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. However, Bakshi was uninterested in the kind of animation he was producing, and wanted to produce something personal. Bakshi soon developed "Heavy Traffic", a tale of inner-city street life. Steve Krantz told Bakshi that studio executives would be unwilling to fund "Heavy Traffic" because of its content and Bakshi's lack of film experience. Bakshi directed 1972's "Fritz the Cat", an adaptation of Robert Crumb's comic strip of the same name. The financial success of "Fritz the Cat" allowed Bakshi to produce the film he had always intended to produce, and to focus on human characters rather than anthropomorphic animals. Bakshi pitched "Heavy Traffic" to Samuel Z. Arkoff, who took an interest in Bakshi's take on the "tortured underground cartoonist", and agreed to fund the film.