Hanna-Barbera

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Hanna-Barbera was an animated cartoon production company that dominated North American television animation during the second half of the 20th century. The company was originally formed in 1944 by MGM animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and live-action director George Sidney as H-B Enterprises in order to produce sponsored films and later television commercials.

After MGM shut down its animation studio in 1957, H-B Enterprises became Hanna and Barbera's full-time job, and the company was re-named Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1960. Over the next three decades, Hanna-Barbera produced many successful cartoon shows, including The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Yogi Bear Show, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo, and The Smurfs, many of which would go on to become icons of Western pop culture. In the mid-1980s, the company's fortunes declined somewhat after the profitability of Saturday morning cartoons were eclipsed by weekday afternoon syndication.

In 1991, the company was purchased by Turner Broadcasting, primarily so that Turner could use its extensive cartoon library as the basis of the programming for its new Cartoon Network cable television channel. Re-christened H-B Production Company in 1992, and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1993, the studio continued without active regular input from William Hanna or Joseph Barbera, who both went into semi-retirement yet continued to serve as ceremonial figureheads for the studio. During the late 1990s, Turner turned Hanna-Barbera towards primarily producing new material for the Cartoon Network. In 1996, Turner was bought out by Time Warner. With Bill Hanna's death in 2001, Hanna-Barbera was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation, and Cartoon Network Studios assumed production of Cartoon Network output. Joe Barbera remained with Warner Bros. Animation until his death in 2006. The Hanna-Barbera name is today only used to market properties and productions associated with Hanna-Barbera's "classic" works such as The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo.

[edit] History

[edit] The beginnings of Hanna-Barbera

Melrose, New Mexico native William Hanna and New York City-born Joseph Barbera first teamed together while working at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in 1939. Their first directorial project was a cartoon entitled Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which served as the genesis of the popular Tom and Jerry cartoon series. Hanna and Barbera served as the directors and story men for the Tom and Jerry cartoons for seventeen years, winning eight Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) between 1943 and 1953 for their work.

Hanna, Barbera, and MGM live-action director George Sidney formed H-B Enterprises in 1944 while continuing working for MGM, and used the side company to work on ancillary projects, including early television commercials and the original opening titles to the popular 1950s television series I Love Lucy.

MGM closed their animation studio in 1957, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release. Hanna and Barbera hired most of their MGM unit to work for H-B Enterprises, which became a full-fledged production company at this time. The decision was made to specialize in television animation. In order to obtain working capital to produce their cartoons, H-B made a deal with the Screen Gems television division of Columbia Pictures in which the new animation studio received working capital in exchange for distribution rights. H-B's first TV series was The Ruff & Reddy Show, which premiered on NBC in December 1957.

In 1958, H-B had their first big success with The Huckleberry Hound Show, a syndicated series aired in most markets just before primetime. The program was a ratings success, and introduced a new crop of cartoon stars to audiences, in particular Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear. The Huckleberry Hound Show won the 1960 Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Children's Programming.

By 1959, H-B Enterprises was reincorporated as Hanna-Barbera Productions, and was slowly becoming a leader in television animation production. After introducing a second syndicated series, Quick Draw McGraw, in 1959, Hanna-Barbera migrated into network primetime production with the animated ABC sitcom The Flintstones in 1960. Loosely based upon the popular live-action sitcom The Honeymooners yet set in a fictionalized stone age of cavemen and dinosaurs, The Flintstones ran for six seasons in prime time on ABC, becoming a ratings and merchandising success.

Hanna-Barbera never had a building of its own until 1963, when the Hanna-Barbera Studio, located at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. in Studio City, California, was opened. The Columbia/Hanna-Barbera partnership lasted until 1967, when Hanna and Barbera sold the studio to Taft Broadcasting while retaining their positions at the studio.

[edit] Television cartoons

Hanna-Barbera was one of the first animation studio to successfully produce animated cartoons especially for television. Until then, cartoons on television consisted primarily of rebroadcasts of theatrical cartoons. During the early and mid-1960s, the studio debuted several new successful programs, among them prime time ABC series such as Top Cat (1961-62), The Jetsons (1962-63), and Jonny Quest (1964-65). New series produced for syndication and Saturday mornings included The Yogi Bear Show (a syndicated spinoff from Huckleberry Hound, 1961-63), The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series featuring Wally Gator (syndicated, 1962-63), The Magilla Gorilla Show (syndicated, 1964-67), and The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show (NBC, 1965-67). Hanna-Barbera also produced several television commercials, often starring their own characters, and animated the opening credits for the ABC sitcom Bewitched, and would use the Bewitched characters as guest stars on The Flintstones.

The studio also produced a few theatrical projects for Columbia Pictures, including Loopy De Loop, a series of theatrical cartoons shorts, and two feature film projects based on its television properties, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! (1964) and A Man Called Flintstone (1966).

Starting in 1965, Hanna-Barbera tried its hand at being a record label for a short time. Danny Hutton was hired by Hanna-Barbera to become the head of Hanna Barbera Records or HBR from 1965-1966.^[1] HBR Records was distributed by Columbia/CBS Records, with artists such as Louis Prima, Five Americans, Scatman Crothers, and The 13th Floor Elevators. Previously, children's records with Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters were released by Colpix Records.

The Hanna-Barbera studio especially captured the market for Saturday morning cartoons. After the success of The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show in 1965, H-B debuted two new Saturday morning series the following year: Space Ghost and Dino Boy, which featured action-adventure, and Frankenstein, Jr. and The Impossibles, which blended action-adventure with the earlier H-B style. A slew of H-B action cartoons followed in 1967, among them Shazzan, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, Moby Dick and the Mighty Mightor, Young Samson and Goliath, The Herculoids and an adaptation of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four. Between these programs and others remaining on the air (reruns of The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Jonny Quest), Hanna-Barbera cartoons aired on all three networks' Saturday morning lineups, and dominated CBS's and NBC's schedules in particular.

While the action programs were notably popular and successful, pressure from parent-run organizations such as Action for Children's Television forced the cancellation of all of them by 1969. ^[2] In 1968, Hanna-Barbera mixed live-action and animated comedy-action for its NBC anthology series, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, while the successful Wacky Races, aired on CBS, returned H-B to straight animated slapstick humor.

Hanna-Barbera's next runaway hit came with Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, a program which blended elements of the H-B comedy series, the action series, and rival Filmation's then-current hit program The Archie Show. Scooby-Doo centered on four teenagers and a dog solving mysteries, and was popular enough to remain on the air and in production until 1986. A cavalcade of H-B Saturday morning cartoons featuring mystery-solving/crime-fighting teenagers with comic pets soon followed, among them Josie and the Pussycats (1970-72), The Funky Phantom (1971-72), Speed Buggy (1973-74), Clue Club (1976-78) and Jabberjaw (1976-77).

During the 1970s in particular, most American television animation was produced by Hanna-Barbera. The only competition came from Filmation and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, as well as occasional prime-time animated "specials" from Rankin-Bass, Chuck Jones and Bill Melendez's adaptations of Peanuts.

[edit] Quality controversy

Over three decades, Hanna-Barbera produced prime-time, weekday afternoon, and Saturday morning cartoons for all three major networks in the United States, and for syndication. The studio has been accused of contributing to the decrease in quality of animation and TV cartoons from the 1960s through the 1980s. However, the studio, and most other producers of American television animation, were forced to work with small budgets which did not allow for full theatrical-quality animation. At MGM, Hanna and Barbera spent between $40,000 and $50,000 to produce each seven-minute cartoon short, whereas they had less than $3,000 to spend on their first TV cartoons of equivalent length. The perception of cartoons as a "kid's medium" made them a low priority for television executives and advertisers. For example, one 22-minute (30 minutes with commercials) episode of Josie and the Pussycats in 1970 had the same budget, $45,000, as an eight-minute Tom and Jerry short from the late-1940s. Such budgetary constraints demanded a change in production values.

In a story published by The Saturday Evening Post, critics stated that Hanna-Barbera was taking on more work than they could handle and were 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." [1] Ironically, during the late 1950s and early 1960s Hanna-Barbera was the only animation studio in Hollywood that was actively hiring, and they picked up a number of Disney artists who were laid off during this period.

Hanna-Barbera introduced limited animation, popularized in theatrical animation by United Productions of America, on The Ruff & Reddy Show as a way of reducing costs. This led to a reduction in animation quality, which was counteracted by a far greater emphasis on character design and posing, as well as scripted jokes and voice work. The studio's solution to the resulting criticism was to go into features, producing both higher-quality versions of their TV cartoons (Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!, The Man Called Flintstone, and Jetsons: The Movie in 1990) and adaptations of other material (Charlotte's Web in 1973 and Heidi's Song in 1982).

The field of American animation reached its low point in the mid-1970s, even as the audience for Saturday morning cartoons was at its peak. The strong focus on scripting and dialogue that had carried the earlier cartoons was more or less gone by 1973, as the studio's output had increased to the point that story quality had to take a backseat to production output. By this time, most Hanna-Barbera shows had degenerated into variations on but a few themes, with each successful formula (The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, SuperFriends) milked dry through repetition. Various animation short-cuts became unfortunate Hanna-Barbera trademarks, such as plots being advanced by characters seen only as "talking heads," and crashes and disasters happening just off the frame, heard but not seen. The soundtracks rather than the visuals carried the majority of the plot and humor of the cartoons. This era of H-B animation is frequently skewered by Adult Swim (most notably Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and Sealab 2021) and in many of Robert Smigel's "TV Funhouse" segments on Saturday Night Live.

[edit] The slow rise and fall

The state of the field of animation changed during the 1980s, thanks to competitors' syndicated cartoon series based upon popular toys and action figures, including Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Rankin-Bass' Thundercats. The Hanna-Barbera studio fell behind, as a new wave of animators and production studios introduced variety into the market for TV cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s.

Throughout the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera churned out shows based on familiar licensed properties like The Smurfs, The Snorks, Pac-Man, The Dukes of Hazzard, Shirt Tales, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, and GoBots, and also produced several ABC Weekend Specials. Some of their shows were produced at their Australian-based studio (a partnership with Australian media company Southern Star Entertainment), including Drak Pack, Wildfire, The Berenstain Bears, Teen Wolf, and almost all of the CBS Storybreak specials. The studio also worked on other projects with less fanfare during the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the direct-to-video series The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible.

H-B also aligned themselves with Ruby-Spears Productions, which was founded in 1977 by former H-B employees Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. H-B's then-parent Taft Broadcasting purchased Ruby-Spears from Filmways in 1981, and Ruby-Spears often paired their productions with Hanna-Barbera shows.

Following the lead of CBS' hit 1984 Saturday morning cartoon series Muppet Babies, which featured toddler versions of the popular Muppets characters, Hanna-Barbera began producing shows featuring "kid" versions of popular characters. These included Pink Panther and Sons, The Flintstone Kids, Popeye and Son, and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. In 1985, Hanna-Barbera launched The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, a weekend-only program that introduced new versions of old favorites like Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, The Snorks, and Richie Rich alongside brand new shows like Galtar and the Golden Lance, Paw Paw Bears, Fantastic Max, and Midnight Patrol. The following year, H-B started Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10, a series of 10 original telefilms based on their popular stable of characters, including the popular crossover The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones.

Throughout all of this, both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears were subject to the financial troubles of parent company Taft Broadcasting, which had just been acquired by the American Financial Corporation in 1987 and had its name changed to Great American Broadcasting the following year. H-B had gradually moved away from producing everything in-house, deciding instead to outsource some of the production to studios in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan (including studios like Toei Animation, Wang Film Productions and Fil-Cartoon). Hanna-Barbera in particular was also held down by the demands of TV networks, mainly ABC, who insisted on rehashing the Scooby-Doo formula many times over, as with Captain Caveman and Josie and the Pussycats; this stifled creativity, leading many of the better writers and creative people to leave in 1989. They responded to a call from Warner Bros. to resurrect their animation department, ultimately developing Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs.

[edit] The Turner rebound

In 1990, burdened with debt, Great American put both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears up for sale. In 1991, Hanna-Barbera and much of the original Ruby-Spears library were acquired by Turner Broadcasting.

Turner's President of Entertainment Scott Sassa turned to an unusual choice to lead the failing studio. Fred Seibert was a cable television branding guru who had created the MTV and Nickelodeon branding and marketing, and had invented Nick-at-Nite, but he had never worked in cartoon production. He immediately filled the gap left by the departure of most of their creative crew during the Great American years with a new crop of animators, writers, and producers, including Pat Ventura, Donovan Cook, Craig McCracken, Genndy Tartakovsky, Seth MacFarlane, David Feiss, Van Partible, and Butch Hartman and new production head Buzz Potamkin. In 1992, the studio was renamed H-B Productions Company, changing its name once again to Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc. a year later.

In the early 1990s, Hanna-Barbera created more new cartoon shows like Tom and Jerry Kids (and its spin-off, Droopy: Master Detective) and The New Adventures of Captain Planet (a sequel to the original DiC/TBS Productions series Captain Planet and the Planeteers), and the ill-fated Yo Yogi!. They also introduced shows that were quite different from their previous releases, including Wake, Rattle, and Roll, 2 Stupid Dogs, Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron, and The Pirates of Dark Water. In the mid-1990s, Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network (which introduced many Hanna-Barbera shows to a new audience) launched Seibert's innovation, the back-to-the-future concept of cartoon shorts World Premiere Toons (a.k.a. What A Cartoon!), which introduced a brand new stable of characters and, in a way, changed Hanna-Barbera forever.

The first original Cartoon Network series to emerge from the World Premiere Toons project was Genndy Tartakovsky's Dexter's Laboratory. Others programs followed, including Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, and The Powerpuff Girls, the last series to use H-B's famous swirling star logo (first used in 1979). H-B also produced several new direct-to-video movies featuring Scooby-Doo (released by Warner Bros.) as well as a new Jonny Quest series, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest.

After the merger between Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner in 1996, the conglomerate had two separate animation studios in its possession. Though under a common ownership, Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. Animation operated separately until 1998. That year, the Hanna-Barbera building was closed and the studio was moved to the Warner Bros. Animation lot at Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California.

[edit] The Cartoon Network Studios era

See also: Cartoon Network Studios

Around 1998, the Hanna-Barbera name began to disappear from the newer shows from the studio in favor of the Cartoon Network Studios name. This came in handy with shows that were produced outside of Hanna-Barbera, but Cartoon Network had a hand in producing, like a.k.a. Cartoon's Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Kino Films' Mike, Lu and Og, and Curious Pictures' Sheep in the Big City, as well as the shows the studio continued to produce, like The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Samurai Jack and various original Cartoon Network shows. This is in spite of the fact that the Cartoon Network Studios brand name was created to produce the first season of Dexter's Laboratory (ironically, the brand name would return to the show when it was revived in 2001).

When William Hanna died on March 22, 2001, an era was over. The last official Hanna-Barbera production was Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase, for which was Hanna was the dedicatee; the actual production was to Warner Bros. Animation. After 2001, Hanna-Barbera was completely absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation and further Cartoon Network projects were handled by Cartoon Network Studios. Joseph Barbera continued to work for Warner Bros. Animation on projects relating to Hanna-Barbera and Tom & Jerry properties until his death on December 18, 2006.

Though the Hanna-Barbera name remains on the copyright notices of new productions based on "classic" properties like the Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, and others, the studio that produces it is Warner Bros. Animation (generally, although Cartoon Network Studios has occasionally handled production); whereas most Cartoon Network series previously produced by Hanna-Barbera are copyrighted by the channel itself.

[edit] Syndication and distribution

From 1957 to 1966, Hanna-Barbera cartoons were distributed to television by Screen Gems, the TV arm of Columbia Pictures. Upon Taft Broadcasting's acquisition of Hanna-Barbera in 1966, Hanna-Barbera's productions were distributed by then-sister company Worldvision Enterprises (since 1979, the year Worldvision was acquired by Taft), with the exception of select material such as licensed properties.

Turner Program Services assumed syndication rights in 1991 after Turner Entertainment purchased the company, an arrangement which continued until the 1997 Turner-Time Warner merger. TPS was folded into Telepictures Distribution, which handled the works produced by Hanna-Barbera (and, as a rule, other select non-Warner Bros.-produced material as well).

Today, all Hanna-Barbera properties under Time Warner control are distributed by Warner Bros. Television Distribution, although some of the shows still carry either a Turner or Telepictures logo.

[edit] List of notable Hanna-Barbera productions

For a complete list of Hanna-Barbera productions, see List of works produced by Hanna-Barbera. For a list of Hanna-Barbera TV shows released in DVD season sets, see List of Hanna-Barbera TV shows on DVD.