with the rights to the character, krantz and bakshi set out to find a distributor. "when i say that every major distributor turned it down, this is not an exaggeration", remembers krantz. "there has never been a project that was received with less enthusiasm. animation is essentially a dirty word for distributors, who think that only disney can paint a tree, and in addition to that, "fritz" was so far out that there was a failure to understand that we were onto something very important."