Hanna-Barbera

From The TV IV

Jump to: navigation, search

Hanna-Barbera Productions was an animation company founded by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

[edit] History

Hanna and Barbera originally worked (as a team) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's animation department; their most famous creation for that studio was Tom and Jerry. When MGM closed their animation department, Hanna and Barbera decided to start their own animation studio, producing cartoons for television. Their first series was The Ruff and Reddy Show (1957-1960), a "serialized" cartoon similar to Crusader Rabbit; their second series, The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1962), became popular enough to make them a household name.

At the very start of their studio, they managed to secure financing for their earliest projects from Screen Gems, the TV distribution arm of Columbia Pictures. After much negotiating, they sold Ruff and Reddy to NBC, but they could only get $2700 per half hour of cartoon (which were shown as features to live action host segments), meaning all the lavish detail afforded to Tom & Jerry had to be streamlined to the near bare bones. The series' appealing heroes and clever storylines compensated for the artistic liabilities. Ruff and Reddy was a modest success.

From the late 1950s to the early 1990s, Hanna-Barbera produced a huge volume of cartoons, mostly funny-animal fare, but also including adventure and mystery shows. Most of their cartoons featured limited animation, to facilitate rapid production; what the shows lacked in movement, they made up for in cleverness and/or humor (depending on the series). This limited animation has been termed "assembly line" production but has been critically derided as "illustrated radio." The studio did make two theatrical features in the 1960s, 1964's Hey, There...It's Yogi Bear! and 1966's The Man Called Flintstone.

The Huckleberry Hound Show was the studio's first major hit and it won them an Emmy (first of five). That show spawned Yogi Bear, the studio's first true superstar. Noticing that half the show's audience was adults, Hanna-Barbera considered doing a prime time cartoon for grown-ups. Seeing an artist's gag picture and taking a nod from Tex Avery's 1953 cartoon The First Bad Man, H-B produced a pilot for a show taking place in the stone age. It was called The Flagstones. There was a comic strip called Hi And Lois whose family name was The Flagstons already, so the name had to be changed. HB sold the show to ABC under its new name, The Flintstones. It wasn't a critical darling by any means, but by its own standards and given its six-year run (never cracking the Top 20), it was critic-proof. At first it paralleled Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners so much that Gleason filed a plagiarism suit against Hanna-Barbera. The studio attempted to start up a series of theatrical animated short subjects, Loopy De Loop, in 1959. It lasted three years.

The studio focused on syndicated and prime time shows up until 1966 (which at this point Columbia sold its interest in the studio to Taft Broadcasting), when the networks expanded their Saturday morning schedules. Hanna-Barbera became the go-to guys for Saturday morning, but due to the expanding schedules, the chew-'em-up-and-spit-'em-out atmosphere of TV and tight deadlines, many of their shows were plain anethema to critics, parents, the PTA and buffs of the Golden Age of Animation. Two prime time specials were made; they won an Emmy for a live action/animated take on the story Jack & The Beanstalk which starred and was produced by actor Gene Kelly. It aired on NBC in 1966. A year later they made Alice in Wonderland: Or, What's A Nice Kid Like You Doing In A Place Like This? for ABC.

In 1969, the studio created their third most popular star, Scooby Doo. With his show Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! a big hit, H-B (and other studios) began populating Saturday morning with mystery-busting kids and smart aleck pets throughout the 1970s. The studio produced an animated adaptation of Charlotte's Web for theaters in 1973. It was their best reviewed animated theatrical feature. They dabbled in live-action once in awhile, winning an Emmy for their 1977 TV movie drama The Gathering, and making a forgettable family comedy fantasy, 1979's C.H.O.M.P.S.

In the 1980s, the H-B studio was in some financial straits and at one time sought the Filmation studio as a buyer. Filmation was hurting as well and was bought out (and closed down in 1988) by Revlon. H-B kept on going. In the 1980s, they brought Peyo's The Smurfs to TV. The Smurfs were hated by everyone except the most undiscriminating children. In 1982 they produced their third theatrical animated feature, Heidi's Song. They made two other animated features for theaters afterwards--1990's The Jetsons: The Movie and 1992's Once Upon A Forest.

In the 1990s, Hanna-Barbera Productions was bought out by Turner Broadcasting, and its library of cartoons was eventually made part of Cartoon Network when that network launched in 1992. In 1996, Hanna-Barbera (as well as all Turner properties) were bought by Time Warner. The last H-B show made for Saturday morning was a TV version of the movie Dumb And Dumber. At that point with Warner Bros. now calling the shots to both Hollywood and Atlanta (Cartoon Network's broadcast home), the studio's focus was now on shows driven by their creators and screened on Cartoon Network. Genndy Tartakovsky's Dexter's Laboratory and Craig McCracken's The Powerpuff Girls were two of their biggest hits. In 2001, the studio shut down (it is now an L.A. Fitness Center) and the animators moved to a new studio in Burbank. Bill Hanna died in 2001 followed by Joe Barbera's death in 2006.

Most shows produced by Hanna-Barbera are now distributed on TV by Warner Bros. Television (WBTV), with a few exceptions:

[edit] External Sites

Retrieved from "http://tviv.org/Hanna-Barbera"

Personal tools
sponsored links