(Editor’s Note: In the January 2009 Written By’s “Field of Dreams or Minefield” feature, WGA veteran Larry Brody recounts his fantastic adventures in Webisodeland. Here is the prologue to that story.)

Back in the day—1995 through 2001, to be exact—the technological and creative communities found themselves united in the belief that Something Wonderful was happening. Something So Wonderful for technologists, content creators (what a wonderfully anti-creative term!), end-users, viewers, visitors, audiences, The Whole Damn World. It would bring peace, harmony, prosperity and harmless new addictions whole families could share.

Forever.

That Something was the Dot-Com Boom.

What a time! What a glorious time!

An Internet Age of Innocence in which thousands of Web-based companies raised billions of investor dollars based on exuberance, hope, and an almost religious (certainly mystical) certainty that the World Wide Web was the future of mankind on all fronts.

I can't think of a single type of business that didn't create a Web presence. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, artists, farmers, manufacturers, ministers, healers, kennel clubs, salesmen—it seemed as though everyone with a dream and access to a computer had a Web site intended to spread enlightenment and Clintonian prosperity to all.

One of the most important groups of dreamers—at least to those of us who spend most of our time trying to fulfill our artistic and financial needs by capturing the attention of huge masses of viewers with our words and images—was made up of businessmen convinced that the Web would replace film and television as the main source of mass audience entertainment.

Armed with terrific-looking (but often meaningless) PowerPoint presentations, these entrepreneurs captured the fancy of flush venture capitalists and opened entertainment site after entertainment site. The idea was to attract millions of viewers by showing irresistibly fascinating video made specifically for the Web.

In those pre-YouTube days, most of the videos were Flash animations, streamed in real time. Which meant they took forever and a half to load because those also were pre-broadband days for just about everyone who wasn't surfing from work. They also were pre-P2P days as we now use the term, so downloads were as far from instant as just about any gratification that doesn't involve being alone in the dark.

The Entrepeneur’s Progress

Enter Larry Brody the Genius, with an idea about how to make the long waits palatable. I was supervising the writing end of FoxKids The Silver Surfer animated series at the time, and although this was an early foray into TV animation I already had developed two major longings.

The first one was creative: I'd learned that as much as I'd felt stifled by overwrought network executive meddling when working in primetime live action, it was nothing compared to network interference in animation. Our series was being prepared so far in advance that no one felt any urgency when it came to the subject of locking a script. Each 18-minute episode went through literally dozens of drafts, each succeeding one so different from the version that came before that they might as well have been for different shows. How I longed for the chance to write something my way—for better or for worse.

My second longing was financial. Animation pay sucked. Especially when the hundreds of changed pages for every episode were factored in. I was developing all the scripts for HBO's Spawn series as well as overseeing and writing every episode of Surfer so I didn't have to pay my mortgage with my credit card (yet), but life wasn't anywhere near as easy as it'd been in my The Fall Guy days. More income! More! More! More! Could the burgeoning field of Web TV be the way?

Writer-director Michael Steven Gregory, a buddy of mine, and I started Toga TV, a company that made short animated gifs, parodies of current TV shows, that we hoped we'd be able to sell to Atom Films.Com and its ilk for use as interstitials to be played while visitors waited for the streams of the main events.

It cost us nothing but time to make a couple of dozen 15-second spots. MSG was a wonderful artist with a real knack for churning the bloody things out. And I do mean "bloody." In the "Stick Figures of Death" style of the era, every mini-episode ended with squashed or exploding body parts and a generous splash of red.

We added theme songs from the original series and put our darlings on my Web site, TV Writer.Com. I put out the word that we were ready, willing, and able to supply the entertainment dot-coms with more at a reasonable price. MSG and I sat at our keyboards and waited.

And waited.

And, on that particular front, are waiting still.

Although our company never made a dime, someone with money and creative vision saw what we'd done and liked it and my career credits enough to make me an offer I couldn't refuse. "How would you like to be the head of a new TV network?" the CEO of a U.S. cousin of Sega, the then very successful Japanese video gaming company, said to me.

I grabbed the job right out of his mouth, before he had a chance to realize that he had the wrong guy, and we spent six months setting up an infrastructure for a cable video game channel, worked out a way to create all our programming in-house… and then discovered that it was going to take $50 million in the first year to pay for carriage on enough cable companies to make it worthwhile. (I'd always thought cable companies paid for the product. It was a hell of an awakening when I discovered it was the other way around.)

SegaSA couldn't afford that kind of mordida. So the CEO and I did a quick restructuring. "Let's make it a Web site instead of a TV network," I said.

"Works for me," the CEO said. "And we'll program the same shows we were going to put on the air."

"Our audience is kids," I said. "Kids use dial-up connections. They'll never be able to sit still and wait for the shows to start."

"Even with your interstitials to amuse them?"

"Yeah," I realized. "Even with those. Because they're not what our kid audience signed on for. They want the games." (Well, at least I'd figured out why no one else had bought any "Togas.")

"Oh," said the CEO. Then, more cheerfully: "Well, we couldn't have afforded them anyway. And I can't afford to pay you anymore, either. I mean, how do I justify your salary when it's just for the Web?"

That was that. I'd failed twice in my attempts to be a creative, money-making kinda Dot-Com Boom guy. I'd gotten nowhere as a little guy entrepreneur, and only a very little further as a hitch-your-wagon-to-a-deep-pockets-patron dude. But HBO and I had come to parting of the ways, The Silver Surfer had gone on and then off the air, and I still wanted to do what I wanted to do, so it was time to take my dimming brilliance in the last remaining direction—

Interrupted Eruption

And sell out directly to one of the newly established on-going entertainment dot-coms with its oh-so-hip venture capitalist-approved Ticket To Ride.

I found Eruptor.Com in Santa Monica, a bustling concern with more employees per square foot than Universal's Black Tower. The two Content Development Execs came from TV animation. Exec Uno had worked for Marvel. Exec Dué had fought the Saturday Morning Wars at FoxKids.

Armed with a budget of $15,000 per 5-minute episode, they were creating interactive cartoons for teenage Web surfers, and they didn't care about the fact that their intended audience was not "going to have" but "already having" the dismal "watch and wait...there it's starting...oops that's just the buffering...wait some more" viewing experience I'd seen rejected (and myself rejected) time and time again.

"We're looking for series that are hip, sexy, weird, funny, and can run forever," Exec Uno said.

"Kids have to see them as subversive," Exec Dué said. "But they can't be so subversive that their parents—or the sponsors—complain."

"You've got sponsors?" I said.

"Um...eventually," Exec Uno said. "Right now we're operating out of our First Funding while the boss looks for the second round."

"But you're going to be self-supporting someday, right?"

Exec Dué clapped me on the shoulder. "C'mon, Brode, what do you care? You're getting $500 for a concept and another $500 for each 3-page script. And we need lots of scripts."

I came up with a concept: the hilarious adventures of a teenage boy inhabited by the spirit of a runaway demon hiding from all the other minions of hell. Three months and seven presentation drafts later, After The Fall was a go. Three more months and another six or seven script drafts later the first episode was ready to be animated.

Sweet.

Except Eruptor.Com was out of business, the second funding money nowhere in sight, as the Dot-Com Boom imploded into the Dot-Com Bust.

Happy New Year 2001.

I like to look at the bright side of things, though, and the bright side of these, my first encounters with the Something Wonderful that was the infant state of Web TV, was that I'd learned by direct experience that it had neither creative nor financial satisfaction to offer me. At least not then.

Now, however, it's a whole 'nuther thing.

Or is it?