Episodes

Because they have a good reasoning. Due to the fact that they spend a lot of time on one episode to make it good rather than boring like the few hundred of Looney Tunes episodes. Also... due to the fact that one excellent cartoon is better than the hundreds of episodes of useless gibberish. Quantity is never ever better than quality. The actual company's reasoning however, is that they do it at their own leisure, since they don't have to conform to the episodic standards of a per season ratio.

Well, initially they maintained a fairly typical rate of production on Nu Pogodi for this sort of animation. During the first 11 years SoyuzMultFilm made thirteen 9-10 minute episodes, on top of four 2-3 minute shorts for Fitil in the late 1970's, plus the pilot a few months before the first episode, as well as the Magic Camera ad. And that was on top of all the other non-Nu-Pogodi projects by the same small core creative team.

This is not dissimilar to the rate of production for the Road Runner cartoons in their early years, for which the first 18 7-minute episodes were spread over 11 years. Both cartoons used similar production methods.

Like Road Runner, SoyuzMultFirm used old-fashioned manual cel methods. They did not have computers to do the animation for them. Nor did they use the output-boosting but quality-reducing shortcuts available to them such as: rotoscoping, heavy re-use of backgrounds or even foreground animation, cut-outs, reduced frame rate, highly repetitive plot elements, or large teams of multiple writers/directors simultaneously working to a very restricted template. Instead they had a small core team creating the Nu Pogodi episodes one at a time as standalone shorts when they had enough good material in between their work on other projects, and without any specific obligation to make a certain number of Nu Pogodi episodes per year. And with each episode set in a different setting, there wasn't much that could be reused between episodes. Quality over quantity in other words.

A separate issue is why they didn't keep up this initial pace. First they were hit by Kamov's emigration. This not only lost them a key resource, but saw the series suspended for 4 years for political reasons. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which deprived SoyuzMultFilm of easy funding. Indeed it required some crass product placement to pay the bills for the 1990's episodes. No doubt the aging of the key people would have had an impact. They weren't that young to start with.