When was hanna barbera born

His musical talent came in useful in his later career, when he helped write soundtracks and themes for his TV shows. After dropping out of college, Bill Hanna's first job was construction engineer. One of the projects he worked on was the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. A more artistic career followed at Pacific Title and Art to design title cards for motion pictures.

In , he got a job at the Harman-Ising animation studio, where he worked his way up to head of the ink and paint department. He stayed at MGM when the partnership with Harman-Ising ended, and worked on the animated 'Captain and the Kids' series , based on Rudolph Dirks ' newspaper comic. At MGM, he also met Joseph Barbera, with whom he formed a steady partnership for the next sixty years.

Cartoons drawn by Joseph Barbera, depicting different moments in his life , source:hannabarberaforever. When Joe was four months old, the family moved to Manhattan's Little Italy section to Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he spent his childhood. His father ran three barber shops, but lost the family fortunes by gambling them away. At high school, Joe showed talent for both drawing and boxing.

Although he won several boxing titles, he eventually decided to focus on a career in cartooning. He sent Disney a fan letter, but while Uncle Walt replied that he was bound to visit New York and would give him a phone call, he never did. In interview published in The Guardian on 27 December , Barbera reflected: "The luckiest break I ever had was that he never called.

I would have gone over there and disappeared. Barbera had a daytime banking job, which he despised. In his spare time, he sold his first single-panel cartoons to magazines like Redbook, Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

After a stint in the ink and paint department of the Fleischer Studios, his actual career in animation began in at the Van Beuren Studios. Mentored by Jack Bogle , he worked on the 'Cubby Bear' and 'Rainbow Parades' cartoon series, as well as an earlier 'Tom and Jerry', unrelated to the cat-and-mouse feature.

The shorts revolve around a blue housecat, Tom, and a little brown mouse, Jerry, who constantly fight and chase each other. Together with the writers, they also oversaw the plots and gags. Although cat-and-mouse cartoons weren't new, Tom and Jerry set the standard for the genre.

Several animation studios tried to duplicate its success with similar duos, such as Famous Studios with 'Herman and Katnip' and Terrytoons with 'Roquefort Mouse and Percy Cat' , and even Hanna-Barbera themselves with 'Pixie, Dixie and Mr.

Hanna and Barbera avoided formulaic writing by thinking up clever variations on the same old gags. The pantomime comedy helped the series break through all language barriers and become universally popular. Kelly's dance sequences with an animated serpent and two Arab guards in the film 'Invitation to the Dance' were also animated by the Hanna-Barbera duo.

However, rising production costs and unavoidable financial cuts became problematic for many animation studios in the s, especially when television gained popularity. In , MGM was forced to close down its studio. Interestingly enough, one of the animators who joined in just before the studios closed was future Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson. He therefore went into acting instead. Storyboard art for 'Jerry's Cousin' by Chuck Couch. It ran until issue July , after which Western Publishing continued it under its Gold Key imprint until issue In countries like Italy, Spain and Germany, publishers made their own stories with the famous cat-and-mouse duo, made by local artists and writers.

For decades, the classic cartoons reran on TV channels all over the globe. They remained popular enough to motivate MGM in producing new theatrical shorts. Joe Barbera served as creative consultant.

Various direct-to-video films followed between and Yet the most enduring controversy has always been its violence. Many scenes are incredibly sadistic, especially towards Tom. Very realistic sound effects make the violence all the funnier, and more painful. Since the s moral guardians, like the censor-crazy British activist Mary Whitehouse but also various parental pressure groups in the U. Some people campaigned for censorship. In Italy, Massimo Mattioli 's comic book series 'Squeak the Mouse' satirized the controversy with a similar cat-and-mouse duo, but far more gruesome violence.

Scratchy the cat is a constant victim to Itchy's sadism, often without having done anything. He ends up being disemboweled, decapitated or dies other horrific deaths. Most of its output was devoted to production of animated TV series. Other low-budget animation studios had already tried their luck with TV cartoon shows, but none of them became hits.

Additionally, many studios didn't have the capacity to produce a full minute episode on a weekly basis. Walt Disney had the foresight to use the new medium as a promotion for his cartoons. Still, his TV shows mostly reran old animated cinematic shorts, with new footage linking this archive material together.

The success helped them finance new animated series, exclusively for television. To cut down costs, all animation was stylized and simplified, reusing stock footage and the same backgrounds whenever possible. Many of HB's early animated shows imitated the sitcom format, complete with a laugh track. All of these shows maintained their popularity in reruns. Generations have grown up enjoying these semi-animated characters, moving against ever-looping backgrounds.

Studio employees, animators and comic artists One of the prominent writers of Hanna-Barbera cartoons was Don R. Many worked on comic book stories too. With the onset of TV, the two men formed their own company in A coin toss determined whose name would be first.

The show became an instant hit and won Hanna-Barbera its first Emmy Award. It was also the first time an animated TV series won an Emmy. Next, the team created the character Quick Draw McGraw in It featured a cuddly looking horse who walked around on two legs and wore a fine Stetson hat. After its initial six-year run on ABC, it has remained one of the top-ranking animated programs in syndication history, with all original episodes still being viewed worldwide.

In a spin-off, there have been two major motion pictures with superstar actors playing the roles. Warner Bros. One Golden Globe. Cartoons storymen Michael Maltese and Warren Foster, who became new head writers for the studio — joined the staff at this time as well as Joe Ruby and Ken Spears as film editors and Iwao Takamoto as character designer.

Hanna and Barbera then also migrated into network primetime production with the ABC smash hit The Flintstones in Loosely based upon the Jackie Gleason series The Honeymooners, yet set in a fictionalized stone age of cavemen and dinosaurs, the show ran for six seasons, becoming a ratings and merchandising success.

It was the longest-running animated show in American prime time TV history and the top-ranking animated program in syndication history until being beaten out by The Simpsons in The Yogi Bear Show, the studio's first spinoff, premiered in syndication in Several animated TV commercials were produced as well, often starring their own characters probably the best known is a series of Pebbles cereal commercials for Post featuring Barney tricking Fred into giving him his Pebbles cereal.

Hanna-Barbera also produced the opening credits for Bewitched, in which animated caricatures of Samantha and Darrin appeared. These characterizations were reused in the fifth season Flintstones episode, "Samantha", voiced by Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York.

In , its operations moved off the Kling lot by then renamed the Red Skelton Studios to new location at Cahuenga Blvd. West in Hollywood, California. This contemporary office building was designed by architect Arthur Froehlich. Its ultra-modern design included a sculpted latticework exterior, moat, fountains, and after later additions, a Jetsons-like tower.

Its acquisition of Hanna-Barbera was delayed for a year by a lawsuit from Joan Perry, John Cohn, and Harrison Cohn — the wife and sons of former Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn, who felt that the animation firm had undervalued the Cohns' 18 percent share in the company when it was sold a few years previously. In , an adaptation of Laurel and Hardy, Frankenstein Jr.

Both Hanna and Barbera stayed on to run the company. Screen Gems retained licensing and distribution rights to Hanna-Barbera's previously produced cartoons, as well as the trademarks to the characters from those shows into the s and s.

Previously, children's records with Yogi Bear and others were released by Colpix Records. The series centered on four teenagers and a dog solving supernatural mysteries. On the horizon, Hanna-Barbera produced and unleashed a steady stream of further new shows for primetime, fresh cartoons for Saturday mornings, programs featuring mystery-solving, crime-fighting teenagers with comical pets and or mascots and many spinoffs for broadcast and the air.

It's the Hair Bear Bunch! Along with the rest of the American animation industry, it began moving away from producing all its cartoons in-house in the late s and early s. By this point in , Ruby and Spears left to found their own studio Ruby-Spears Enterprises, with Filmways as its parent company. In , Taft bought Worldvision Enterprises, which would become the syndication distributor for Hanna and Barbera's cartoons. In a different venture, the studio tried its hand at producing TV shows and films entirely in live-action for example, the realistic series Korg: 70, B.

Hanna-Barbera had already got into the live-action stuff earlier in the late sixties mixing it with animation. Its live-action division was spun off and renamed Solow Production Company, which immediately following the name change, was able to sell the action adventure TV series Man from Atlantis to NBC.

In Australia, Hanna-Barbera Pty. The studio launched a major thrust into the European market with the introduction of the Hanna-Barbera Hour, which was supported by an integrated European marketing program.

The studio's educational unit produced 26 new animated filmstrips part of its series Hanna-Barbera Educational Filmstrips, featuring its popular characters in new educated material.

For earthquake preparedness, Yogi Bear, one of Hanna and Barbera's most famous created stars, was chosen to be spokesman and mascot for Earthquake Preparedness Month in California and its most notable event is the Shakey Quakey Schoolhouse exhibit. Hanna-Barbera have produced nightly primetime, Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons for all three major networks and syndication in the U. The small budgets that TV animation producers had to work within prevented them, and most other producers of American TV animation, from working with the full theatrical-quality animation the duo had been known for at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

To keep within these tighter budgets, Hanna-Barbera modified the concept of limited animation also called semi-animation practiced and popularized by the United Productions of America UPA studio, which also once had a partnership with Columbia Pictures. Character designs were simplified, and backgrounds and animation cycles walks, runs, etc. Characters were often broken up into a handful of levels, so that only the parts of the body that needed to be moved at a given time i.

The rest of the figure would remain on a held animation cel. This allowed a typical minute short to be done with only 1, drawings instead of the usual 26, Dialogue, music, and sound effects were emphasized over action, leading Chuck Jones—a contemporary who worked for Hanna and Barbera's rivals at Warner Bros. Cartoons when the duo was at MGM, and one who, with his short The Dover Boys practically invented many of the concepts in limited animation—to disparagingly refer to the limited television cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera and others as "illustrated radio".

In a story published by The Saturday Evening Post in , critics stated that Hanna-Barbera was taking on more work than it could handle and was resorting to shortcuts only a television audience would tolerate. An executive who worked for Walt Disney Productions said, "We don't even consider [them] competition". Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman argues that Hanna-Barbera attempted to maximize their bottom line by also recycling story formulas and characterization instead of introducing new ones.

Once a formula for an original series was deemed successful, the studio would keep reusing it in subsequent series. Besides copying their own works, Hanna-Barbera would draw inspiration from the works of other people and studios. Lehman considers that the studio served as a main example of how animation studios which focused on TV animation differed from those that focused on theatrical animation. Theatrical animation studios tried to maintain full and fluid animation, and consequently struggled with the rising expenses associated with producing it.

Limited animation as practiced by Hanna-Barbera kept production costs at a minimum. The cost in quality of using this technique was that Hanna-Barbera's characters only moved when absolutely necessary. Ironically, in the late s and early s, Hanna-Barbera was the only studio in Hollywood that was actively hiring, and it picked up a number of Disney artists who were laid off during this period. Its solution to the criticism over its quality was to go into features.

It produced six theatrical features, among them are higher-quality versions of its TV cartoons and adaptations of other material. It was also the first animation studio to have their work produced overseas. One of these companies was a subsidiary started by Hanna-Barbera called Fil-Cartoons in the Philippines. Wang Film Productions got its start as an overseas facility for the studio in Hanna-Barbera's most popular smash hit show The Smurfs, based on the characters and comics by creator and Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford known as Peyo and centering on a gang of little blue forest dwelling creatures led by Papa Smurf, premiered and aired for nine seasons, becoming a significant ratings success, the top-rated program in eight years, the longest-running Saturday morning cartoon series in TV history and the highest for an NBC program since Hanna-Barbera had set up a computerized digital ink and paint system at the studio around and , and for its time, it was really innovative.

It was one of the first to use digital coloring long before Disney and other animation studios started using the process as well. It did not require as much effort as the time consuming labor of painting on cels and photographing them. The studio did use it on some of its cartoons but not on all of them however. Big Cartoons, Mook Co. The studio presented The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible, its first made-for-video series.