Governors Award Goes to Hanna-Barbera

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the creators of such enduring television characters as Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, the Jetsons and Scooby-Doo, have been partners for 50 years--longer than most marriages last.

The continuing association of the two, who received the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences at the 40th annual Emmy Awards Sunday night, is a classic example of yin and yang: Their talents and interests complement each other rather than overlap.

“We lean toward different areas of the business, so we each get to do what we like,” Barbera explained in a recent interview. “I work on creating the ideas for projects and trying to sell those ideas in the various markets. Bill oversees the actual production in studios all over the world, which I would hate doing.

“When Bill’s out of town,” he joked, “I turn the light out behind his name on the studio sign, but he does the same thing to me when I’m gone, so we stay even.”

The Governors Award, given for career achievement in television, honors the most prolific creators of animation in America.

In the three decades since the debut of “Ruff and Reddy,” their first series, the Hanna-Barbera studio has produced nearly 300 series for network and syndicated TV, totaling more than 1,500 hours of programming--the equivalent of 1,000 feature films.

Their shows have aired in more than 80 countries and won seven Emmys, a Humanitas Award, a Golden Globe and a star on Hollywood Boulevard for Hanna and Barbera. Their characters appear on more than 4,000 licensed products in 50 countries.

They first met at the MGM cartoon studio in 1937. Hanna had studied engineering and journalism before going to work as a cel washer on the early “Looney Tunes” in 1931. Six years later, he moved to MGM as a director and story editor on an ill-fated cartoon series based on “The Katzenjammer Kids.”

A native of New York City, Barbera left a brief, unhappy career in banking to work as an animator at the Van Buren and Terrytoons studios. He was one of the East Coast artists MGM cartoon producer Fred Quimby invited to California in an effort to bolster his studio. After the demise of the “Katzenjammer” series, Barbera and Hanna began working together on stories for director Rudy Ising.

The animation unit at MGM underwent several changes in management during the late ‘30s, and often seemed in imminent danger of closing. In desperation, Hanna and Barbera decided to create a film of their own.

Many of their co-workers dismissed the idea of a cat-and-mouse team as a cliche, but the hot-tempered cat and chubby-cheeked mouse scored a big hit in their debut film, “Puss Gets the Boot” (1940). Re-christened “Tom and Jerry,” they starred in one of the most popular series in cartoon history.

Hanna and Barbera spent most of the next 17 years devising new antics for them, and won seven Academy Awards.

“We used to sit at facing desks and develop the stories together,” Hanna recalls. “Joe would draw the story board and plot the actions. I would do the timing and go over the scenes with the animators, telling them what I wanted out of the animation. We used to make a ‘Tom and Jerry’ short every six weeks and they were about six minutes long, so we were producing about a minute of animation a week.”

The “Tom and Jerry” series came to an abrupt end in 1957, when the management of financially troubled MGM suddenly closed the animation studio. Hanna and Barbera formed a partnership and began looking for work in the television industry.

During the mid-’50s, most cartoon shows consisted of reruns of old theatrical shorts. Very little animation was being produced for TV, but the new partners managed to interest Screen Gems in a new series called “Ruff and Reddy.”

The MGM shorts had been among the most lavish cartoons in Hollywood: By the mid-’50s, the average cost of a “Tom and Jerry” film had risen to $40,000. The first 6-minute episodes of “Ruff and Reddy” were budgeted at $2,700.

To cut corners, the partners switched to the style of limited animation that Jay Ward and Alexander Anderson pioneered in 1949 with “Crusader Rabbit.” The visuals consisted of little more than story-board drawings linked by simple movements; much of the action took place on the sound track, as the narrator and voice actors described what was going on.

“Instead of the 25,000 to 40,000 drawings we used in a ‘Tom and Jerry’ short, we were able to make a cartoon with 1,200 to 1,800 drawings,” Barbera says. “But you had to be an animator to understand where to use those drawings and how to use camera moves to give it more life. We couldn’t do the pantomime we had used in the ‘Tom and Jerry’ series, because it took too many drawings. We learned you can cover a lot of ground with dialogue and that guys like Daws Butler and Mel Blanc could provide voices that were sheer entertainment.”

The comic adventures of a big, dumb bulldog and a small, clever cat, “Ruff and Reddy” received favorable reactions when it premiered on NBC in December, 1957. But Screen Gems used the cartoons in a package show that also featured live hosts, puppets and old Columbia shorts. Hanna and Barbera realized that to succeed in television, they would have to make programs that were entirely their own.

Their first half-hour program, “The Huckleberry Hound Show,” premiered in syndication in 1958. A laconic blue hound dog who spoke with a thick Southern drawl, Huck was quickly upstaged by a secondary character on the show: Yogi Bear, who proclaimed himself “smarter than the average bear.” Yogi scored an even bigger hit when his show debuted in 1961.

Hanna-Barbera’s most popular show of the ‘60s was “The Flintstones,” the first program animated for prime time, although Barbera had to find a sponsor before the networks would consider it. The team followed that success with three other prime-time cartoon series: “Top Cat” (1961), “The Adventures of Johnny Quest” (1964) and the recently rediscovered camp favorite “The Jetsons” (1962).

During the mid-’60s, animation slowly vanished from the network evening schedules, and the studio shifted to the production of children’s shows for the burgeoning Saturday morning kidvid ghetto. Hanna-Barbera created programs for all three networks, and in some seasons accounted for as much as 70% of the Saturday morning programming.

The men who had produced less than an hour of animation each year for the “Tom and Jerry” series began turning out more than two hours per week.

Although Taft Entertainment acquired the studio in 1967, Barbera has continued to serve as president and Hanna as senior vice president of Hanna-Barbera Productions. Both men remain active and the studio is busier than ever.

Nancy Reagan will appear in the live-action closing of “The Flintstone Kids Just Say No Special” on ABC Sept. 15, and a second prime-time special for CBS will feature Dik Browne’s comic-strip Viking, “Hagar the Horrible.”

Plans are underway for both animated and live-action features of “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons,” and Hanna-Barbera characters will appear in the theme park that Universal Studios is building in Orlando, Fla.

New episodes of “Yogi Bear” and “The Snorks” are being animated for syndication, and this fall’s Saturday morning lineup includes two new series, “The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley” (NBC) and “A Pup Named Scooby-Doo” (ABC), plus new episodes of “The Smurfs” (NBC).

“The early years of Hanna-Barbera were more fun than the later ones,” Hanna says thoughtfully. “I was working more in the creative areas of timing and direction then. But as the studio grew, I became more involved in administration and got away from the creative aspects. Also, the networks were not as involved in the creative process as they are now; a lot more of the input came from the studio. Frankly, I miss that.”