Joseph Barbera

Joseph Barbera (born March 24, 1911, New York, New York—died December 18, 2006, Los Angeles, California) was an American animator who, as part of the team of Hanna and Barbera, created popular cartoon characters such as Tom and Jerry, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, and Scooby-Doo.

Barbera was working as a bank accountant with the Irving Trust Company in New York City during the early 1930s when he started submitting cartoons to magazines; he sold his first to Collier’s magazine and decided to give up banking for cartooning. Barbera joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) as a sketch artist in 1937, the same year as William Hanna. Hanna and Barbera produced more than 100 episodes in the Tom and Jerry series for MGM between 1940 and 1957. Several of these—including Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), The Cat Concerto (1946), and Johann Mouse (1952)—won Academy Awards for best animated short subject. In all, they won seven Academy Awards for their cartoons between 1943 and 1952.

The pair left MGM and formed Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1957, where they made a number of cartoon series for television. For these shows they developed a much-derided technique of “limited,” or reused, animation that allowed them to produce cartoons much more cheaply by drastically reducing the number of original drawings required to film an episode. For example, the clean line created by Yogi Bear’s signature shirt collar and tie enabled the studio to animate only his head in conversation scenes, leaving his body static. To compensate for the reused animation, the pair stressed character and witty dialogue instead of action. They were praised for the quality of writing found in their most successful productions.

In 1996 Warner Brothers bought Hanna-Barbera, eventually closing the studio and marketing its properties under the Cartoon Network brand. Hundreds of episodes of their animated works continued to be broadcast around the world. The Hanna-Barbera team had produced more than 3,000 half-hour shows for 150 television cartoon series, and they won eight Emmy Awards.