Bakshi began to practice animating; to give himself more time, at one point he slipped 10 cels that he was supposed to work on into the "to-do" pile of a fellow painter, Leo Giuliani.

In response to the period's political climate and as a form of therapy, Bakshi drew the comic strips Bonefoot and Fudge, which satirized "idiots with an agenda", and Junktown, which focused on "misfit technology and discarded ideals".

As Fred Silverman, CBS's daytime programming chief, began to leave the office, an unprepared Bakshi pitched a superhero parody called The Mighty Heroes on the spot.

[15][17] Bakshi enlisted comic-book and pulp-fiction artists and writers Harvey Kurtzman, Lin Carter, Gray Morrow, Archie Goodwin, Wally Wood, and Jim Steranko to work at the studio.

[18] Hampft suggested that Bakshi work with producer Steve Krantz, who had recently fired Culhane as supervising director on the Canadian science-fiction series Rocket Robin Hood.

[18] In 1969, Ralph's Spot was founded as a division of Bakshi Productions to produce commercials for Coca-Cola and Max, the 2000-Year-Old Mouse, a series of educational shorts paid for by Encyclopædia Britannica.

[23] Preparation began on a studio pitch that included a poster-sized cel featuring the comic's cast against a traced photo background—as Bakshi intended the film to appear.

Artist Ira Turek inked the outlines of these photographs onto cels with a Rapidograph, the technical pen preferred by Crumb, giving the film's backgrounds a stylized realism virtually unprecedented in animation.

Some, including Rod Scribner, Dick Lundy, Virgil Walter Ross, Norman McCabe, and John Sparey, welcomed Bakshi and felt that Fritz the Cat would bring diversity to the animation industry.

When the Motion Picture Association of America gave Bakshi's film an X rating, as well, Cinemation exploited it for promotional purposes, advertising Fritz the Cat as "90 minutes of violence, excitement, and SEX ... he's X-rated and animated!

[31] As he continued to work on Heavy Traffic, Bakshi began pitching his next project, Harlem Nights, a film loosely based on the Uncle Remus story books.

[8][37] Bakshi cast Scatman Crothers, Philip Michael Thomas, Barry White, and Charles Gordone in live-action and voice roles, cutting in and out of animation abruptly rather than seamlessly because he wanted to prove that the two media could "coexist with neither excuse nor apology".

"[43] Hey Good Lookin' is set in Brooklyn during the 1950s; its lead characters are Vinnie, the leader of a gang named "The Stompers", his friend Crazy Shapiro, and their girlfriends, Roz and Eva.

Returning to the fantasy drawings he had created in high school for inspiration, Bakshi intended to prove that he could produce a "family picture" that had the same impact as his adult-oriented films.

Learning that IBM had introduced an industrial-sized photocopier, Bakshi asked one of the company's technical experts if he would be able to feed 35mm reels into the machine to produce enlarged copies of each frame.

[51] Down the hall from Medavoy was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer president Dan Melnick, who interrupted a meeting with Peter Bogdanovich when he learned that Bakshi wanted to discuss acquiring the rights to The Lord of the Rings.

Bakshi contacted Saul Zaentz, who wrote a check to cover MGM's debt and agreed to fund the $8 million budget for the first of what was initially planned as a series of three films, and later negotiated down to two.

[51] Bakshi did not want to produce a broad cartoon version of the tale, so he planned to shoot the entire film in live action and animate the footage with rotoscoping.

[52] After the Spanish film development lab discovered that telephone lines, helicopters and cars were visible in the footage, they tried to incinerate it, telling Bakshi's first assistant director, "if that kind of sloppy cinematography got out, no one from Hollywood would ever come back to Spain to shoot again."

[52] Roger Ebert called Bakshi's effort a "mixed blessing" and "an entirely respectable, occasionally impressive job [which] still falls far short of the charm and sweep of the original story".

"[57] Bakshi was able to acquire the rights to an extensive soundtrack—including songs by Janis Joplin, The Doors, George Gershwin, The Mamas & the Papas, Herbie Hancock, Lou Reed, and Louis Prima—for under $1 million.

"[64] After production of Fire and Ice wrapped, Bakshi attempted several projects that fell through, including adaptations of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, William Kotzwinkle's The Fan Man, E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels and an anthropomorphic depiction of Sherlock Holmes.

Bakshi was forced to pay the union wages out of his own fees, and the continuity between Kricfalusi's animation and the live-action footage did not match; however, the video was completed on time.

[71] During the production of the episode "The Littlest Tramp", editor Tom Klein expressed concern that a sequence showing Mighty Mouse sniffing the remains of a crushed flower resembled cocaine use.

The AFA, during its incarnation as the National Federation for Decency, had previously targeted CBS as an "accessory to murder" after a mother killed her daughter following an airing of Exorcist II: The Heretic.

[71] Despite receiving an award from Action for Children's Television, favorable reviews, and a ranking in Time magazine's "Best of '87" feature, Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures was canceled by CBS following the controversy.

Bakshi moved into a warehouse loft in downtown Los Angeles to clear his head, and was offered $50,000 to direct a half-hour live-action film for PBS's Imagining America anthology series.

To keep actor Brad Pitt, Bakshi had to replace Drew Barrymore, his original choice for the character of Holli Would, with Kim Basinger, a bigger box office draw at the time.

[108][109] The availability of Bakshi's work on the Internet sparked a resurgence of interest in his career, resulting in a three-day American Cinematheque retrospective held at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, California, in April 2005.

[116] At the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, California, on March 27, 2015, there was a screening of Heavy Traffic and American Pop with Bakshi, Ron Thompson and Mews Small attending.