”, and in 1998 the Annecy festival named the show the best television series in its category, for two segments he directed.

The familiar version of the show’s story casts it as a war against the censors, and the leaked finale has turned it into a small online martyr story. Schauer does not tell it that way. He has described working with Nickelodeon as a positive experience overall, and his own crew gave the less romantic reason the run ended: co-developer Keith Kaczorek recalled that they were “significantly over budget, behind schedule,” and had “generally worn out our welcome.” Margie Cohn, then in charge of original programming at the network, called the “Bye Bye Beavers” script “beautifully crafted, funny, and clever” and still refused to kill off characters children loved. Both sides had a point, which is exactly why a story that never aired has outlived most of the ones that did.

Production ended in 2001 and Gunther-Wahl closed the same year. Schauer became the kind of animation professional who keeps the industry running without his name on the poster. He wrote and drew the graphic novel Rip M.D., painted a cover for Famous Monsters of Filmland, spent two years in Berlin as a creative producer developing series for Berliner Film Companie, and storyboarded on Marvel’s animated projects. In 2016 he directed Hulk: Where Monsters Dwell, a Halloween-night team-up of the Hulk and Doctor Strange for Marvel Animation.

His most recent feature as director is The Soccer Football Movie, which Netflix released in November 2022, days before the World Cup. Zlatan Ibrahimović, Megan Rapinoe and “Weird Al” Yankovic voice themselves in it, the footballers fighting slime monsters and the musician playing the scientist who wants to steal their talent. It runs barely over an hour, and MCM’s review found that it works best when it commits to being dumb, a description that would have suited the beavers too.

The beavers, meanwhile, refuse to stay cancelled. Norbert and Daggett turned up as playable fighters in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 in 2023, and Schauer has spent a decade of podcast interviews sketching a return. He calls it “ReSpooted”, a title his daughter Chelsea came up with, and has described it as a parody of The Shining, with Norbert married to Treeflower and raising two daughters, Lily and Petunia, while Daggett stays single and drops by. He has pitched it to Nickelodeon, which he said has been “on and off” about it. The beavers belong to the network, not to him. If the revival ever happens, it would give him the ending he was never allowed to draw, approved this time by the channel that stopped the first one.