This article is about the American animation studio active from 1957 to 2001. For the individuals, see William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. For the currently active British animation studio, see Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe.
Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.
The Hanna-Barbera headquarters in Los Angeles in the 1990s. The "swirling star" logo on the right was designed by Saul Bass in 1979.
By the time Hanna died in 2001, Hanna-Barbera as a standalone company was folded into Warner Bros. Animation. The name continues to be used for copyright, marketing and branding purposes for former properties now produced by Warner Bros.
Hanna supervised the animation,[11] while Barbera did the stories and pre-production. Seven of the 114 cartoons won seven Oscars for "Best Short Subject (Cartoons)" between 1943 and 1953, and five additional shorts were nominated for twelve awards during this period. However, they were awarded to producer Fred Quimby, who was not involved in the development of the shorts.[12]: 83–84
In addition to continuing to write and direct new Tom & Jerry shorts, now in CinemaScope, Hanna and Barbera supervised the last seven shorts of Tex Avery's Droopy series and produced and directed the short-lived Spike and Tyke, which ran for two entries. In addition to their work on the cartoons, the two men moonlighted on outside projects, including title sequences and commercials for I Love Lucy.[14]
MGM decided in mid-1957 to close its cartoon studio, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release.[13] While contemplating their future, Hanna and Barbera began producing additional animated television commercials.[15] During their last year at MGM, they had developed a concept for a new animated TV program about a cat and a dog.[15]
After failing to convince the studio to back their venture, George Sidney, who had worked with Hanna and Barbera on several of his movies for MGM, offered to serve as their business partner and convinced Screen Gems to make a deal with the producers.[3] A coin toss gave Hanna precedence in naming the new studio. Harry Cohn, president and head of Columbia Pictures, took an 18% ownership in H-B Enterprises,[3] and provided working capital.
Screen Gems became the new distributor and its licensing agent, handling merchandizing of the characters from the animated programs[16] as the cartoon firm officially opened for business in rented offices on the lot of Kling Studios (formerly Charlie Chaplin Studios)[14] on July 7, 1957, one year after the MGM animation studio closed.[15]
Sidney and several Screen Gems alumni became members of the studio's board of directors and much of the former MGM animation staff—including animators Carlo Vinci, Kenneth Muse, Lewis Marshall, Michael Lah and Ed Barge and layout artists Ed Benedict and Richard Bickenbach—became the new production staff[15] while Hoyt Curtin was in charge of providing the music.
After reincorporating as Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., The Quick Draw McGraw Show and the theatrical cartoon short series Loopy De Loop followed in 1959. Walt Disney Productions laid off several of its animators after Sleeping Beauty (1959) bombed on the box-office during its initial theatrical run, with many of them moving to Hanna-Barbera shortly afterwards.[19] In August 1960, it moved into a window-less, cinder block building at 3501 Cahuenga Boulevard West.[20] Though too small to house the staff, some of its employees worked at home.
The Flintstones premiered on ABC on September 30 1960, becoming so the first animated series airing in prime time. It is loosely based on The Honeymooners and is set in a fictionalized Stone Age of cavemen and dinosaurs. Jackie Gleason considered suing Hanna-Barbera for copyright infringement, but decided not to because he did not want to be known as "the man who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air".[21] For six seasons, it became the longest-running animated show in American prime time at the time (until The Simpsons beat it in 1997), a ratings and merchandising success and the top-ranking animated program in syndication history. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, but its reputation eventually improved and it is now considered a classic.
The partnership with Screen Gems would last until 1965 when Hanna and Barbera announced the sale of their studio to Taft Broadcasting.[16] Taft's acquisition of Hanna-Barbera was delayed for a year by a lawsuit from Cohn's family, wife Joan Perry and sons John and Harrison Cohn, who felt the studio undervalued the Cohns' 18% share in when it was sold a few years previously.[22]
In 1966, Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles and Space Ghost debuted, and by December of that year the litigation had been settled, Taft finally acquired Hanna-Barbera for $12 million and folded the studio into its corporate structure in 1967 and 1968,[16] becoming its distributor. Hanna and Barbera stayed on while Screen Gems retained licensing and distribution rights to their previous produced cartoons[16] and trademarks to the characters into the 1970s and 1980s.[16][23]
Hanna-Barbera teamed up with Avco Broadcasting Corporation in 1971, a company that was once a rival to its owner Taft at that time, who maintains rivalry in the Columbus and Cincinnati markets, to produce two holiday specials for the syndicated market by way of its syndicated division.[29] In 1972, H-B opened an animation studio in Australia, with the Hamlyn Group acquiring a 50% stake in 1974.
New live-action material was produced, as well as new live-action/animated combos since the mid-1960s. In 1975, former MGM executive Herbert F. Solow joined the company to start a live-action unit, Hanna-Barbera Television, to produce prime time programming,[30] which later spun off and became Solow Production Company in 1976.[31][32]
Along with the animation industry in the U.S., it moved away from producing in-house in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While The Great Grape Ape Show and The Mumbly Cartoon Show aired, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears (creators of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!) worked with Hanna-Barbera in 1976 and 1977 as ABC network executives to create and develop new cartoons before leaving in 1977 to start their company, Ruby-Spears Enterprises, with Filmways as its parent division.[27] In 1979, Taft bought Worldvision Enterprises, which became Hanna-Barbera's new distributor.
While Filmation, Sunbow Productions, Marvel Productions, Rankin/Bass, DIC, Saban Entertainment and other Hollywood animation factories introduced successful animated series syndicated, including some based on licensed properties, Hanna-Barbera fell behind, as it no longer dominated the TV animation market as it did years earlier and lost control over children's programming, going down from 80% to 20%.
Hanna-Barbera Poland, a Polish branch of the American studio, opened up and dealt with the promotion and distribution of animated H-B content and is most well known for releasing VHS tapes with Polish music distributor P.P. Polskie Nagrania, which mostly consisted of numbered compilation releases of Hanna-Barbera shows on one tape. This would last until 1993, when the company separated and reincorporated itself as Curtis Art Productions.
Great American sold Worldvision to Aaron Spelling Productions, while Hanna-Barbera and its library remained with them. Hanna-Barbera split off from Worldvision Home Video in early 1989 to start out its own home video division, Hanna-Barbera Home Video.[38] In January 1989, while working on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Tom Ruegger got a call from Warner Bros. to resurrect its animation department.[39]
Ruegger, along with several of his colleagues, left Hanna-Barbera at that time to develop Tiny Toon Adventures at Warner Bros.[39]David Kirschner, known for An American Tail and Child's Play, was later appointed as the studio's new CEO.[40] Later that year, the company had a licensing agreement with MicroIllusions, a video game publisher, to produce video games based on its properties, namely Jonny Quest, The Jetsons and others.[41]
Acquisition by Turner and absorption into Warner Bros. Animation (1991–2001)
Turner Broadcasting System outbid MCA (then-parent company of Universal Pictures), Hallmark Cards and other major companies in acquiring Hanna-Barbera while also purchasing Ruby-Spears as well.[citation needed] The two studios were acquired in a 50-50 joint venture between Turner Broadcasting System and Apollo Investment Fund for $320 million.[43][44] Turner purchased these assets to launch a then-new all-animation network aimed at children and younger audiences.
In 1993, the studio again renamed itself to Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc. (though the Hanna-Barbera Productions name was still used in regards to the pre-1992 properties) and, while Turner acquired its remaining interests from Apollo Investment Fund for $255 million,[47]2 Stupid Dogs, Droopy, Master Detective, The New Adventures of Captain Planet and SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron emerged that year. Turner refocused the studio to produce new shows exclusively for its networks.
In 1998, following The Powerpuff Girls, Hanna-Barbera moved from Cahuenga Blvd. to Sherman Oaks Galleria in Sherman Oaks, California in 1998, where Warner Bros. Animation was located. I Am Weasel would be its final show in 1999. After the studio's absorption into Warner Bros. Animation,[49][50] Hanna died of throat cancer on March 22, 2001, at the age of 90 years old.
After the absorption and Barbera's final years (2002–2006)
While Cartoon Network Studios took over production of programming,[51] the Los Angeles City Council approved a plan to preserve the Cahuenga Blvd. headquarters in May 2004, while allowing retail and residential development on the site.[52]
Barbera died of natural causes on December 18, 2006, at the age of 95 years old.[53] Warner Bros. Animation continues to produce new productions based on the Hanna-Barbera properties since then.[54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62]Cartoon Network Studios Europe was rebranded as Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe paying tribute to the studio in April 2021.[63]
Production
Production process changes
The small budgets that television animation producers had to work within prevented Hanna-Barbera from working with the full theatrical-quality animation that Hanna and Barbera had been known for at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. While the budget for MGM's seven-minute Tom and Jerry shorts was about $35,000, the Hanna-Barbera studios were required to produce five-minute Ruff and Reddy episodes for no more than $3,000 apiece.[3] To keep within these tighter budgets, Hanna-Barbera furthered the concept of limited animation (also called "planned animation")[64] 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.) were regularly re-purposed.
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.e. a mouth, an arm, a head) were animated. The rest of the figure remained on a held animation cel. This allowed a typical seven-minute short to be done with only nearly 2,000 drawings instead of the usual 14,000.[65] Dialogue, music, and sound effects were emphasized over action, leading Chuck Jones—a contemporary who worked for Warner Bros. Cartoons and whose 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".[66]
In a story published by The Saturday Evening Post in 1961, 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.[67] An executive who worked for Walt Disney Productions said, "We don't even consider [them] competition".[67] Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman argues that Hanna-Barbera attempted to maximize their bottom line by recycling story formulas and characterization instead of introducing new ones. Once a formula for an original series was deemed successful, the studio reused it in subsequent series.[68] Besides copying their own works, Hanna-Barbera drew inspiration from the works of other people and studios.[68]
Lehman considers that the studio served as the main example of how animation studios that 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.[68] 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 necessary.[68]
Its solution to the criticism over its quality was to go into films. It produced six theatrical feature films, among them are higher-quality versions of its television cartoons and adaptations of other material. It was also one of the first animation studios to have their work produced overseas. One of these companies was a subsidiary began by Hanna-Barbera in November 1987 called Fil-Cartoons in the Philippines,[69][70] with Jerry Smith as a consultant for the subsidiary.[71]Wang Film Productions got its start as an overseas facility for the studio in 1978.[72]
Digital innovation
Hanna-Barbera was among the first animation studios to incorporate digital tools into their pipeline. As early as the 1970s, they experimented with using Scanimate, a video synthesizer, to create an early form of digital cutout style. A clip of artists using the machine to manipulate scanned images of Scooby-Doo characters, scaling and warping the artwork to simulate animation, is available at the Internet Archive.[73]
Likewise, Hanna-Barbera was perhaps the first proponent of digital ink and paint, a process wherein animators' drawings were scanned into computers and colored using software. Led by Marc Levoy, Hanna-Barbera began developing a computerized digital ink and paint system in 1979 to help bypass much of the time-consuming labor of painting and photographing cels.[74] The process was implemented on a third of Hanna-Barbera's animated programs, televised feature films and specials from 1982 through 1996.[74][75]
Sound effects
Hanna-Barbera was known for its large library of sound effects, which have been featured in exhibitions at the Norman Rockwell Museum.[76]
Ownership
After Hanna-Barbera's partnership with Screen Gems ended in 1966, it was sold to Taft Broadcasting,[77] where it remained its owner until 1991 when Turner Broadcasting System acquired the studio and its library for its flagship network, Cartoon Network.[78][79] In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner, then WarnerMedia, now Warner Bros. Discovery.[80]
The studio was separated from Cartoon Network Studios and absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation in 2001. Since its closure, Hanna-Barbera became an in-name-only unit of Warner Bros. and it has continued to produce new material and programming based on its classic intellectual property and the classic Hanna-Barbera logo occasionally appears.
In 1998, the rights to Hanna-Barbera's productions for Cartoon Network (excluding The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest) were transferred to the latter entity, Cartoon Network claimed ownership of later Hanna-Barbera co-productions beginning with Cow & Chicken's third season.
^Seibert, Fred; Burnett, Bill. "Unlimited Imagination". Animation World Network. Retrieved January 8, 2021. Seibert was also a former president at Hanna-Barbera.