Hanna-Barbera

From the beginning of their careers as animators at MGM studios in the 1940s, Joseph Barbera and William Hanna set out to unseat Walt Disney as the premiere producer of cartoons and children's entertainment. In fact, the pair did manage to upstage Mickey Mouse with the creation of the cat and mouse cartoon characters, Tom and Jerry, in 1940. These short subject Tom and Jerry cartoons were to be nominated for 14 Academy Awards and would win seven Oscars, the first such achievement by a company other than Disney. Joe Barbera modeled Tom and Jerry cartoons on the chase scenes featured in the great silent films of Charles Chaplin and the Keystone Cops. The simple formula of Tom and Jerry was succeeded by greater animation challenges, such as the combination of live-action and animation pioneered by Hanna and Barbera in collaboration with dancer Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh in 1945 and again with swimming star Esther Williams in the 1952 MGM musical Dangerous When Wet. Despite the success of Hanna's directing and Barbera's writing, MGM management dropped its animation division during the 1950s, citing the rising cost of quality animation and a general malaise in its big studio system. In 1957 Hanna and Barbera no longer had jobs at MGM, so they started their own production company and turned to television, the very instrument that had accounted for the fall of the Hollywood studio system. Hanna and Barbera turned away from the visual, energetic approach they had used at MGM and focused instead on story and dialogue. The key aspect of creating cheaper cartoons was to limit the number of drawings required. The men adapted a tool they had developed while at MGM in which they produced a test cartoon with approximately one-tenth the number of drawings than the finished product would have. They would use this test to adapt and refine the timing of the film so as not to waste drawings. They realized that they could adapt this process and produce a saleable product based on this limited animation technique. The limited animation approach was only half of the solution, however. With a lower quality of visual product the audience interest had to be sustained through dialogue. Joe Barbera realized that a team of talented, reliable actors would have to be assembled because the visually restricted cartoons would depend on effective voices for their success. Actors Daws Butler and Don Messick were hired in 1957 as the voices of the Ruff and Ready characters, and the two men would be heard behind Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters for the next three decades. Ruff and Ready debuted on NBC in 1957 and one year later Hanna-Barbera introduced The Huckleberry Hound Show, representing the company's first big hit and introducing the enduring character Yogi Bear, who was to have his own show one year later. Once the company had perfected its production technique of limited animation and high quality scripting and voicing, it proceeded to produce shows quickly while developing and selling new shows at the same time. In 1960 Hanna-Barbera launched the first half-hour cartoon show to air during primetime. The concept was to put an animated, half-hour situation comedy series in the same time slot normally occupied by live action shows. Popular sit-com writers were hired to draft the scripts in conjunction with writers, such as Barbera himself, who understood how to make cartoons work. The Flintstones was to become the company's greatest success, having a six-year run followed by many more years in syndication. The "modern stone-age family" remained the most enduring image of Hanna and Barbera's partnership, eclipsing even that of Tom and Jerry. Almost immediately, the company followed its television success with marketing schemes. The images of their fresh, popular characters were sold to toy manufacturers and were used in product promotions, recordings, Hanna-Barbera's own version of Disneyland called Jelleystone Park in Hew Hampshire, and were even repro