It’s a sad day for cartoon lovers and they most be grieving in Toon Town. For it is officially the end of an era:
Joseph Barbera, an innovator of animation who teamed with William Hanna to give generations of young television viewers a pantheon of beloved characters, including Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.
…Mr. Barbera and the studio he founded with Mr. Hanna, Hanna-Barbera Productions, became synonymous with television animation, yielding more than 100 cartoon series over four decades, including “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?,â€? “Jonny Questâ€? and “The Smurfs.â€?
On signature televisions shows like “The Flintstones� and “The Jetsons,� the two men developed a cartoon style that combined colorful, simply drawn characters (often based on other recognizable pop-culture personalities) with the narrative structures and joke-telling techniques of traditional live-action sitcoms. They were television’s first animated comedy programs.
Before that, Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna had worked together on more than 120 hand-drawn cartoon shorts for MGM, dozens of which starred the archetypal cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry. The Hanna-Barbera collaboration lasted more than 60 years. The critic Leonard Maltin, in his book “Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons,� wrote that Mr. Barbera’s strength was more in his drawing and gag writing while Mr. Hanna had a good sense of comic timing and giving characters warmth.
“I was never a good artist,� said Mr. Hanna, who died in 2001. But Mr. Barbera, he said, “has the ability to capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I’ve ever known.�
Although cartoons — with computer animation and traditional cartoons such as The Simpsons that are a bit more than Barbera’s “limited animation” — are now enjoying a kind of second “Golden Age,” many forget how Hanna-Barbera seemingly rescued the genre as the big Hollywood studios began decreasing or shutting down their glitzy cartoon units in the late 40s and 50s.
Baby Boomers (such as yours truly) remember how Hanna-Barbera became the leaders in a revolution on the tube: cartoons made for children (and later for adults) specifically for television. That effectively killed many kids’ shows like the great, vaudeville style, slapstick puppet show Howdy Doody (which is still a scream if you view some of its later episodes). Cartoons could run seemingly forever and remain seemingly timeless.
And that’s what happened with the Hanna-Barbera cartoons. They’re not given as prominent time slots now due to much newer product geared to the present culture. But the team pioneered the concept of coupling limited-action animation with high-quality voice work in cartoons pegged to the popular culture and show biz icons. For instance, Huckleberry Hound sounded suspiciously like Andy Griffith. Yogi Bear had a voice and hat similar to Art Carney’s Ed Norton from Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners.” Gleason consulted his lawyers when he saw “The Flintstones,” which really was a transparent animated adaptation of his immortal “The Honeymooners” (in later years, cartoon voice great Mel Blanc noted that he decided not to imitate Art Carney for Barney Rubble but develop a different one).
With limited budgets, Hanna-Barbera churned out entertaining TV cartoons, although towards the end of the studio’s existence as an independent unit the quality had started to suffer in terms of wit and originality. Some of its final cartoons seemed like boring radio with limited-movement pictures.
The Flintstones’ was considered television’s first real prime time cartoon geared towards adults as well as kids. It even had guest stars from time to time. Watch this You Tube clip of Ann Margrock, aka Ann Margret:
UPDATE: For our younger readers, we’ve added a short clip from “The Honeymooners.” Note the similarities between Gleason’s Ralph Kramden and Fred Flintstone and Carney’s Ed Norton and Yogi Bear?
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.