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2016 - present
The plant: Every earlier leg of this record measures a trade by its buildings. This one has a house. Cartoon Connect, founded in 2016, is the animation studio and YouTube channel behind Lil Ron Ron, Gotta Be Mo, and Granny & Duke, and it operates from Brandon Reed's home in South Bend. Reed animates and edits his videos himself; a single cartoon took about two weeks of production in 2019, a short one a week, at a pace of at least one upload a week. His behind the scenes team in the Tubefilter account numbered four or five people, with an assisting animator who was usually one of his brothers, plus a manager and the Fullscreen network. That is the whole plant: a self-taught animator, family help, and a distribution system owned by a platform in California. It has produced, on the Chamber podcast's count of November 2026, more than 600 animated episodes.
The partnership: The channel's voice belongs to Reed's collaborator. Tubefilter records that RonBoiTv provides all the voices for Lil Ron Ron while Reed does all the art and animation, and the Chamber's account names the partner in full: writer and voice actor Ron Bush, co-owner of the company with Reed. The division of labor has held for a decade: one man draws everything, one man voices everything. Lil Ron Ron stood in its fourteenth season in the Chamber's November 2026 account, a run no South Bend television production in this record matches for length, and the studio has since added a second medium, puppetry, in Granny & Duke, whose puppet sidekick Duke appeared alongside Reed as a guest on the Chamber podcast itself.
The ambition, printed as ambition: Reed told Tubefilter in 2019 that he meant to build Cartoon Connect into a full animation network, a go-to place for cartoon series and a broadcast home for other animators. Seven years on, the Chamber episode's own table of contents shows the same plan still stated from the same city: segments on why he builds from South Bend, on teaching the next generation, and on what is next, a Saturday morning block, built independently. This record prints those as stated ambitions, not achievements. What is achieved is narrower and stranger: the largest creator business in South Bend is an animation studio with no studio, run from a house, by a man the platforms found because a two minute cartoon about a kid called Lil Ron Ron passed a million views while he slept.
Sources:
- Tubefilter, 24 Apr 2019: Reed animates and edits everything himself, the two week production, the team of four to five including his brothers, RonBoiTv providing all the voices for Lil Ron Ron, the stated ambition of an animation network.
- South Bend Regional Chamber, Rooted & Reaching, Nov 2026 (episode description and table of contents): Cartoon Connect as the studio and channel behind Lil Ron Ron, Gotta Be Mo and Granny & Duke; more than 600 episodes animated; Lil Ron Ron in its fourteenth season; Ron Bush as writer, voice actor and co-owner; the puppetry move; the segments on building from South Bend and on a Saturday morning block.
- Cartoon Connect Studios, the studio's own About page (corroboration tier only, undated): founded 2016; platform counts on the studio's own site are not printed in this section, by the leg's rule.