Joe Barbera:Joe Barbera, half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team that produced such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and the Flintstones, has died.
He was 95.
Barbera died of natural causes at his Los Angeles home with his wife, Sheila, at his side, Warner Brothers spokesman Gary Miereanu said.
With his longtime partner, Bill Hanna, Barbera first found success creating the highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons. The antics of the battling cat and mouse went on to win seven Academy Awards, more than any other series with the same characters.
The partners, who had first teamed up while working at MGM in the 1930s, went on to a new realm of success in the 1960s with a witty series of animated TV comedies, including The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo and Huckleberry Hound and Friends.
Their strengths went together perfectly, critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his book Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Barbera brought the comic gags and skilled drawing, while Hanna brought warmth and a keen sense of timing.
"This writing-directing team may hold a record for producing consistently superior cartoons using the same characters year after year - without a break or change in routine," Maltin wrote.
Warner Bros Chairman and chief executive Barry Meyer said: "From the Stone Age to the Space Age and from prime time to Saturday mornings, syndication and cable, the characters he created with his late partner, William Hanna, are not only animated superstars, but also a very beloved part of American pop culture. While he will be missed by his family and friends, Joe will live on through his work."
Born March 24th, 1911, in New York City to immigrant parents, Joseph Roland Barbera displayed an early aptitude for drawing. Although he graduated from the American Institute of Banking, he intensely disliked his first job at the Irving Trust bank. While employed there, he took classes at the Pratt Institute, Art Students League and New York University and sold cartoons to Collier's magazine.
Hanna, who died in 2001, once said he was never a good artist but his partner could "capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I've ever known".
The two first teamed cat and mouse in the short Puss Gets the Boot. It earned an Academy Award nomination, and MGM let the pair keep experimenting until the full-fledged Tom and Jerry characters eventually were born.
Jerry was borrowed for the mostly live-action musical Anchors Aweigh, dancing with Gene Kelly in a scene that become a screen classic.
After MGM folded its animation department in the mid-1950s, Hanna and Barbera were forced to go into business for themselves. With television's sharply lower budgets, their new cartoons put more stress on verbal wit rather than the detailed - and expensive - action featured in theatrical cartoon.
The Tom and Jerry series ended in 1957 when the management at MGM closed the animation studio. Hanna and Barbera formed a production company and began looking for work in television. Little animation was being produced for TV, but they managed to interest Screen Gems in the series Ruff and Reddy, the comic adventures of a big, dumb bulldog and a small, clever cat. It premiered on NBC in December 1957 as part of a package show that included live hosts, puppets and old theatrical cartoons.
In contrast to the lavish Tom and Jerry cartoons that cost more than $40,000 apiece in the mid-50s, the first episodes of Ruff and Reddy were budgeted at $2,700 apiece. To cut corners, Hanna and Barbera began using limited animation.
"Instead of the 25,000 to 40,000 drawings we used in a Tom and Jerry short, we were able to make a cartoon with 1,200 to 1,800 drawings," Barbera said in 1988. "But you had to be an animator to understand where to use those drawings and how to use camera moves to give them more life. We learned you can cover a lot of ground with dialogue."
"The Huckleberry Hound Show", their first half-hour programme, premiered in syndication in 1958, starring a laconic blue dog who spoke in a Southern drawl. Huck was quickly upstaged by Yogi Bear, which scored an even bigger hit when it debuted in 1961. Yogi, who frequently proclaimed he was "smarter than the average bear", used his devious intelligence to swipe food from campers' "picanic baskets" in Jellystone National Park.
The influence of Hanna-Barbera was felt for decades. In 2002 and again in 2004, characters from the cartoon series Scooby-Doo were brought to the big screen in films that combined live actors and animation.
"Joe's contributions to both the animation and television industries are without parallel - he has been personally responsible for entertaining countless millions of viewers across the globe," said friend, colleague and Warner animation president Sander Schwartz.
Hanna-Barbera's most popular show of the 60s was The Flintstones, which ran from 1960 through 1966, the longest-running animated prime-time series until The Simpsons. He and Hanna later served as executive producers of the 1994 live-action feature film based on the Stone Age characters.
When Barbera and Hanna received the Governors' Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1988, Barbera explained how their 60-year collaboration functioned.
"We never mix socially. It isn't deliberate, it just happened that way," he said. "Bill likes the great outdoors - he goes fishing, boating and on camping trips with sleeping bags. I hate boating, I hate fishing, I hate camping. While Bill is up north at his ranch, I go to Palm Springs."
Barbera noted that they agreed on the division of labour, which made for an amicable partnership. "I work on creating the ideas for projects and trying to sell those ideas in the various markets," he said. "Bill oversees the actual production in studios all over the world, which I would hate doing.
In addition to his wife, Joe Barbera is survived by three children from a previous marriage, Jayne, Neal and Lynn.
Born March 24th, 1911; died December 21st, 2006