show because it was deemed too frightening; she commented, "the trouble with kids' dreams is they're really scary. It's a lot about abandonment, it's a lot about suffocation. They don't make very good stories." The network continued to only broadcast externally-produced animation until almost a decade later, when animator Ralph Bakshi pitched an original animated series called Tattertown. In 1988, a half-hour pilot episode was produced, overseen by Debby Beece (Nickelodeon's senior vice president of programming). Nickelodeon declined to pick up a full series, and the pilot "Christmas in Tattertown" premiered on December 21, 1988, as a standalone Christmas special. The network's next attempt at an original animation was Nick's Thanksgiving Fest, which was composed of two shorts. According to Linda Simensky, the Thanksgiving shorts "gave Nickelodeon executives the confidence they needed to get the animation department started." During the production of Nick's Thanksgiving Fest in 1989, Geraldine Laybourne held a meeting at her house to develop a philosophy for the channel's original cartoons. She played tapes of current animated shows, which her colleagues viewed as merchandise-driven and overly commercial. The group decided that Nickelodeon should aim for the opposite of their contemporaries, producing cartoons that would keep their creators in a key creative role rather than prioritizing an efficient "assembly line" process. Later investments and success (1988–2000) 1988–1996 Geraldine Laybourne laid out a set of rules for the network's cartoons, most importantly wanting to "put the creator back, front and center." She approached her fellow executive Vanessa Coffey to find artists in Los Angeles interested in pitching original cartoons. Coffey had experience working in animation and was the producer for Nick's Thanksgiving Fest in 1988. Laybourne gave Coffey "pretty much free rein to look for properties." Vanessa Coffey rented an apartment in Los Angeles for two weeks and accepted hourly pitches. She mailed animators a call for submissions, which she summarized as "I'm looking for ideas, I'm looking for concepts. The less developed, the better. I want drawings, not a big pitch." As Coffey accepted pitches, she decided that she did not want a "consistent look like Disney," specifically searching for projects that had completely different styles from each other. Of the pitches she accepted, Coffey decided to approve eight six-minute pilots at a cost of $100,000 each. Laybourne would eventually select three pilots to expand into full series, meant to fill a programming block of an hour and