Hanna-Barbera

Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.
Private company (1957–1967)
Subsidiary (1967–2001)
Name-only unit (2001–present)
Industry Animation
Television production
Fate Separated from subsidiary Cartoon Network Studios and folded into Warner Bros. Animation
Successor Warner Bros. Animation
Cartoon Network Studios
Founded July 7, 1957[1]
Founder William Hanna
Joseph Barbera
George Sidney
Defunct 2001
Headquarters Los Angeles, California, United States
Products TV series
Theatrical films
TV specials
Direct-to-video projects
TV movies
Parent Independent
(1957–1967)
Taft Broadcasting
(1967–1987)
American Financial Corp. (1987–1988)
Great American Broadcasting (1988–1991)
Turner Broadcasting System (1991–1996)
Time Warner (as AOL Time Warner from 2001–2003)
(1996–2001)

Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. (also known at various times as H-B Enterprises, H-B Production Company and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons) was an American animation studio that dominated American television animation for nearly three decades in the mid-to-late 20th century. It was formed in 1957 by former Metro Goldwyn Mayer animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (creators of Tom and Jerry) and live-action director George Sidney in partnership with Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems television division.[2] The company was sold to Taft Broadcasting in late 1966, and spent the next two decades as a subsidiary of the parent and its successors.

For thirty years, Hanna-Barbera produced many successful animated shows, including The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, and The Smurfs, earning eight Emmy Awards,[3] a Golden Globe Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, among other merits. The company's fortunes declined in the mid-eighties after the profitability of Saturday morning cartoons was eclipsed by weekday afternoon syndication. Hanna-Barbera was purchased from Taft (by then named Great American Broadcasting) in late 1991 by Turner Broadcasting System, who used much of its back catalog to program its new channel, Cartoon Network.[4][5]

After Turner purchased the company, both Hanna and Barbera continued to serve as mentors and creative consultants. In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner, and Hanna-Barbera became a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Animation. With Hanna's death in 2001, it was absorbed into its parent, and Cartoon Network Studios continued the projects for the channel's output. Barbera continued to work for Warner Bros. Animation until his death in 2006. The studio now exists as an in-name-only company used to market properties and productions associated with the Hanna-Barbera library, specifically its "classic" works.

In 2005, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences honored Hanna and Barbera with a bronze wall sculpture of them and the characters they created. Hanna-Barbera was known not only for its vast variety of series and characters, but for building upon and popularizing the concepts and uses of limited animation.

History

Founders William Hanna (left) and Joseph Barbera pose with several of the Emmy awards the Hanna-Barbera studio has won.

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 animated project together was Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which served as the genesis of the popular Tom and Jerry series of theatricals. Hanna and Barbera served as the directors and story men of the shorts for eighteen years. Seven of the cartoons won seven Oscars for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) between 1943 and 1953, though the trophies were awarded to their producer Fred Quimby, who was not involved in the creative development of the shorts.[6]:83–84 With Quimby's retirement in 1955, Hanna and Barbera became the producers in charge of the MGM animation studio's output.[7]

Outside of their work on the MGM shorts, the two men moonlighted on outside projects, including the original title sequences and commercials for the hit television series I Love Lucy.[8] MGM decided in early 1957 to close its cartoon studio, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release.[7] Hanna and Barbera, contemplating their future while completing the final Tom and Jerry and Droopy cartoons, began producing animated television commercials.[1] During their last year at MGM, they developed a concept for an animated television program about a dog and cat pair who found themselves in various misadventures.[1] After they failed to convince MGM to back their venture, live-action director George Sidney, who'd worked with Hanna and Barbera on several of his features – most notably Anchors Aweigh in 1945 – offered to serve as their business partner and convinced Screen Gems, the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, to make a deal with the animation producers.[2]

Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, took an 18% ownership in Hanna and Barbera's new company, H-B Enterprises,[2] and provided working capital to produce. Screen Gems became the new studio's distributor and its licensing agent, handling merchandizing of the characters from the animated programs.[9] H-B Enterprises opened for business in rented offices on the lot of Kling Studios (formerly Charlie Chaplin Studios)[8] on July 7, 1957, two months after the MGM animation studio closed down.[1] Sidney and several Screen Gems alumni became members of H-B's original 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 – as its production staff.[1]

Television cartoons

Hanna-Barbera was one of the first animation studios to successfully produce cartoons especially for television.[10] Previously, animated programming on television had consisted primarily of rebroadcasts of theatrical cartoons. Their first animated series for television The Ruff & Reddy Show, featuring live-action host Jimmy Blaine and several older Columbia-owned cartoons as filler, premiered on NBC in December 1957. The studio had its first big success with The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958, 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 show won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Children's Programming. The studio began to expand rapidly following the success of Huckleberry Hound, and several animation industry alumni – in particular former Warner Bros. Cartoons storymen Michael Maltese and Warren Foster, who became H-B's new head writers – joined the staff at this time.[1]

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, The Quick Draw McGraw Show, 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 show ran for six seasons in prime time on ABC, becoming a ratings and merchandising success. It was the longest-running animated show in American prime time television history until being beaten out by The Simpsons in 1996. During the early and mid-sixties, the studio debuted several new successful programs, among them prime time ABC series such as Top Cat, The Jetsons and Jonny Quest.

New shows produced for syndication and Saturday mornings included The Yogi Bear Show – a syndicated spinoff from The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series featuring Wally Gator, The Magilla Gorilla Show, The Peter Potamus Show and The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show. Hanna-Barbera also produced several television commercials, often starring its own characters, and animated the opening credits for the ABC sitcom Bewitched (the Bewitched characters would also appear as guest stars in a season six episode of The Flintstones). Hanna-Barbera also produced Loopy De Loop, a series of theatrical cartoon shorts. It was the studio's first and only series for theaters. The studio moved off of the Kling lot in 1963 (by then renamed the Red Skelton Studios) when it located at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. West in Hollywood, California, was opened.

The former Hanna-Barbera building at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. West in Hollywood, California, seen in a 2007 photograph. The small yellow structure (lower right) was originally the "guard shack" for the property entrance to the east of the building.

This California 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. After the success of The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show in 1965, two new Saturday morning series debuted the following year, Space Ghost, which featured action-adventure and Frankenstein, Jr. and The Impossibles, which blended action-adventure with the earlier Hanna-Barbera humor style. A number of the company's action cartoons followed in 1967, among them are 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 along with new syndicated shows based on famous celebrities, such as The Abbott and Costello Cartoon Show and Laurel and Hardy.

The Hanna-Barbera and Screen Gems partnership lasted until 1965, when Hanna and Barbera announced the sale of the studio to Taft Broadcasting.[9] Its acquisition of Hanna-Barbera was delayed for a year by a lawsuit from Joan Perry, John Cohn, and Harrison Cohn - the widow and sons of former Columbia head Harry Cohn - who felt that Hanna-Barbera had undervalued the Cohns' 18% share in the company when it was sold a few years prior.[11] By December 1966, the litigation had been settled and the company was finally acquired for $12 million by Taft, who spent 1967 and 1968 folding Hanna-Barbera into its corporate sctructure.[9] Hanna and Barbera stayed on to run the company, and Taft became Hanna-Barbera's new distributor.

Screen Gems retained licensing and distribution rights to the previous cartoon series,[9] as well as the trademarks to the characters from those series (The Flintstones and Yogi Bear in particular) into the 1970s and early 1980s.[9][12] In 1968, the studio mixed live-action and animated comedy-action for its new anthology series for NBC, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, while the successful Wacky Races, and its spinoffs The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, aired on CBS, returning Hanna-Barbera to straight animated slapstick humor. ABC would air Cattanooga Cats, which debuted the following year. The studio tried its hand at being a record label for a short time when Danny Hutton was hired to become the head of Hanna Barbera Records (HBR) from 1965 to 1966.[13] It was distributed by Columbia Records, with artists such as Louis Prima, Five Americans, Scatman Crothers and the 13th Floor Elevators. Previously, children's records with Hanna-Barbera characters were released by Colpix Records.

Next came Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in 1969, a CBS program which blended elements of H-B's comedy programs, action shows, the live-action sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and the old time radio show I Love a Mystery.[14][15] The series centered on four teenagers and a dog solving supernatural mysteries, and was so popular that the company made more new Saturday morning cartoons featuring mystery-solving, crime-fighting teenagers with comical pets and mascots during the 1970s. These series included Josie and the Pussycats, The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Speed Buggy, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kids, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Clue Club, Jabberjaw, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels and The New Shmoo. By 1977, Scooby-Doo was the centerpiece of a two-hour ABC program block titled Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics, which also included Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, Captain Caveman and Laff-a-Lympics.[16]

The 1970s

During the seventies in particular, the majority of American television animation was produced by Hanna-Barbera. The only competition came from Filmation, DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and a few other companies that specialized primarily in prime time specials, such as Rankin-Bass, Chuck Jones Enterprises and Lee Mendelson-Bill Meléndez. Filmation, in particular, lost ground to Hanna-Barbera when the failure of its show Uncle Croc's Block led ABC president Fred Silverman to drop Filmation and give Hanna and Barbera the majority of the network's Saturday morning cartoon time. Besides Scooby-Doo and the programs derived from it, the studio also found success with new programs such as Harlem Globetrotters, Where's Huddles, The Addams Family, These Are The Days, Partridge Family 2200 A.D., Hong Kong Phooey and Jeannie. The syndicated Wait Till Your Father Gets Home returned Hanna-Barbera to adult-oriented comedy, although the show was more provocative than The Flintstones or The Jetsons had been.

The studio revisited its 1960s hits starting with the Flintstones spin-offs The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, The Flintstone Comedy Hour, The New Fred and Barney Show and The Flintstone Comedy Show. In 1980, four new Flintstones specials aired in prime time on NBC as a limited-run revival of the original series. "All-star" shows featuring Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and others included Yogi's Gang and Yogi's Space Race and the Scooby-Doo spin-offs, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, The Scooby-Doo Show, and Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, followed by new shows, The All-New Popeye Hour, Casper and the Angels and The New Tom and Jerry/Grape Ape Show. Super Friends, a Hanna-Barbera produced adaptation of DC Comics' Justice League of America comic book, remained on ABC Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1986. The Kwicky Koala Show, the first and only project of Tex Avery for Hanna-Barbera, first aired in 1981.

Hanna-Barbera also tried its hand at live-action projects, though its success in selling such programming was limited by its track record as an animation studio. The first fully live action film was Hardcase one of the ABC Movie of the Week television movies. Their most notable production out of the many of its non-animated specials is the Emmy-winning favorite The Gathering. Its live-action department spun off into Solow Production Company, founded by Herbert F. Solow, which immediately following the name change was able to sell the series Man from Atlantis to NBC.[17]

Production process changes

Early H-B Enterprises logo used from the studio's inception in 1957 until 1960.

From 1957 to 1995, Hanna-Barbera produced prime-time, weekday afternoon, and Saturday morning cartoons for all three major networks and syndication in the United States. The small budgets that television animation producers had to work within prevented them, and most other producers of American television animation, from working with the full theatrical-quality animation the duo had been known for at MGM. While the budget for a seven-minute Tom and Jerry entry of the 1950s was about $35,000, Hanna-Barbera was required to produce five-minute Ruff and Reddy episodes for no more than $3,000 a piece.[2] 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.) 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) would be animated. The rest of the figure would remain on a held animation cel. This allowed a typical 10-minute short to be done with only 1,200 drawings instead of the usual 26,000. 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 TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera and others as "illustrated radio".[18]

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.[19] An executive who worked for Walt Disney Productions said, "We don't even consider [them] competition".[19] Ironically, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hanna-Barbera was the only animation studio in Hollywood that was actively hiring, and it picked up a number of Disney artists who were laid off during this period. The studio's solution to the criticism over its quality was to go into features. The studio produced six theatrical features, among them higher-quality versions of its hit television cartoons and adaptations of other material. Hanna-Barbera was also the first animation studio to have their animation work produced overseas. One of these production companies was a subsidiary started by Hanna-Barbera called PhilToons in the Philippines.[20]

Slow rise and fall

Competing studios, such as Sunbow/Marvel, Filmation and Rankin/Bass began to introduce successful syndicated cartoons of G.I. Joe, Transformers, He-Man, She-Ra and Thundercats, based upon characters from popular toy lines and action figures. Hanna-Barbera continued to produce for Saturday mornings but no longer dominated the market. In 1981, Taft purchased Ruby-Spears Enterprises from Filmways, founded in 1977 by former H-B employees Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. It would often pair their shows with Hanna-Barbera's programs. Then in 1979, the parent bought Worldvision Enterprises, which then throughout the eighties, became the syndication distributor for most of the cartoons. It was also during this time the studio switched from cel animation to digital ink and paint for some of their shows.

Both Hanna-Barbera and Worldvision had their own home video labels (Worldvision Home Video and Hanna-Barbera Home Video) while many of its productions were released by other VHS distributors. The Smurfs debuted in 1981 on NBC, based on Belgian cartoonist and creator Pierre Culliford's popular comics and stories. It centers around the society of tiny, blue creatures lead by Papa Smurf. It began when Hanna and Barbera were called by Fred Silverman in 1979, offering an "on the air" commitment if they could secure the television rights to the property, which had caught the attention of Silverman's young daughter. It ran for nine seasons and won two Daytime Emmys and a Humanitas Prize. A ratings success and the top rated program in eight years, it was the longest-running Saturday morning cartoon and the highest for an NBC program since 1970.

Some of their shows were produced at their Australian-based studio, a partnership with Australian media company Southern Star Entertainment, including Drak Pack, The Berenstain Bears and Teen Wolf. Trollkins made its premiere on CBS in 1981, then The Biskitts in 1983. Next was The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible, a Hanna-Barbera produced series for direct-to-video about three young adventurers traveling back in time to watch biblical events take place in the past.[21] After the success of the smash hit CBS Saturday morning cartoon series Muppet Babies, which featured toddler versions of Jim Henson's popular Muppet characters, Hanna-Barbera began producing shows featuring "kid" versions of popular characters, such as The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Pink Panther and Sons and Popeye and Son.

Yogi's Treasure Hunt and a 1986 revival of Jonny Quest, along with new series originals Galtar and the Golden Lance, Paw Paws, Sky Commanders, Fantastic Max, The Further Adventures of Superted and Paddington Bear were introduced for the new weekly syndicated block The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera. Meanwhile, DC Comics named Hanna-Barbera as one of the honorees in its 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great for its work on the Super Friends cartoon series.[22] More new shows were introduced, featuring Yogi Bear (The New Yogi Bear Show) and Scooby-Doo (The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show and The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo) along with The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, Wildfire and Foofur.

Following its original newtork run, two decades earlier, The Jetsons returned for new episodes, premiering in 1985 syndicated. The studio followed the lead of its competitors by introducing new shows based on familiar licensed properties, such as Pac-Man, Mork and Mindy, Snorks, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Pound Puppies, The Gary Coleman Show, Challenge of the GoBots, Laverne & Shirley in the Army, Shirt Tales, The Little Rascals, Richie Rich, The Dukes and Monchhichis. Throughout all of this, both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears were affected by the financial troubles of Taft, which had just been acquired by the American Financial Corporation in 1987 and had its name changed to Great American Broadcasting the following year.

Many of the business deals were overseen by Taft CEO, Charles Mechem. Along with the rest of the American animation industry, the company had gradually begun to move away from producing everything in-house in the late seventies and early eighties. Much of its product was outsourced to studios in Australia and Asia, including Wang Film Productions, Cuckoo's Nest Studios, Mr. Big Cartoons, Mook Co., Ltd., Toei Animation, and its own Philippines-based studio Fil-Cartoons. In 1989, much of its staff responded to a call from Warner Bros. to resurrect their animation department. Tom Ruegger and a number of his colleagues left the studio, moving to Warners to develop hit programs, such as Tiny Toon Adventures, Batman: The Animated Series and Animaniacs.

The rights to the Hanna-Barbera properties were licensed to Universal Studios while David Kirschner was appointed as the head of the studio in 1989, with Hanna and Barbera remaining as co-chairmen[23] and launched new programs, such as Yo Yogi! and The Pirates of Dark Water. Less than successful and burdened with debt, Carl Lindner, Jr.'s Great American put both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears up for sale in 1990. The Smurfs appeared in the drug prevention special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, produced by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.

Turner rebound

Hanna, Iwao Takamoto, a studio employee, and Barbera, from July 14, 1996

In November 1991, the Hanna-Barbera studio and library, as well as much of the original Ruby-Spears library, were acquired by a 50-50 joint venture between Turner Broadcasting – which by that time had also bought the pre-May 1986 MGM library – and Apollo Investment Fund for $320 million.[24] This was with the intention of launching an all animation based network aimed at children and younger audiences. Turner's president of entertainment Scott Sassa hired Fred Seibert, a former executive for MTV Networks, to head the Hanna-Barbera studio.

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, Craig McCracken, Donovan Cook, Genndy Tartakovsky, David Feiss, Seth MacFarlane, Van Partible, Stewart St. John, and Butch Hartman with 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, the same year that Turner acquired the remaining interests of Hanna-Barbera from Apollo Investment Fund for $255 million.[25] New programs of Tom & Jerry Kids and Droopy: Master Detective made their premieres on FOX in 1990 and 1994.

Production assumed on Captain Planet and the Planeteers for TBS in 1993, renaming it The New Adventures of Captain Planet. More new Hanna-Barbera programs were introduced, that were quite different from its old classics, including Wake, Rattle, and Roll, Young Robin Hood (which was a co-production with the Canadian animation firm Cinar), Midnight Patrol: Adventures in the Dream Zone, The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda, SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron, Dumb and Dumber (which was the last Hanna-Barbera series to be aired on broadcast television, as well as co-produced with eventual corporate sibling New Line Cinema), 2 Stupid Dogs, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures, Fish Police, Gravedale High and Capitol Critters.

Partnership with Cartoon Network

In 1992, Turner launched Cartoon Network, to showcase its huge library of animated programs, of which Hanna-Barbera was the core contributor. As a result, many classic cartoons, especially the Hanna-Barbera ones, were introduced to a new audience.[26] Following a 1987 popularity wane and program length decrease, The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera ended permanently in 1994, so that Turner could refocus the studio to produce new shows exclusively for the Turner-owned networks. In 1995, Hanna-Barbera produced What a Cartoon! (also known as World Premiere Toons) for Cartoon Network, an animation showcase series guided by Fred Seibert, founder of Frederator Studios. The program featured forty-eight new creator driven cartoon shorts developed by its in-house staff. Several original series emerged from the project, giving the company their first hits since The Smurfs. The first series based on a What a Cartoon short was Genndy Tartakovsky's Dexter's Laboratory. This spawned a multitude of original series for the network known as Cartoon Cartoons.

In 2001, the Hanna-Barbera name began to disappear from newer shows by the studio in favor of the Cartoon Network Studios label. This came in handy with shows that were produced outside the company, but Cartoon Network had a hand in producing (ex.: Ed, Edd n Eddy and Codename: Kids Next Door) as well as shows the studio continued to produce (ex.: Adventure Time, Regular Show, Camp Lazlo and Ben 10). Hanna passed away of throat cancer on March 22, 2001, ending his sixty-year partnership in animation with Barbera. Since his partner's death, Barbera went solo and moved on to work for Warner Bros. Animation on new projects relating to the Hanna-Barbera and Tom and Jerry properties until his passing on December 18, 2006.[27] Today, Hanna-Barbera Productions is an in-name-only unit of Warner Bros. Animation, which administers the rights to its catalog and characters.

Sound effects

Besides their cartoons and characters, Hanna-Barbera was also noted for their large library of sound effects. Besides cartoon-style sound effects (such as ricochets, slide whistles and more), they also had familiar sounds used for transportation, household items, the elements, and more. When Hanna and Barbera started their own cartoon studio in 1957, they created a handful of sound effects, and had limited choices. They also took some sounds from the then-defunct MGM animation studios. By 1958, they began to expand and began adding more sound effects to their library.

Besides creating a lot of their own effects, they also collected sound effects from other movie and cartoon studios, such as Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Animation, and even Walt Disney Productions. Some of their famous sound effects included a rapid bongo drum take used for when a character's feet were scrambling before taking off, a "KaBONG" sound produced on a guitar for when Quick Draw McGraw, in his Zorro-style "El Kabong" crime fighting guise, would smash a guitar over a villain's head, the sound of a car's brake drum combined with a bulb horn for when Fred Flintstone would drop his bowling ball onto his foot, an automobile's tires squealing with a "skipping" effect added for when someone would slide to a sudden stop, a bass-drum-and-cymbal combination called the "Boom Crash" for when someone would fall down or smack into an object, a xylophone being struck rapidly on the same note for a tip-toeing effect, and a violin being plucked with the tuning pegs being raised to simulate something like pulling out a cat's whisker.

The cartoons also used Castle Thunder, a thunderclap sound effect that was commonly used in movies and TV shows from the 1940s to the 1970s. Other common sounds such as Peeong (a frying pan hitting sound with a doppler effect) and Bilp were used regularly in all of its cartoons. Starting in the 1960s, other cartoon studios began using the sound effects, including Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Universal Animation Studios, Disney Television Animation, Film Roman, MGM Animation, Cartoon Network Studios, DiC Entertainment, Hasbro Studios, Warner Bros. Animation and many others. By the 21st century, almost every animation studio was using the sound effects. Today, like Hanna-Barbera, they are used sparingly, while some cartoons and non-animated series like Warner Bros. Animation's Krypto the Superdog, Nelvana's The Magic School Bus, A&E's Parking Wars, Disney's Bonkers and Spümcø's Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" make heavy use of the classic sound effects, mostly for a retro feel.

Some Hanna-Barbera sounds show up in various sound libraries such as Valentino and Audio Network. Hanna-Barbera Records (the studio's short-lived record division) released a set of LP records in the late 1960s entitled Hanna-Barbera's Drop-Ins, which contained quite a few of the classic sound effects. This LP set was only available for radio and TV stations and other production studios. In 1973, and again in 1986, H-B released a second sound effect record set; a seven-LP set entitled The Hanna-Barbera Library of Sounds, which, like the previous set, contained several of the classic sound effects. Like the previous set, this was only available to production companies and radio/TV stations. The 1986 version was also available as a two compact-disc set.

In 1993, the last president of the studio, Fred Seibert recalled his early production experiences with early LP releases of the studio's effects, and commissioned Sound Ideas to release a four-CD set entitled The Hanna-Barbera Sound FX Library, featuring nearly all of the original H-B sound effects used from 1957 to 1992, a more vast collection compared to the early LP releases (including the sounds H-B had borrowed from other studios). The sound effects were digitally remastered, so they would sound better on new digital soundtracks. A fifth CD was added in 1996, entitled Hanna-Barbera Lost Treasures, and featured more sound effects, including sounds from Space Ghost and The Impossibles.

Also in 1994, Rhino Records released a CD containing some of Hanna-Barbera's famous sound effects, titled simply as Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Sound FX, and also included some answering-machine messages and birthday greetings and short stories starring classic Hanna-Barbera characters, and was hosted by Fred Flintstone. In 1996, it was reissued with the Hanna-Barbera's Pic-A-Nic Basket of Cartoon Classics CD set, which also contained three other CDs of Hanna-Barbera TV theme songs and background music and songs from The Flintstones. Here, the CD was relabeled as The Greatest Cartoon Sound Effects Ever.

In the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera slowly began to cease using their trademark sound effects. This was especially true with the action cartoons of the time such as Sky Commanders. By the 1990s, with cartoons shows, such as Fish Police, SWAT Kats and the animated specials The Halloween Tree and Arabian Nights, the sound effects were virtually nonexistent, being replaced with newer, digitally recorded sounds (mostly from Sound Ideas), as well as the Looney Tunes sound library by Treg Brown. A few early 1990s cartoons continued to use the sound effects, such as Tom & Jerry Kids and The Addams Family.

By 1996, each TV series from the studio typically had its own set of sound effects, including some selected from the classic Hanna-Barbera sound library, as well as some new ones and various sounds from Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons (this was especially true of Dexter's Laboratory and Cow and Chicken). Several of the classic H-B sound effects still pop up from time to time in many of Cartoon Network Studios' productions. However, on the recent Warner Bros. produced Scooby-Doo shows (What's New, Scooby-Doo?, Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated) and direct-to-video movies, the Hanna-Barbera sound effects are very rarely used.

List of Hanna-Barbera productions

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford University Press. Pg. 560–562. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Hanna, William and Ito, Tom (1999). A Cast of Friends. New York: Da Capo Press. 0306-80917-6. Pg. 81–83
  3. ↑ "William Hanna – Awards". allmovie. Retrieved August 12, 2008.
  4. ↑ "COMPANY NEWS; Hanna-Barbera Sale Is Weighed". The New York Times. July 20, 1991. Retrieved August 19, 2010.
  5. ↑ Carter, Bill (February 19, 1992). "COMPANY NEWS; A New Life For Cartoons". The New York Times. Retrieved August 17, 2010.
  6. ↑ Barbera, Joseph (1994). My Life in "Toons": From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing. p. 207. ISBN 1-57036-042-1.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford University Press. Pg. 547–548. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Leonard Maltin (1997). Interview with Joseph Barbera (Digital). Archive of American Television.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Rogers, Lawrence H. (2000). History of U. S. Television: A Personal Reminiscence. Bloomington. IN. USA: AuthorHouse. pg. 444-447
  10. ↑ Benzel, Jan (February 23, 1992). "Caveman to Carp: The Prime-Time Cartoon Devolves". The New York Times. Retrieved August 17, 2010.
  11. ↑ Shostak, Stu (03-11-2011). "Interview with Jerry Eisenberg, Scott Shaw!, and Earl Kress". Stu's Show. Retrieved 03-18-2013. Jerry Eisenberg, Scott Shaw!, and Earl Kress were all former employees of Hanna-Barbera over the years, and relate the history of the studio to host Stu Shostak
  12. ↑ "BRIEFCASE: Great American Broadcasting". Orlando Sentinel. August 19, 1989. Retrieved December 23, 2014.
  13. ↑ Davidson, Chris (March 27, 2007). "Animation + Rock = Fun: The Danny Hutton Interview". Bubblegum University.
  14. ↑ Laurence Marcus & Stephen R. Hulce (October, 2000). "Scooby Doo, Where Are You". Television Heaven. Retrieved on June 9, 2006.
  15. ↑ Shostak, Stu (05-02-2012). "Interview with Joe Ruby and Ken Spears". Stu's Show. Retrieved 03-18-2013.
  16. ↑ Lenberg, Jeff (1991). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. New York: Facts of File. ISBN 0-8160-6599-3 p. 409-411.
  17. ↑ Shostak, Stu (12-20-2006). "Interview with Mark Evanier". Stu's Show. Retrieved 06-17-2014.
  18. ↑ The Golden Era
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 (Dec. 2, 1961) "TV'S Most Unexpected Hit – The Flintstones" The Saturday Evening Post
  20. ↑ Basler, Barbara (December 2, 1990). "TELEVISION; Peter Pan, Garfield and Bart – All Have Asian Roots". The New York Times. Retrieved August 17, 2010.
  21. ↑ The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible: The Creation. 1987. VHS. Hanna-Barbera
  22. ↑ Marx, Barry (1985). Fifty Who Made DC Great. New York: DC Comics Inc. p. 41.
  23. ↑ David Kirschner named new head of Hanna-Barbera Productions; founders Hanna and Barbera to assume roles as studio co-chairmen. (William Hanna, Joseph Barbera)
  24. ↑ "TBS Buys Animator Hanna-Barbera Library for $320 Million". Atlanta: AP. Oct 29, 1991. Retrieved May 22, 2014.
  25. ↑ "COMPANY NEWS; TURNER BUYS REMAINING 50% STAKE IN HANNA-BARBERA". The New York Times. December 30, 1993. Retrieved August 17, 2010.
  26. ↑ Carter, Bill (February 19, 1992). "THE MEDIA BUSINESS; Turner Broadcasting Plans To Start a Cartoon Channel". The New York Times. Retrieved August 17, 2010.
  27. ↑ "Cartoon creator Joe Barbera dies". Dallas Morning News/AP. December 18, 2006. Archived from the original on August 16, 2008. Retrieved August 16, 2008.

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