50 Fun Facts About Hanna-Barbera

Which cat-and-mouse duo did Hanna and Barbera create before founding their own studio?

Tom and Jerry won seven Oscars for best cartoon short, yet the producer credited on every one was Fred Quimby, a studio executive who had almost no creative hand in them.

Hanna-Barbera began on which silent star's old lot?

Charlie Chaplin had sold the lot in 1953, the year after he left the United States, and it was being rented out as Kling Studios. The pair's first television hits were drawn there before they built a studio of their own.

Before founding their studio, Hanna and Barbera quietly made cartoon titles and adverts for which 1950s sitcom?

I Love Lucy's cartoon versions of its two stars were made on the side, without credit, so that the pair's film-studio bosses would not find out. When the studio shut its cartoon unit in 1957, television was where they went next.

What was Hanna-Barbera's first animated television series, premiering in 1957?

The Ruff and Reddy Show, about a cat and a dog, went out in short chapters wrapped around old Columbia cinema cartoons. Television paid a small fraction of a film budget, so the pair had to find a far cheaper way to animate.

Which Hanna-Barbera series was the first cartoon to win an Emmy?

The Huckleberry Hound Show was the studio's first big hit, and the pair followed it with something bigger: a prime-time cartoon sitcom meant for parents as well as children.

The Flintstones was prime time's longest-running animated series until which show overtook it in the 1990s?

The Simpsons took the record some thirty years after The Flintstones ended its six-season run. The Stone Age family were very nearly the Flagstones, the name on the pitch film that sold the show.

The Flintstones was loosely modelled on which 1950s live-action sitcom?

The Honeymooners starred Jackie Gleason as the blustering Ralph Kramden, with Art Carney as his best friend. The studio never hid the debt: Hanna said you could compare Fred and Barney with the pair.

Who provided the voice of Barney Rubble for most of the original run?

Mel Blanc nearly lost the part to a car crash in 1961. A colleague covered a handful of episodes, then the cast began recording around Blanc's bed, body cast and all, so that he could come back sooner.

Voice actor Alan Reed swapped his script's plain 'Yahoo' for which Hanna-Barbera catchphrase?

Yabba Dabba Doo! was Alan Reed's invention as the voice of Fred Flintstone: the script had Fred yell 'Yahoo', which Reed found too flat, so he offered something livelier and Joe Barbera kept it.

Which pet in The Flintstones behaves just like a family dog?

Dino is there because the show rebuilt modern suburbia in stone: the family dog became a small dinosaur, the vacuum cleaner a baby mammoth and the car something Fred powered with his feet.

Where does Fred Flintstone work?

Slate Rock and Gravel Company pays Fred to drive a bronto-crane, a living dinosaur standing in for an excavator. Much of the show's humour came from giving modern machines a Stone Age body.

Which Hanna-Barbera character dashes off with the cry 'Exit, stage left'?

Snagglepuss, a stagestruck pink mountain lion, sounded so like the Cowardly Lion of The Wizard of Oz that actor Bert Lahr objected when the cartoon began advertising cereal. The adverts then had to credit the real voice on screen.

Where do the Jetsons live?

Orbit City borrows its look from Googie, the swooping space-age style of real 1950s coffee shops and motels. Its homes and offices perch on tall adjustable columns, high above the ground.

Who is George Jetson's boss?

Cosmo Spacely owns Spacely Space Sprockets, where he is as short-tempered as he is short. George's whole job is to push a button, a workload he still manages to complain about.

In 1962 The Jetsons became one of the first programmes which network broadcast in colour?

ABC was the last of the big three networks to move into colour, starting in 1962 with a few cartoons. Only a handful of its stations could transmit it, so most homes still saw the future in black and white.

Don Messick, the original voice of Scooby-Doo, used a similar growl for which character in The Jetsons?

Astro came first, in 1962: the family dog growls an R onto the front of every word he says. At the end of the decade Messick gave Scooby-Doo much the same way of talking.

Where does Yogi Bear steal picnic baskets?

Jellystone Park is a pun on Yellowstone, and it escaped the cartoon: a chain of real family campgrounds has traded under the name, with Yogi as its mascot, since 1969.

Who is Yogi Bear's cautious sidekick?

Boo-Boo acts as Yogi's conscience, the small voice of caution the bigger bear ignores. He is Yogi's companion, not his son.

Daws Butler, the original voice of Yogi Bear, also played which Wild West sheriff with the alter ego El Kabong?

Quick Draw McGraw sent up the TV westerns of the day: a well-meaning but dim sheriff whose running gag was shooting himself with his own six-gun. As the masked El Kabong he clobbered outlaws with a guitar.

Which cereal company sponsored The Yogi Bear Show?

Kellogg's had backed the studio's first syndicated hit in 1958 and went on sponsoring the shows that followed. The logic was simple: the cartoon stars spent the breaks selling breakfast cereal.

Top Cat was created as a parody of which sitcom?

The Phil Silvers Show starred Silvers as Sergeant Bilko, a fast-talking army con man, and T.C. was his alley-cat double. The studio even cast Maurice Gosfield, the sitcom's Private Doberman, as Benny the Ball.

Which policeman hounds Top Cat's gang?

Officer Dibble walks the beat past Hoagy's Alley and always has his eye on the gang, who spend each episode trying to stay one step ahead of him. For all the scheming, cop and cats share a grudging affection.

Comic artist Doug Wildey designed which realistic 1964 Hanna-Barbera adventure series?

Jonny Quest began as something else: the studio first had Wildey design a cartoon of the radio hero Jack Armstrong. When that plan was dropped and it asked for a hero of its own, he went home and, he said, wrote Jonny Quest that evening.

Scooby-Doo's name was inspired by the scat line that ends which Frank Sinatra hit?

Strangers in the Night fades out on Sinatra singing 'doo-be-doo-be-doo'. A television executive heard it on an overnight flight to a meeting about the show, and the dog, until then called Too Much, had a new name.

Which duo, who later gave their name to a rival studio, created Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!?

Joe Ruby and Ken Spears were the staff writers who built the show around a cowardly Great Dane. In 1977 they founded Ruby-Spears, a rival that four years later was bought by their old studio's parent company.

What was Scooby-Doo's working title before the name changed?

The Mysteries Five were a teenage rock band who solved spooky cases between gigs, with a bongo-playing dog called Too Much in tow. The band idea was dropped, and the dog ended up as the star.

When 60 Minutes compared Hanna-Barbera to a giant of American industry, which company did it pick?

General Motors sold about half the cars in America at the time, and the 'General Motors of animation' ended up going further: in one season the studio made nearly two-thirds of all Saturday-morning cartoons.

Which arcade game became a 1982 Hanna-Barbera Saturday-morning series, the first cartoon based on a video game?

Pac-Man reached television in September 1982, at the height of the arcade craze, complete with a wife, a baby and a pet dog. The idea caught on: within a year a sister studio had Donkey Kong and Frogger on air too.

Which company bought Hanna-Barbera in 1991 and used its library to launch Cartoon Network?

Turner Broadcasting System outbid rivals including MCA and Hallmark, paying up to $320 million for the cartoons. Its founder had used the same trick once before, building the TNT channel on a film library he had bought.

Which sister channel did Cartoon Network spin off in 2000 to show the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons?

Boomerang had started in 1992 as a block of old cartoons on Cartoon Network, the home of the studio's library. Eight years later the classics moved out to a channel of their own.

Which Belgian comic became Hanna-Barbera's NBC hit, running nine seasons from 1981?

The Smurfs, from the Belgian cartoonist Peyo, were the studio's one runaway hit of the 1980s, a decade when its grip on Saturday mornings was otherwise slipping.

Which animator dismissed Hanna-Barbera's limited animation as "illustrated radio"?

Chuck Jones aimed the jibe at television cartoons in general, where talk did the work that movement used to. The irony is that his own 1942 short The Dover Boys had pioneered several of the shortcuts he was mocking.

Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone and Scooby-Doo all wear what, thanks to a Hanna-Barbera cost-cutting trick?

Neckwear hides the join at the neck: a collar or tie let the body stay frozen while artists redrew only the head as a character spoke.

Which show did Hanna-Barbera make as its first Cartoon Network spin-off from What a Cartoon!?

Dexter's Laboratory grew out of films its creator had made as an animation student. His first short became the showcase's highest-rated cartoon, and the audience's approval turned it into a full series.

Which future prime-time cartoon creator wrote for Hanna-Barbera's Johnny Bravo in the 1990s?

Seth MacFarlane also made a short at the studio called Larry & Steve, about a dim middle-aged man and his highly intelligent dog. Reworked, the pair became Peter and Brian of Family Guy.

Which 1976 Hanna-Barbera series cashed in on the Jaws craze with a great white shark who played the drums?

Jabberjaw drummed for an undersea rock band, the Neptunes, and owed his existence to the shark mania that swept America after the film came out the year before.

When William Hanna died in 2001, Hanna-Barbera was folded into which studio's animation division?

Warner Bros. had inherited the studio through a chain of media takeovers in the 1990s. Its animation arm took in what remained, and the old name lives on as a label on new Scooby-Doo and Flintstones projects.

Which 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero returned in 1994 as the host of a spoof late-night talk show?

Space Ghost swapped crime-fighting for a desk in Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which recycled the old 1960s drawings and had him interview real celebrities. It was one of Cartoon Network's first original series.

Which 1973 film was Hanna-Barbera's first feature drawn from a children's novel rather than one of its TV cartoons?

Charlotte's Web did not win over its author. E. B. White complained that the story 'is interrupted every few minutes so that somebody can sing a jolly song', adding: 'I don't care much for jolly songs.'

In which US state, a territory until 1912, was William Hanna born?

New Mexico was still a territory when Hanna was born there, one of seven children, and became a state in 1912. His father's construction jobs soon moved the family on, and the future animator grew up on the West Coast.

In which New York neighbourhood was Joseph Barbera born?

His parents were Sicilian immigrants; he joined Van Beuren Studios in 1932 before heading west.

Hanna and Barbera first met while working at which studio?

MGM hired both men in 1937, about a month apart. Their first cartoon together, a cat-and-mouse short, won an Oscar nomination, and the partnership it started lasted for the rest of Hanna's life.

What was the title of Hanna and Barbera's first cat-and-mouse cartoon, released in 1940?

Puss Gets the Boot called its cat Jasper and gave its mouse no name at all, then went on to an Oscar nomination. The names the world knows arrived only with the pair's second outing.

Gene Kelly dances with Hanna and Barbera's cartoon mouse in which 1945 musical?

Anchors Aweigh has Kelly teach the mouse to dance, a blend of live action and animation. Kelly rejoined the pair two decades later for a television Jack and the Beanstalk that won an Emmy.

Which children's health product was made in the shapes of Fred Flintstone and his friends?

Chewable vitamins were part of a merchandising push that began almost as soon as the show did, alongside toys, records and cereals. The Flintstones went on to sell millions of dollars' worth of goods.

Hanna-Barbera supplied the animated opening credits for which live-action sitcom?

Bewitched opens with a cartoon Samantha on her broomstick, drawn by the studio. The favour was repaid in 1965, when Samantha and Darrin moved in near the Flintstones for an episode, voiced by the sitcom's own stars.

Hanna-Barbera's overseas studio, opened in 1972, was in which country?

Australia's branch, based in Sydney, ended up going its own way: after a management buyout in 1988 it became Southern Star, a major independent television producer, while Disney took over its animation studio.

Which DC Comics team did Hanna-Barbera adapt as Super Friends in 1973?

Justice League of America heroes fought very gentle battles on Saturday mornings. The first series swapped the comics' arch-villains for misguided scientists and aliens, who were usually talked round rather than punched.

Which 1968 Hanna-Barbera show spun off Dastardly and Muttley and Penelope Pitstop?

Wacky Races sent a field of outlandish cars on cross-country road rallies. Its villain kept speeding ahead to lay traps for the rest, and every one backfired and left him at the back of the pack.

Who played Fred Flintstone in the 1994 live-action film of The Flintstones?

John Goodman was cast at the insistence of Steven Spielberg, whose company made the film, with Rick Moranis as Barney. It drew crowds around the world.