Silas Hickey is Senior Director of Regional Animation Development at Turner International, Asia Pacific.

Formal Version:

Based in Tokyo Japan, Silas is responsible for the creative direction of Turner’s pioneering original content development initiatives in Asia Pacific. These include pinpointing and green-lighting the production of high-quality original shorts from script to screen for all of the region’s kids’ brands: Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Toonami and POGO.

He works closely with the regional and global acquisitions team and plays a pivotal role in ensuring what goes on air reflects Turner’s brands and their promise to kids – to deliver fun, engaging and relevant content. This is also in keeping with his vision that kids everywhere can grow up watching a combination of locally-produced premium content and great shows from around the world.

Silas grew up in Australia on a heavy diet of classic American, Hanna-Barbera ‘toons, which sparked the beginning of his long and diverse relationship with the medium. Prior to joining Turner, Silas worked with a long list of media firms such as Virgin, MTV, Nickelodeon, Disney, to name a few.

Longer Version:

When I was a kid, The daily after school ritual — before my parents would get home — a large bowl of about 10 Weetbix was inhaled whilst simultaneously consuming two solid hours of animation on “Cartoon Corner” This consisted mainly of Hanna Barbera and Warner Brothers content. Unbeknown to me at the time, this would occupy an important part of the Cartoon Network library when Ted Turner brilliantly realised the repeat value of animated programming content. So in a way, and much to my parents dismay at the time, this unhealthy, though rich in fibre after school-day routine, would uniquely qualify me for the position I currently occupy at Cartoon Network APAC.

As mentioned my personal favourite genre is non-dialogue slapstick and screwball comedy, typified by Tex Avery, mainly for its stretch and squash but also for its universal appeal and enduring shelf life. Additionally, I have always loved the genre’s overlapping action, extreme poses as well as fluidity in the best examples. The genre’s use of tropes and the inherent gags and comic events such as ‘Knavery’, Mimicry, escalation, and crazy devices “hammer” or “mallet space”: fan-envisioned extra-dimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction, which is used to explain how animated, comic, and game charact