Victor Cook


Victor Cook is an American television producer and director, perhaps best known for the animated series The Spectacular Spider-Man, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters.
Victor Cook is Executive Producer of Disney Junior's TOTS.
Cook's other Disney credits include: Producer/Director for Lilo and Stitch the series and 101 Dalmatians the series, Director for Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, The Legend of Tarzan, Atlantis 2 and Mickey Mouse Club House. Victor started at Disney as a Storyboard Artist for Tail Spin, Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles among others shows.

Cook was also Producer/Director of Scooby-Doo!Stage Fright, Supervising Producer/Director of Ben 10 Destroy All Aliens, and Director of Director of Young Justice episode "Cold Hearted", Dante's Inferno and 2007's , the second of two Hellboy Animated films.

The Spectacular Spider-Man

Cook was called by Sony Entertainment to develop a DVD project about Spider-Man. Cook developed it with Greg Weisman, they wanted to base it on the early comic book publications of the character that showed him younger, which Cook had never seen done before in any adaption. The idea was reformatted to an animated television series, but they still kept a similar chronicle style where, as Cook describes, "each episode stands alone as its own story, but like the comic book itself it's a saga. Then each three episodes is a story and those three episodes are what would be on the DVD releases." The original title for the series was The Amazing Spider-Man, based on the comic series of the same name, but by mid-2007 the name was changed to The Spectacular Spider-Man, as well a Spider-Man comic series.
Cook wanted the animation to be squash and stretch style, and the action to be as good as the first two live action movies Sam Raimi, director of the Spider-Man films, as it had "set the bar" for the fluid movement for Spider-Man. As they were on a specific budget, they wanted to allow the animation to "move" more than anything, giving it simple and stylistic designs. He also looked back on Blood and Iron, which had a "fresh, young, look to it" that appealed to him visually. Cook wanted to make an "iconic" Spider-Man for both new and older generations and "really wanted this to be a two dimensional Spider-man that moved like we've never really seen him move in animation before." The Spectacular Spider-Man became very successful in its first season on Kids WB! and entered its second season in America in 2009 on Disney XD.

Subsequent works

After The Spectacular Spider-Man, Cook moved onto Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters and Weisman on Young Justice for Cartoon Network and eventually the DC Universe streaming service. According to Weisman, the show's version of the character Artemis was partially based on Victor's daughter who is also Half Caucasian and Half Asian.