Hanna-Barbera Productions



         


Cartoon Network Studios, formerly known as Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, is a cartoon animation studio founded by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera that has produced television cartoons for over sixty years.

[Top]

Founding

Hanna and Barbera had created the Tom and Jerry cartoon series for MGM in 1940, and they formed Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1944 while working for the studio. After an award-winning stint in which they won eight Oscars, Hanna and Barbera left MGM when the studio closed its animation studio in 1955. They started their own indepance company Hanna-Barbera in 1957. The first cartoon they made is called "Ruff and Ruddy"

[Top]

Television cartoons

Hanna-Barbera was the first animation studio to successfully produce animated cartoons especially for television; until then, cartoons on television consisted primarily of rebroadcasts of theatrical cartoons.

Many of Hanna-Barbera's original TV series were produced for prime-time broadcast, and they continued to produce prime-time TV cartoons up until the early 1970s. Such shows as Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat, Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, The Jetsons, and especially The Flintstones were originally broadcast during prime-time hours, competing with live-action comedies, dramas, and quiz shows. The Flintstones in particular became a top-rated show (the birth of Pebbles Flintstone was the highest-rated episode in the show's history, mirroring the I Love Lucy birth episode). But the Hanna-Barbera studio especially captured the market for animated TV shows produced for after-school and Saturday mornings, grabbing the majority of TV cartoon production and holding it for over thirty years. During the 1970s in particular, the majority of TV cartoons were produced by Hanna-Barbera, with the only competition coming from Filmation and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, plus occasional prime-time animated "specials" from Rankin-Bass, Chuck Jones, and Bill Melendez's Peanuts (Charlie Brown).

[Top]

Quality controversy

The Hanna-Barbera studio has been accused of contributing to the general decrease in quality of animation and TV cartoons during the 1960s through the 1980s. This probably has more to do with it being one of the first studios to do animated cartoons for television and having to deal with constrained budgets. The perception of cartoons as a "kids medium" did not make them a budget priority for television executives. A ten minute theatrical animation short movie might have five times the budget of a full half-hour episode of a television cartoon, and so television required a change in production values. Hanna-Barbera first practiced the technique of limited animation on the television serial "The Ruff & Reddy Show" as a way of reducing costs. Unfortunately, this led to a reduction in animation quality.

The field of animation reached its low point in the mid-1970s, even as the audience for Saturday morning cartoons was at its peak. By this time, most Hanna-Barbera shows had degenerated into endless variations of the same theme, and each successful formula (The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, Super Friends) was milked dry through repetition. Various animation short-cuts became unfortunate Hanna-Barbera trademarks, like plots being advanced by cartoon characters seen only as "talking heads," and crashes and disasters happening somewhere just off the frame, not seen but only heard as sound effects.

[Top]

Decline

The state of the field of animation changed during the 1980s and 1990s, and Hanna-Barbera fell behind as a new wave of animators and production studios introduced variety into the market for TV cartoons. In 1991, Hanna-Barbera was acquired by Turner Broadcasting, which in turn was acquired by Time Warner in 1996 (since the 1990s the studio was called Hanna-Barbera Cartoons). By then, several of Hanna-Barbera's animators and writers had left the company to help resurrect Warner Brothers Animation, working on projects like Tiny Toon Adventures. Hanna-Barbera's most famous cartoon series from the early 90s were Tom and Jerry Kids, Droopy Master Detective and The New Adventures of Captain Planet (a sequel to the original DiC/TBS Productions series Captain Planet and the Planeteers).

[Top]

The Time Warner era

Time Warner eventually combined Hanna-Barbera with the Warner Brothers Animation facilities (though they operated as separate units, and continue to do so), and turned Hanna-Barbera's focus toward the Cartoon Network cable channel. A newer, fresher batch of cartoons were produced starting in 1995, leaving the old days of Yogi Bear behind (though older Hanna-Barbera cartoons are still rerun regularly in many markets and on Cartoon Network). In December 1997, Hanna and Barbera closed the studio and sold it to Warner Bro. inc.

After Bill Hanna's death in 2001, it was decided to retire the Hanna-Barbera name, and the company now operates under the Cartoon Network Studios banner, although organizationally, the two companies are siblings, Cartoon Network Studios as a unit of Turner Broadcasting and Hanna-Barbera as a unit of Warner Bros. The Hanna-Barbera name is still used for legal formalities such as copyright notices. In 2002, Warner Bros. released a new animated series about Scooby-Doo, called What's New Scooby-Doo?. Although the show was released under the Warner Brothers Animation brand, it was copyrighted as © 2002 Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc..

[Top]

Notable Hanna-Barbera productions

[Top]

1950s

[Top]

1960s

[Top]

1970s

[Top]

1980s

[Top]

1990s

[Top]

Theatrical cartoons

Hanna-Barbera produced a number of animated feature films for theatrical release, including Hey There, It's Yogi Bear (1964), The Man Called Flintstone (1966), and Jetsons: The Movie (1990). Critics consider the best of the Hanna-Barbera feature films to be its movie adaptation of the book, Charlotte's Web (1973).

[Top]

Notable Cartoon Network Studios productions

[Top]

See also

[Top]




  View Live Article   This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License