Hanna and Barbera were a team of animators and producers who created many popular cartoon characters for motion pictures and television. They first gained fame for their movie cartoon characters Tom and Jerry. For television, Hanna and Barbera created the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo, Top Cat, and Yogi Bear, among others.
William Denby Hanna (1910-2001) was born in Melrose, New Mexico, on July 14, 1910, and died in Hollywood, California, on March 22, 2001. Joseph Roland Barbera (1911-2006) was born in New York City on March 24, 1911, and died in Los Angeles on Dec. 18, 2006. In 1937, they joined the MGM motion-picture studio. With producer Fred Quimby, they created more than 100 short movie cartoons. The most popular were the “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, a violent comic series about an aggressive cat named Tom and his cheerful adversary, a mouse named Jerry. The “Tom and Jerry” cartoons won eight Academy Awards from 1940 to 1952.
In 1957, Hanna and Barbera left MGM and established their own company, Hanna-Barbera Productions. The company turned out an enormous number of cartoon series for television. In the early 1960’s, Hanna-Barbera began making feature-length motion pictures. The productions included the animated films Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear (1964), The Man Called Flintstone (1966), and The Jetsons: The Movie (1990), and the live-action movie The Flintstones (1994).
