Fathering Cartoon Legends : Famed animator Joe Barbera has written his memoirs to coincide with the opening of the film version of Hanna-Barbera’s ‘The Flintstones.’

The nuns at Holy Innocents School in Brooklyn knew talent when they saw it.

They took one look at how well little Joe Barbera drew and made the first-grader the unofficial school artist. While his peers mastered addition and learned how to read, Joe spent every day at the blackboard drawing pictures of Jesus entering Jerusalem and other pious scenes. When his mother discovered that Joe wasn’t learning anything except how to wield a mean piece of chalk, she pulled him out of Holy Innocents and sent him off to public school.

Barbera, one of the most successful animators of all time, tells the story of his unorthodox artistic beginnings in his new book, “My Life in ‘toons.” From Turner Publishing, the memoir has been felicitously timed to coincide with the release of “The Flintstones,” the live-action comedy featuring Fred, Wilma and the other wacky residents of Bedrock that opens nationwide today.

With Bill Hanna, his partner of almost 60 years, Barbera is, of course, the father of “The Flintstones,” as well as the sire, for better or worse, of an entire industry--TV animation.

A man envied by his peers for his ability to produce one comic idea after another, to sketch them and, above all, to sell them, Barbera is still hard at work at 83. Indeed, Barbera could be a Gray Panther poster boy: He is thoughtful, engaging, enormously energetic and still, as a writer for the Saturday Evening Post once put it, “darkly handsome in the Valentino manner.” Sitting in his Hanna-Barbera office, just across the Hollywood Freeway from Universal Studios, he seems to take genuine pleasure in all his creations, from the new book to the dozens of characters he has conceived since he and Hanna all but invented Saturday morning cartoons in 1957.

“I have such a nice bunch of friends,” Barbera said, gesturing toward the stuffed Yogi Bears, Huckleberry Hounds, Muttleys and Dick Dastardlys that fill every corner of the room. And he hasn’t stopped dreaming up new pals, he makes clear. “I have three I have to work on tonight.”

It was Barbera who was responsible for selling each of Hanna-Barbera’s shows--as many as a dozen in a single year. His pitches are the stuff of legend. Barbera would produce sketches of characters faster than his assistants could pin them up, and he would act out the stories as well. Barbera put on a show and, even now, when he talks about such favorite creations as the rakish mountain lion Snagglepuss, he becomes Snagglepuss, doing a dead-on Bert Lahr imitation as he drawls the character’s trademark “Exit, stage left.”

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Barbera has spent a lifetime in one of the toughest industries in the world and yet his autobiographical account is remarkably upbeat, even sunny. Barbera chides Gene Kelly for failing to give Hanna and Barbera the credit they deserved for turning Jerry, the cartoon mouse, into a worthy dance partner for Kelly in “Anchors Aweigh.” But there is virtually no vitriol in Barbera’s book even when he writes about the dapper father who abandoned him and his siblings.

Barbera begins his book with an account of his frenzied efforts to sell “The Flintstones” to network and sponsors (ABC ultimately took the gamble, and one of the original sponsors, Miles Laboratories, still makes Flintstones children’s vitamins). Today, an entire generation knows the lyrics of “The Flintstones” theme; it is as much a part of American cultural history as the Slinky. But in 1960, the project was anything but a sure thing.

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A major stumbling block was that “The Flintstones” was something completely new--an animated situation comedy in prime time. As to why the idea not only sold, but keeps on selling, Barbera theorizes that Fred is a kind of neolithic Everyman whose domestic and job problems everyone can identify with. Value was added to the series, Barbera says, by clever touches such as a guest appearance by Stony Curtis (whose voice is that of Tony Curtis) and assorted Stone Age “modern” inventions, including the Flintstones’ vacuum cleaner--a little woolly mammoth that sucks up dirt with its trunk.

According to Norman M. Klein, an expert on animation who teaches at CalArts, Barbera is unique among the great animators. During two decades at MGM, Hanna and Barbera made seven Oscar-winning cartoons featuring Tom and Jerry, “indelible characters that only he could do” (the stories were largely Barbera’s). In Klein’s view, those cartoons combine the best of the elegant Disney full-animation style with the manic energy and wit of the best Warner Bros. cartoons. Barbera’s most successful Tom and Jerrys are superb examples of the classic chase or baseboard cartoon--so-called “because everything happens at the level of the baseboard along the bottom of the wall,” explained Klein, author of “Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon.”

But when MGM suddenly closed its animation studio, Barbera wasted no time in reinventing himself as the creator of the Saturday morning and later prime-time cartoon. “He’s almost single-handedly responsible for that, for good or ill,” Klein said. Successful as both an artist and a businessman, “he’s really two people,” said Klein, who thinks that Barbera has been unfairly neglected by historians of animation.

But some animation aficionados despise Hanna-Barbera. They blame the partners for killing the full-animation cartoon. To make cartoons on minuscule TV budgets, Hanna-Barbera resorted to something called “limited animation,” using every cost-cutting trick imaginable to produce cartoons that purists denounce as flat, jerky and wooden.

Barbera is unrepentant. By the mid-1950s, full-animation cartoons had simply become too expensive to produce, he says. “We went into limited animation because there was no money, absolutely no money. You couldn’t do cartoons the way they were being done. You couldn’t afford to.”

By 1957, it cost $30,000 to $40,000 to make a Tom and Jerry cartoon, Barbera points out. Six-minute Disney cartoons cost as much as $120,000. As a result, the major studios eliminated their animation departments during the 1950s, in no small part because they discovered that they could make 90% of their revenues from cartoons by showing old ones instead of shelling out for new ones.

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Hanna-Barbera didn’t kill the business, Barbera maintains. It was already dead. “We had to survive,” he said, and so, thanks to what he calls “Yankee ingenuity,” he and Hanna developed limited animation. “And because of what we were doing, the entire business came back to work again,” Barbera recalled proudly. Today, he points out, there are more animated features being made than ever before.

Barbera’s office is filled with treasures, including Hanna-Barbera’s eight Emmys and a photo of Barbera with the Pope during a meeting he describes as “electric time.” Among the best-loved objects are the 20-odd volumes of “The Book of Knowledge” that his mother bought for him (on time, as poor mothers did) as a boy. Knowledge was a thing of real value in his childhood home, and his mother kept the books under lock and key. When he requested a particular volume, his mother would make a brown-paper cover for it before she solemnly passed it over to him.

When she died, Barbera recalls, he found the books among her things and discovered that she had secreted the money he had sent her over the years between the pages. “I can assure you any knowledge I have comes from these books,” he said, reaching for one of the aging volumes. “Every once in a while, I take one down and flip it to see if there’s any money in there!”

Despite the naysayers, Barbera’s cartoon friends have proved to be almost as hardy as he is, and he obviously revels in their continued survival. Muttley and Dick Dastardly are currently the hottest thing in Japan, he reports. “Ted Turner didn’t pay $320 million for these characters to have them shunted aside,” he noted.

Barbera’s longtime Sherman Oaks home was damaged beyond repair in the Northridge quake, although he and his wife, Sheila, were unhurt (they’re now living in Laurel Canyon). That was the year’s nadir.

“The Flintstones” movie promises to be a high point. Barbera makes a cameo appearance, in animal-skin tux and bare feet, as a big shot making a splashy entrance at Bedrock’s ritziest nightclub, Cavern on the Green, in a scene shot at Vasquez Rocks in Agua Dulce. John Goodman is terrific as Fred, Barbera says. And, as for the screaming matches between Goodman and Elizabeth Taylor, as Fred’s mother-in-law: “All I could think of was ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ ”

‘The Flintstones’ Mini-Quiz

1. “The Flintstones” was the third name on the drawing board for TV’s first prime-time animated series. What did Hanna-Barbera originally want to call the show?

2. Whence the semi-immortal phrase “Yabba-dabba-doo”?

3. Hanna-Barbera had planned for Fred and Wilma’s first “chip off the old rock” to be a baby boy, Fred Jr. Why, then, Pebbles?

4. Who was the voice of Barney Rubble?

Mini-Quiz Answers

1. Hanna-Barbera planned to call the pioneering series “The Flagstones”--until they received a letter from the creator of “Hi and Lois” advising them that the name was unacceptably close to that of the comic strip couple, the Flagstons. Fred and Wilma were briefly surnamed the Gladstones before they were finally dubbed the Flintstones.

2. It happened, Joe Barbera recalls, in the recording studio. Fred’s original line was “Yahoo!” But actor Alan Reed, who provided Fred’s voice, turned to Barbera and asked, “Can I say ‘Yabba-dabba-doo’ here?”

3. An executive in the studio’s marketing department called Barbera and told him that it was too bad that the Flintstones were having a boy. Had it been a girl, the Ideal Toy company would love to do a Flintstones’ baby doll. Visions of dollar signs danced in Barbera’s head and he turned Fred Jr. into Pebbles on the spot.

4. Mel Blanc, who was also the voice of the Flintstones’ pet dinosaur, Dino.