Hanna-Barbera Trivia
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50 free Hanna-Barbera trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
When MGM shut its cartoon unit in 1957, the two men behind Tom and Jerry rented space on Charlie Chaplin's old lot and started making cartoons for television at a tenth of their old budget. A coin toss put Hanna's name first. Within five years Hanna-Barbera had an Emmy for Huckleberry Hound, prime time's first animated sitcom in The Flintstones, and a Space Age mirror image in The Jetsons; a decade later it was turning out two-thirds of all Saturday-morning cartoons and was nicknamed the General Motors of animation. These 50 questions run from Jellystone Park to Orbit City: Yogi's picnic baskets, Top Cat's alley, Jonny Quest, Wacky Races, Scooby-Doo's original title, the Smurfs' record run, the Honeymooners lawsuit that never happened, the limited-animation tricks Chuck Jones called "illustrated radio", and the Turner deal that built Cartoon Network. Easy questions stick to the famous families; the expert tier asks about sponsors, sale prices, head writers and the studio's digital ink-and-paint system. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which cat-and-mouse duo did Hanna and Barbera create before founding their own studio?
Tom and Jerry
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.
Q 02Hanna-Barbera began on which silent star's old lot?
Charlie Chaplin
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.
Q 03Before founding their studio, Hanna and Barbera quietly made cartoon titles and adverts for which 1950s sitcom?
I Love Lucy
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.
Q 04What was Hanna-Barbera's first animated television series, premiering in 1957?
The Ruff and Reddy Show
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.
Q 05Which Hanna-Barbera series was the first cartoon to win an Emmy?
The Huckleberry Hound Show
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.
Q 06The Flintstones was prime time's longest-running animated series until which show overtook it in the 1990s?
The Simpsons
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.
Q 07The Flintstones was loosely modelled on which 1950s live-action sitcom?
The Honeymooners
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.
Q 08Who provided the voice of Barney Rubble for most of the original run?
Mel Blanc
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.
Q 09Voice actor Alan Reed swapped his script's plain 'Yahoo' for which Hanna-Barbera catchphrase?
Yabba Dabba Doo!
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.
Q 10Which pet in The Flintstones behaves just like a family dog?
Dino
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.
Q 11Where does Fred Flintstone work?
Slate Rock and Gravel Company
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.
Q 12Which Hanna-Barbera character dashes off with the cry 'Exit, stage left'?
Snagglepuss
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.
Q 13Where do the Jetsons live?
Orbit City
Q 21Top Cat was created as a parody of which sitcom?
The Phil Silvers Show
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.
Q 22Which policeman hounds Top Cat's gang?
Officer Dibble
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.
Q 23Comic artist Doug Wildey designed which realistic 1964 Hanna-Barbera adventure series?
Jonny Quest
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.
Q 14Who is George Jetson's boss?
Cosmo Spacely
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.
Q 15In 1962 The Jetsons became one of the first programmes which network broadcast in colour?
ABC
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.
Q 16Don Messick, the original voice of Scooby-Doo, used a similar growl for which character in The Jetsons?
Astro
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.
Q 17Where does Yogi Bear steal picnic baskets?
Jellystone Park
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.
Q 18Who is Yogi Bear's cautious sidekick?
Boo-Boo
Boo-Boo acts as Yogi's conscience, the small voice of caution the bigger bear ignores. He is Yogi's companion, not his son.
Q 19Daws Butler, the original voice of Yogi Bear, also played which Wild West sheriff with the alter ego El Kabong?
Quick Draw McGraw
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.
Q 20Which cereal company sponsored The Yogi Bear Show?
Kellogg's
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.
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.
Q 24Scooby-Doo's name was inspired by the scat line that ends which Frank Sinatra hit?
Strangers in the Night
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.
Q 25Which duo, who later gave their name to a rival studio, created Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!?
Joe Ruby and Ken Spears
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.
Q 26What was Scooby-Doo's working title before the name changed?
The Mysteries Five
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.
Q 27When 60 Minutes compared Hanna-Barbera to a giant of American industry, which company did it pick?
General Motors
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.
Q 28Which arcade game became a 1982 Hanna-Barbera Saturday-morning series, the first cartoon based on a video game?
Pac-Man
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.
Q 29Which company bought Hanna-Barbera in 1991 and used its library to launch Cartoon Network?
Turner Broadcasting System
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.
Q 30Which sister channel did Cartoon Network spin off in 2000 to show the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons?
Boomerang
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.