StarToons was an American animation studio located in Chicago, Illinois. It was founded by Jon McClenahan, an animator who had previously worked for other studios like Hanna Barbera. While the initial founding of StarToons was in October 1988, the studio didn't start getting credit until 1991, when StarToons animated a full episode of Tiny Toon Adventures (it had previously done individual scenes outsourced to them by Kennedy Cartoons but only Jon got credit). For the most part, StarToons provided animation exclusively for Warner Bros. shows; however, it also created a pilot for Cartoon Network and some direct-to-video films for the Christian market.

Before its demise in 2001, StarToons had a plethora of exciting projects lined up, such as an unreleased Looney Tunes short entitled Little Go-Beep, and pilots such as "Up With the Chickens", "Tuna Sammich", "The Kitchen Sink Gang", "The Neverland Gnomes", and M-7, a Japanese anime animated fully in the U.S.

Sadly, many factors contributed to StarToons' demise. The cost of paying American animators is far higher than for labor in foreign countries like South Korea and Taiwan. In addition, the steady rise in popularity of anime made network execs question the need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on animating something domestically when it could simply import foreign programs. Also, the advent of Macromedia Flash, which allows the user to make animation faster and cheaper, didn't help. Though StarToons struck an alliance with Heart Animation Studios in India during the late 1990s so that they could combine the American experience with cheap Indian labor, it wasn't enough.

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@dalelazarov old friend worked on pinky/brain, animaniacs, freakazoid, tazmania. Hanging around StarToons was an amazing time!
krypt0nian (Rick Hellgeth) Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:35:27 -0000
@dalelazarov old friend worked on pinky/brain, animaniacs, freakazoid, tazmania. Hanging around StarToons was an amazing time!

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