The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Cartoon fans are waking up to the sad news that Joseph Barbera, one half of the enormously successful Hanna-Barbera cartoon partnership, has died at the age of 95 (the BBC has a video report here); as a Seventh Day Cartoonist I’m deeply saddened. Alongside his collaborator William Hanna (who died a few years ago) the Brooklyn-born Barbera worked on the greatest of all cat and mouse cartoon teams back in the 30s and 40s, the multi-Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry at MGM (a lifelong favourite of mine – the humour and character generated by a small change in Tom’s face is astonishing), where the great Fred Quimby recognised the potential of the characters and assigned the pair to work on a series, before forming their own Hanna-Barbera studios in 1957. Some fans of animation criticised the lower quality of this new TV animation (compared to the previous work), but the truth was that by the 50s the costs of creating the detailed and rich animations seen in the classic 40s Tom’n’Jerry cartoons was immensely expensive and laborious, making it largely the preserve of feature-length animated movies rather than shorts, a situation which in contemporary times has lead to much of the work being drawn by Asian studios and the increasing use of digital technology; animation is one of the most versatile of all film mediums but it is also time-intensive and expensive, then and now – and HB didn’t have access to modern technology to help.

Despite the animation not being as detailed and fluid as the MGM work Hanna-Barbera was successful almost from the beginning in the expanding new world of TV animation with the Huckleberry Hound Show and then a little show you may recall, about a certain ‘modern stone-age family’, the Flintstones. Proving that it was more than just the quality of the animation process which mattered, it was about generating and developing characters people would engage with and care about. Hanna and Barbera not only introduced the world to a new cartoon series but broke moulds while they did so: today the Flintstones is generally held to be the first proper prime-time cartoon on TV. The show also, unusually for the time, portrayed a blue-collar, working class family and did so in a longer format, eschewing the old 3 or 4 minute cartoon short format for a longer form which fitted perfectly into a TV scheduling slot, while artist Ed Benedict (who died only a few months ago) created some now-iconic designs for the studio (most especially for the Flintstones) which are held up today as classics.

Today we have prime-time cartoons such as the Simpsons and Family Guy, more cartoons made specially for a more late-night audience in South Park and a plethora of cable channels dedicated to cartoons (including many repeats of Hanna-Barbera’s work), but Back In The Day this was all pretty much new (even when I was a kid you had to scour the channels for decent cartoons – now they are on tap); just another area of innovation and pioneering by the team which laid the foundations for contemporary TV animation. Not only did they prove that it was possible to have both commercial and artistic success with TV animation (20-25 minutes of a cartoon family? Are you mad???? It will never work!!!) making it possible for today’s creators to make material for networks, they inspired those people who are making today’s ‘toons; they grew up with these characters and styles, from T &J and the Flintstones to Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo and thanks to HB’s trailblazing work they had the opportunity to get their new work on the air – the Simpsons is only the most obvious of many shows to owe a huge debt to their work; little wonder then that the Simpsons creators have often paid homage to the Flintstone’s and other HB characters through the years, with the Simpsons in turn going on to become incredibly influential in TV animation, in a way continuing the tradition.

In some ways it is hard to think of Joseph Barbera, or indeed any of the creators of these wonderful cartoons, as ageing and dying; their cartoons are their most public image and they don’t change, don’t age – Fred and Wilma are the same now as they were half a century ago and always will be, while Tom and Jerry will long outlive the short-sighted attempts to re-cut them for a more ‘politically correct’ era of viewing. It is a shock to realise the people who created these characters who have enriched so many lives since childhood do age and pass on like the rest of us and unlike their creations, but at least we do have those creations; a legacy of hundreds of cartoons, innovative designs, pioneering techniques and classic characters. As Joseph Barbera is summoned to the Great Animator in the Sky we can say all of the above about him and all of it is true, but the most important thing of all is he and his team made generations of us laugh; no matter how sophisticated we’d like to think our humour is an anvil dropped on a cartoon cat’s paw or a car run by foot power will always be funny.