Hanna-Barbera

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The partnership of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Also, the animation studio formed by the two shortly before leaving MGM's animation studio (where they'd spent almost twenty years producing Tom and Jerry shorts), which came to dominate Western Animation on television for decades.

Responsible for creating Scooby Doo, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Space Ghost and many, many more -- including the infamous live action acid sequence KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park.

Hanna-Barbera pioneered the use of many Limited Animation techniques, such as Ring Around the Collar, to produce cartoons on a low budget quickly enough to meet a television schedule. The company has been accused of fostering the Animation Age Ghetto as a result of their popularizing of kiddie fare for Saturday Morning Cartoons[1] They've also been cited as one of the causes of the so-called "Dark Age of Animation" due to the supposedly low quality of production and writing in their cartoons, especially in the wake of a wave of knock-offs of their programs (especially The Flintstones, The Smurfs and Scooby Doo) starting in the 1960s. This wave of copycat cartoons was spurred on by networks searching for the next big hit in that vein, who would then cancel the copycat show when it didn't meet ratings expectations. The low quality of some of their cartoons, probably a by-product of producing so many at once (you could argue that their biggest competitor was themselves), sometimes ran into severe They Just Didn't Care territory, though some of their shows, such as Hong Kong Phooey and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, are cult classics to this day as a result of their Narm Charm, while other series, such as The Herculoids and Jonny Quest, are little masterpieces of design and layout, and worthy competitors with animated works produced with vastly greater amounts of time and money. They also showed greater ambition with The Pirates of Dark Water, which (while not perfect) had a lot more time, money and thought put into the animation and storytelling, although it was sadly Too Good to Last.

The studio often produced crossovers starting in The Seventies, such as Yogi's Ark Lark and Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics. Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law acts as a Spiritual Successor to that tradition even while unendingly mocking it.

They also produced the films Charlotte's Web, Heidi's Song, and Once Upon a Forest. These have the distinct honor of being the only movies they ever made that did not feature any of their trademark characters.

Another popular aspect of the company was their distinctive sound effects library. Said sounds have become so common in cartoons that they have become ingrained in our minds to the point of becoming Stock Sound Effects.

After the purchase of the studio by Turner Broadcasting in 1991, the studio was an integral part in the founding of Cartoon Network; while its archives (and the MGM and pre-1948 Looney Tunes library, the post-1948 Looney Tunes coming with the Time Warner acquisition in 1996) filled up the schedule, its studio was revitalized to serve as the network's in-house production unit. Noted programing from this period included Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. The name Hanna-Barbera was retired after Bill Hanna's death in 2001; Cartoon Network programming is handled by Cartoon Network Studios while Warner Bros. assumed the production of Scooby Doo, the company's longest-running franchise. Joseph Barbera spent his final years producing new Tom and Jerry movies and the very first episodes of Tom and Jerry Tales, returning to his roots.

The Other Wiki has information about this. See also The Hanna-Barbera Wiki and Wang Film Productions, a Taiwanese studio first established by a former employee for outsourcing to (eventually expanding their services to other companies too).

For a complete list of their shows, check out IMDB.com or TV Tome:

List of Hanna-Barbera works:

  1. ↑ Perhaps not entirely fairly, since the mawkish sentimentality that is one of the primary elements of the trope was scarcely ever characteristic of their work. However, low comedy certainly was, so maybe such accusations aren't entirely unfair either.
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