Variety details how Seth MacFarlane, one-time Hanna-Barbera storyboard artist, went from animation employee working near the scale rate to multi-multi millionaire ...
... “Family Guy” executive producer Kara Vallow, who has worked with MacFarlane since his earliest days in animation, sees a common theme to his successes: “The projects that he was taking on never seemed to be out of desire for money or pomposity,” she says. “It all seems to me like different versions of innocence and the dedication that he had when I first worked with him when he was 23.” ...
Here's the deal about Seth MacFarlane and his entertainment empire.
It was a roll of the dice and he came up with a string of sevens. And good for him. Because in show biz, you need talent, a work ethic, and luck. And if you have a lot of one of those things, you can get by with less of the others.
Seth made a short and came up with a concept (Family Guy) that got him a fairly rich development deal from Fox. And he and his crew went onto do make a couple of seasons of the show, at which point it was cancelled.
And that, as the saying goes, would have been that. But Fox began selling the produced shows as a package of DVDs, and the DVDS sold like hot cakes. Millions of hot cakes. This got corporate attention, and Fox decided to put Family Guy back into production.
It's been in production ever since, making Seth and Fox (and now Disney) lots of money.
Kara Vallow has noted: "DVD sales are what triggered Family Guy's rebirth." Who knows? Without DVDs, which are now pretty much defunct, there would have been a truncated number of FG episodes, and probably (possibly?) no American Dad no Ted, no anything else.
So luck had something to do with the shape of Seth MacFarlane's career. As it does for everybody. Without "X", there would never have been "Y". Remember that.
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