TVSquad

When you look at the history of television you can usually connect names to certain eras of programming. For instance, producer Aaron Spelling can be connected with many of the dramas and primetime soap operas of the 70s and 80s; Garry Marshall can be matched to many of the great ABC comedies of the 70s; Mark Goodson and Bill Toddman can be hooked up with the daytime game shows that pocked the television landscape for three decades.

When the names William Hanna and Joseph Barbera are mentioned two words come to mind: Saturday mornings. Without the creations that the Hanna-Barbera studios put out year after year Saturday mornings would have looked much different. Oh, other studios like Rankin-Bass and Filmation would have probably picked up the slack, but then we wouldn't have known about Space Ghost, Scooby-Doo, Mutley, Jabberjaw, or the Wonder Twins.

From the late 50s until the early 90's Hanna-Barbera was a major presence on television. Their shows produced countless imitations (some coming from Hanna-Barbera itself), thousands of characters, and memories that will last our lifetime.

And, it all started with a cat and a mouse.

William "Bill" Hanna (1910-2001) and Joseph Barbera (1911-2006) first met at MGM in 1938. Joe came from the Van Beuren Studios/Terrytoons, where he was animator and script writer (and produced a series called Tom and Jerry -- no relation to the cat and mouse), Bill came from Leon Schlesinger Productions, where he was head of their Ink and Paint Department.

The two would join together at MGM to direct theatrical short cartoons: Joe was the layout artist while Bill was the director. Their first short was the 1940 Puss Gets the Boot, which would become the first Tom and Jerry cartoon and be nominated for an Academy Award a year later. It was that cartoon that began a partnership that would produce 114 Tom and Jerry shorts, seven Academy Awards for Best (Cartoon) Short Subject, and 14 nominations.

All looked great for the duo. By 1944 they had established H-B Enterprises in order to independently produce sponsored films and, later, television commercials. A decade later they would be put in charge of MGM's animated division. This new title would be short-lived as the movie studio decided to shutdown their animated division in 1957. So, what did Joe and Bill do? Since they were already producing commercials for television, they decided to jump head first into the wonderful world of animated television programs.

Their first offering was The Ruff & Reddy Show, which premiered on NBC in December, 1957 and featured a dog and cat team that fell into many mishaps. Like many of the serialized theatrical shorts of the day, Ruff and Reddy featured cliffhanger storylines during each four-minute cartoon. It also featured the first appearance of the limited animation technique that the studio would be famous, and notorious for, throughout its lifetime. The show lasted until 1960, when it was cancelled by the network.

The next cartoon Hanna-Barbera produced was 1958's The Huckleberry Hound Show, featuring a blue dog with a Southern accent who was always looking for a job. This was the production company's breakout show. Not only did viewers connect to the doleful little hound, but they also enjoyed the two supporting features: Yogi Bear and Pixie and Dixie. After running for four seasons, winning an Emmy Award in 1960, and begetting The Yogi Bear Show in 1961, Huckleberry Hound ended its original run in 1962.

After producing one more syndicated cartoon package -- 1959's Quick Draw McGraw -- Bill and Joe took the plunge into programming for primetime network schedules. Their first, and most successful, venture was The Flintstones, which premiered on ABC in 1960. Loosely based on the Jackie Gleason sitcom The Honeymooners (originally, as I don't think Ralph Kramden talked to the equivalent of The Great Gazoo on his show) this prehistorically animated situation comedy lasted for six seasons on the primetime schedule.

Other nighttime fare produced by Hanna-Barbera didn't do as well as The Flintstones, but remained on television for decades to come. Top Cat, loosely based on characters from The Phil Silvers Show, premiered in 1961 and lasted for one season. So did The Jetsons, which premiered one year later. In 1964 ABC placed Johnny Quest on the primetime schedule. Quest signaled a change as it was the first animated, action/adventure series produced by Hanna-Barbera. It was also one of the few cartoons the company produced that didn't feature the limited animation style that many of their earlier shows were known for.

As the 60s progressed Joe and Bill realized that Saturday mornings were becoming the main place for animated fare. And, while they had produced a number of syndicated shows for that time of the week, including such classics as Wally Gator and Magilla Gorilla, they had never produced any original programming for the networks. That all changed in 1965 as Hanna-Barbera produced two shows for NBC -- both of them catering to cultural fads at the time. Atom Ant, the adventures of a super-powered ant, catered to the superhero fan set. Secret Squirrel, which featured a secret agent squirrel, catered to the secret spy set enamored with the James Bond films.

After that, the flood gates opened for Hanna-Barbera on Saturday mornings. By 1966 the production company had four hours of original and syndicated programming on Saturdays. In 1967 that increased to six hours (most of it on CBS and NBC). After that, the studio had an average five to six hours of animated programming on the Saturday morning schedule well into the early 1980s.

Their late 60s fare was very heavy in the action/adventure-superhero genre, with cartoons such as Space Ghost, Shazzan, The Herculoids, Birdman and The Fantastic Four. As the 60s turned into the 70s, the duo became fascinated with vehicles as they produced programs like The Wacky Races, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, and Dastardly and Mutley in Their Flying Machines, which returned the studio back into the slapstick humor they were originally famous for.

Another trend they helped to create in the late 60s was the animated, teenage mystery. Spurred on by the success of 1968's The Archie Show, Scooby-Doo, Where are You? featured a dog and his four friends who solved crimes while touring the world in a van known as The Mystery Machine. With its laugh track, hip-speaking teens (for the late 60s) and the occasional bubble-gum pop song playing during one of their romps (probably in imitation of those romps shown on The Monkees), Scooby-Doo became an instant hit.

It also produced many imitations, most of them from Hanna-Barbera itself. Some of the cartoons that the studio produced in the 70s that used the Scooby-Doo template were Josie and the Pussycats (1970), Funky Phantom (1971), Speed Buggy (1973), Jabberjaw (1976), Clue Club (1976), and Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels (1977). Clue Club was almost a direct rip-off of Scooby-Doo as it featured two dogs and their teen-age friends solving mysteries around the country.

It wasn't all teenagers and their talking pets/vehicles/ghosts in the 1970s for Hanna-Barbera. For instance, in the early 70s the studio obtained licensing rights from DC Comics to produce cartoons of their most popular superheroes. The result: Super Friends. A watered down version of the comic book company's Justice League of America, Super Friends would be extremely popular and remain on the Saturday morning schedule in one incarnation or another from 1973 until 1985.

The 1970s was also the decade where Hanna-Barbera revisited some of the old favorites in new adventures. The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show returned to the town of Bedrock and the adventures of Pebbles Flintstone and Bam-Bam Rubble as teenagers. Yogi's Ark and Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics (1977) featured many of the studio's stars of the 60s and early 70s in further adventures. Joe and Bill even got to work with the two characters that started their careers as Tom and Jerry premiered in 1975 along with The Grape Ape. Only this time around, thanks to the rigid standards of Saturday morning television, Tom and Jerry were the best of friends.

As the 70s moved into the 80s things began to change for Hanna-Barbera. As viewers began to age and studios like Filmation and Rankin-Bass began to produce more and more fare for Saturday mornings, Joe and Bill's organization began to shift from original content and move towards the production of licensed properties. Some of these included animated versions of The Smurfs, Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, Shirt Tales, Pac-Man and GoBots, which were a very bad imitation of the Transformers. They also began to team up with other studios, like Ruby-Spears (founded by two former members of the Hanna-Barbera team) and Warner Brothers television to produce such forgettable shows as The Dukes (cartoon version of The Dukes of Hazard), Wildfire, and the animated version of Teen Wolf.

By the early 90s, with most of their staff moving to Warner Brothers animation department and the major networks shifting away from animated fare, Hanna-Barbera's reign on Saturday mornings was basically over. They had a few shows on the schedule -- A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, The Flintstone Kids, and Tom and Jerry Kids -- which featured younger versions of their classic characters, but nothing else that really drew the viewer's attention like their shows of the 60s and 70s. By 1991 both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears were sold to Turner Broadcasting.

This was not the end for Hanna-Barbera, though. With the purchase by Turner the studio got a second life on cable, with much of their old library and new product being featured on TBS, and the newly founded Cartoon Network. The studio, now renamed Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, produced The New Adventures of Captain Planet (the sequel to the DIC-produced Captain Planet and the Planeteers) and 2 Stupid Dogs, for the Superstation, and Swat Kats and The Pirates of Dark Water for syndication (although Pirates first ran on ABC). It even produced a series called Jump, Rattle and Roll that was exclusively aired on, of all places, the Disney Channel.

As the 90s progressed, production of original Hanna-Barbera shows shifted to Cartoon Network, which was home to many older H-B shows before the Boomerang network came along. Shows like Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, The New Adventures of Johnny Quest and The Powerpuff Girls, would garner a new set of Hanna-Barbera fans, old and young. When Time-Warner purchased Turner Broadcasting in the mid 1990s the Hanna-Barbera were shutdown and merged with Warner Brothers Animation, ending a nearly four-decade run for the animation studio.

Despite the poor animation and, sometime, cheesy plot an dialogue. the hundreds of cartoons created by Hanna-Barbera will always have a soft spot in our lives. And, with networks like Boomerang as well as numerous DVDs, those cartoons can be passed down for new generations to enjoy.

Next time -- More superheroes than you can shake a stick at as we profile Saturday morning in 1967.