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This is a list of animated television series, made-for-television films, direct-to-video films, theatrical short subjects, and feature films produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions (also known as H-B Enterprises, H-B Enterprise Production Company, and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons).
Every single television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. A homenage to one of the best cartoon factories of all time. 1. The Ruff & Reddy Show (1957–1962) TV-G | 30 min | Animation, Comedy, Family. The adventures of Ruff, a smart and steadfast cat, and Reddy, a good-hearted and brave but not a very bright dog.
Apr 8, 2021 · T-PC. WarnerMedia, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T ), is bringing back one of the most iconic brands in animation by renaming its’ European television animation studio after Hanna-Barbera ...
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- Overview
- History
- Merchandise
- Sound effects
Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. (simply known as Hanna-Barbera and also referred to as H-B Enterprises, H-B Production Company and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc.) was an American animation studio that dominated American television animation for over three decades in the mid 20th century.
It was founded in 1957 by former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (creators of Tom and Jerry) and live-action director George Sidney in partnership with Screen Gems, a TV unit of Columbia Pictures. In late 1966, it was sold to Taft Broadcasting and spent two decades as its subsidiary. It is officially considered the very first major animation studio to successfully produce cartoons exclusively for television.
Hanna-Barbera is known for creating a wide variety of popular animated characters and for 3 decades, the studio produced a succession of cartoon shows, including The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Wacky Races, Scooby-Doo and The Smurfs. For their achievements, Hanna and Barbera together won seven Academy Awards, eight Emmy Awards, a Governors Award, a Golden Globe Award and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The pair was also inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1993.
The two men and their company yielded over 3,500 half hours of animated programming for network and syndication and 31 television movies, 48 television specials, 12 theatrical films, 48 theatrical shorts and 25 direct-to-video features were also produced by the studio. Many of Hanna-Barbera's cartoons were distributed and seen worldwide in over 175 countries in 45 languages around the world. Most of the shows Hanna and Barbera created revolved around close friendship or partnership.
Hanna-Barbera's fortunes declined in the mid-1980s when the profitability of Saturday morning cartoons was eclipsed by weekday afternoon syndication. In late 1991, the studio was purchased from Taft (by then named Great American Broadcasting) by Turner Broadcasting System, who used much of its back catalog to program its new channel, Cartoon Network. After Turner purchased the company, Hanna and Barbera continued to serve as creative consultants and mentors.
Turner merged with Time Warner in 1996 and the studio became a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Animation, in which Hanna-Barbera would absorb into before Hanna died in 2001. Cartoon Network Studios continued the projects for the channel's output. Barbera went on to work for Warner Bros. Animation until his death in 2006.
1939–57: Humble beginnings, theatrical shorts and birth of a TV studio
Melrose, New Mexico native William Hanna and New York City-born of Italian heritage Joseph Barbera first met while working at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in 1939. Their first directorial production and collaboration was the Academy Award-nominated Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which served as the basis for the popular Tom and Jerry series of short subject theatricals. Hanna and Barbera served as directors of the shorts for over 20 years, with Hanna in charge of supervising the animation and Barbera in charge of the stories and pre-production. Hanna also provided the screams, yelps, howls and yells for Tom Cat. In addition to the series being nominated for twelve more Oscars, seven of the cartoons won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) between 1943 and 1953. The trophies were awarded to their producer Fred Quimby, who was not involved in the creative development of the shorts. Hanna and Barbera also did animated/live-action musical sequences for Anchors Aweigh, Invitation to the Dance and Dangerous When Wet and a handful of one-shot cartoons for MGM: Gallopin' Gals, Officer Pooch, War Dogs and Good Will to Men, a remake of Peace on Earth. With Quimby's retirement in 1955, Hanna and Barbera became the producers in charge of the MGM animation studio's output, supervising the last seven shorts of Tex Avery's Droopy series and directing and producing a short-lived Tom and Jerry spin-off series, Spike and Tyke, which ran for two entries. In addition to their work on the cartoons, the two men moonlighted on outside projects, including the original title sequences and commercials for the CBS sitcom I Love Lucy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided in early 1957 to close its cartoon studio, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release. Hanna and Barbera, contemplating their future while completing the final Tom and Jerry cartoons, began producing animated TV commercials. During their last year at MGM, they developed a concept for an animated TV program about a dog and cat in various misadventures. After they failed to convince the studio to back their venture, live-action director George Sidney, who had worked with Hanna and Barbera on several of his features (including the 1945 film Anchors Aweigh, which featured Jerry Mouse in a dance sequence with Gene Kelly) offered to serve as their business partner and convinced Screen Gems, TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, to make a deal with the producers. A coin toss determined that Hanna would have precedence in the naming the new studio. Harry Cohn, president and head of Columbia Pictures, took an 18 percent ownership in Hanna and Barbera's new company, H-B Enterprises, and provided working capital. Screen Gems became the new studio's distributor and its licensing agent, handling merchandizing of the characters from the animated programs. Their new cartoon firm officially opened for business in rented offices on the lot of Kling Studios — formerly Charlie Chaplin Studios — on July 7, 1957, two months after the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studio closed down. Sidney and several Screen Gems alumni became members of the studio's board of directors. Much of the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation staff — including animators Carlo Vinci, Kenneth Muse, Lewis Marshall, Michael Lah, and Ed Barge and layout artists Ed Benedict and Richard Bickenbach — became the new production staff for H-B. Conductor and composer Hoyt Curtin was in charge of providing the music while many voice actors came on board, such as William "Bill" Denby Hanna, Joseph "Joe" Roland Barbera, Paul Winchell, Janet Waldo, Dave Willock, Alan Reed, Henry Corden, Jean Vander, Frank Welker, Arnold Strong, Marvin Kaplan, Allen Melvin, Bea Benaderet, June Foray, Gerry Johnson, Lucille Bliss, Casey Kasem, Gary Owens, Scatman Crothers, George O' Halon, Penny Singleton, Michael Bell, Laurel Page, Jerry Dexter, Jo Ann Harris, Ronnie Schell, Indira Stefanianna Christopherson, Heather North Kenney, Nicole Jaffe, Lennie Weinrib, Kathy Gori, Bob Holt, Marilyn Schreffler, Vernee Watson Johnson, Arlene Golonka, Phil Luther Jr, Kath Soucie, Debi Derryberry, Julie McWhirter Dees, Mark Hamill, Joe Besser, Tommy Cook, Bill Callaway, Marty Ingels, Dick Curtis, John Astin, Rip Taylor, Hamilton Camp, Bj Ward, Neil Ross, Patrick Zimmerman, Charlie Adler, Russi Taylor, Dan Gilvezan, Nancy Cartwright, Peter Cullen, Ami Foster, Robert Morse, Carl Esser, Gregg Berger, Jim Cummings, Candi Milo, Jeff Bennett, Dan Castellaneta, Toran Caudell, Tim Wiley, Pamela Anderson, Harvey Korman, Daws Butler, Don Messick, Julie Bennett, Mel Blanc, Howard Morris, John Stephenson, Hal Smith, and Doug Young.
1957–69: Success with television cartoons
H-B Enterprises was one of the first American cartoon studios to successfully produce cartoons specifically for TV broadcast. Previously, animated programming on TV was primarily of rebroadcasts of theatrical cartoons. Its first original animated TV series, The Ruff and Reddy Show, premiered on NBC in December 1957. Next was the studio's first big hit The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958, a syndicated animated series aired in most markets just before primetime. A ratings success, it introduced a new crop of cartoon stars to audiences, in particular Huckleberry Hound, Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks and Yogi Bear. It was the first ever to win an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Children's Programming. Expanding rapidly following its initial success, several animation industry alumni – in particular former Warner Bros. Cartoons storymen Michael Maltese and Warren Foster, who became new head writers for the studio – joined the staff at this time as well as Joe Ruby and Ken Spears as film editors and Iwao Takamoto as character designer. By 1959, H-B Enterprises was reincorporated as Hanna-Barbera Productions and started slowly becoming a leader in TV animation production from then on. A second syndicated cartoon show, The Quick Draw McGraw Show and its only theatrical series, Loopy De Loop, followed in 1959. Hanna and Barbera then also migrated into network primetime production with the ABC smash hit The Flintstones in 1960. Loosely based upon the Jackie Gleason series The Honeymooners, yet set in a fictionalized stone age of cavemen and dinosaurs, the show ran for six seasons, becoming a ratings and merchandising success. It was the longest-running animated show in American prime time TV history and the top-ranking animated program in syndication history until being beaten out by The Simpsons in 1996. The Yogi Bear Show, the studio's first spinoff, premiered in syndication in 1961. Top Cat, Wally Gator, Touche Turtle and Dum Dum, Lippy the Lion & Hardy Har Har (the three shows part of The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series), The Jetsons and The Magilla Gorilla Show debuted in 1961, 1962 and 1963. Several animated TV commercials were produced as well, often starring their own characters (probably the best known is a series of Pebbles cereal commercials for Post featuring Barney tricking Fred into giving him his Pebbles cereal). Hanna-Barbera also produced the opening credits for Bewitched, in which animated caricatures of Samantha and Darrin appeared. These characterizations were reused in the fifth season Flintstones episode, "Samantha", voiced by Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York. In 1963, its operations moved off the Kling lot (by then renamed the Red Skelton Studios) to new location at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. West in Hollywood, California. This contemporary office building was designed by architect Arthur Froehlich. Its ultra-modern design included a sculpted latticework exterior, moat, fountains, and after later additions, a Jetsons-like tower. Newer programs of Jonny Quest, The Peter Potamus Show, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel and Sinbad Jr. and his Magic Belt came in 1964 and 1965. The Hanna-Barbera and Screen Gems partnership lasted until 1965, when Hanna and Barbera announced the sale of the studio to Taft Broadcasting. Its acquisition of Hanna-Barbera was delayed for a year by a lawsuit from Joan Perry, John Cohn, and Harrison Cohn – the wife and sons of former Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn, who felt that the animation firm had undervalued the Cohns' 18 percent share in the company when it was sold a few years previously. In 1966, an adaptation of Laurel and Hardy, Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles, which blended action-adventure with the earlier Hanna-Barbera humor and Space Ghost, which featured action-adventure, debuted. By December 1966, the litigation had been settled and the studio was finally acquired for $12 million by Taft, who would spend 1967 and 1968 folding it into its corporate structure and became its distributor. Both Hanna and Barbera stayed on to run the company. Screen Gems retained licensing and distribution rights to Hanna-Barbera's previously produced cartoons, as well as the trademarks to the characters from those shows into the 1970s and 1980s. A number of comedy and action cartoons followed in 1967, among them are The Space Kidettes, The Abbott and Costello Cartoon Show, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Herculoids, Shazzan, Fantastic Four, Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor and Samson & Goliath (also known as Young Samson). New TV programs arose in 1968, such as The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, The Adventures of Gulliver and The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while the successful Wacky Races and its spinoffs The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines aired on CBS, returned Hanna-Barbera to straight comedy, followed by Cattanooga Cats for ABC. The studio had its first (and only) record label Hanna Barbera Records, headed by Danny Hutton and distributed by Columbia Records. It featured artists Louis Prima, Five Americans, Scatman Crothers and the 13th Floor Elevators. Previously, children's records with Yogi Bear and others were released by Colpix Records. Next came Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in 1969, which blended elements of comedy, action, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and I Love a Mystery. The series centered on four teenagers and a dog solving supernatural mysteries.
1970–79: New cartoons and live action ventures
Hanna and Barbera and their studio had rapidly controlled over 80% of children's programming for television at the start of 1970s and secured the top three Saturday morning ratings as well, making them the world's biggest and largest animation company in the business. On the horizon, Hanna-Barbera produced and unleashed a steady stream of further new shows for primetime, fresh cartoons for Saturday mornings, programs featuring mystery-solving, crime-fighting teenagers with comical pets and or mascots and many spinoffs for broadcast and the air. These include Harlem Globetrotters, Josie and the Pussycats, Where's Huddles, The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, Help!... It's the Hair Bear Bunch!, The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, The Flintstone Comedy Hour, The Roman Holidays, Sealab 2020, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, Speed Buggy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, Yogi's Gang, Super Friends, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Inch High, Private Eye, Jeannie, The Addams Family, Hong Kong Phooey, Devlin, Partridge Family 2200 A.D., These Are The Days, Valley of the Dinosaurs, Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, The Tom and Jerry Show, The Great Grape Ape Show, The Mumbly Cartoon Show, The Scooby-Doo Show, Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, Clue Club, Jabberjaw, Laff-A-Lympics, CB Bears, The Robonic Stooges, The All-New Super Friends Hour, The All-New Popeye Hour, Yogi's Space Race, Galaxy Goof-Ups, Buford and the Galloping Ghost, Challenge of the Super Friends, Godzilla, Jana of the Jungle, The New Fred and Barney Show, Casper and the Angels, The New Shmoo, The Super Globetrotters, Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo and The World's Greatest Super Friends. The majority of American television animation was made by Hanna-Barbera and the only competition came from DePatie-Freleng Enterprises and Rankin-Bass. Filmation Associates lost ground to the Hanna-Barbera studios when the failure of its show Uncle Croc's Block led ABC president Fred Silverman to drop Filmation and give the network's Saturday morning cartoon time to Hanna-Barbera. Along with the rest of the American animation industry, it began moving away from producing all its cartoons in-house in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By this point in 1977, Ruby and Spears left to found their own studio Ruby-Spears Enterprises, with Filmways as its parent company. In 1979, Taft bought Worldvision Enterprises, which would become the syndication distributor for Hanna and Barbera's cartoons. In a different venture, the studio tried its hand at producing TV shows and films entirely in live-action (for example, the realistic 1974 series Korg: 70,000 B.C.), though its success selling such programming was limited by its track record as an animation company. Hanna-Barbera had already got into the live-action stuff earlier in the late sixties (mixing it with animation). Its live-action division was spun off and renamed Solow Production Company, which immediately following the name change, was able to sell the action adventure TV series Man from Atlantis to NBC.
Hanna-Barbera released its early VHS titles through Worldvision Home Video. During the shakeup at then owner Taft, which was transformed into Great American Communications, Worldvision was sold off. Accordingly, the animation company got its own home video line Hanna-Barbera Home Video, which lasted until 1991, when Turner bought the studio and subsequently put the video line on moratorium. Thereafter, all Hanna-Barbera titles were distributed by Turner Home Entertainment. Then following the merger between Turner and Time Warner, Warner Home Video would handle the home video releases of the cartoons and later by Warner Archive.
DC Comics announced a comic book initiative titled Hanna-Barbera Beyond, to re-imagine some of the company's classic cartoons into some darker and edgier settings. The first comic books on the line are Future Quest, Scooby Apocalypse, The Flintstones and Wacky Raceland. New titles arrived in March 2017 crossing over with the DC Universe. On June 29, Warner Bros. celebrated the 60th Anniversary of the formation the studio with a Hanna-Barbera Diamond Collection.
Besides its famous cartoon shows and characters, Hanna-Barbera was also noted for their large library of sound effects. Besides cartoon-style sound effects (such as ricochets, slide whistles, etc.), they also had familiar sounds used for transportation, household items and more. When Hanna and Barbera started their studio in 1957, they created a handful of sound effects, and had limited choices. They also took some sounds from the then-defunct Metro-Goldwyn Mayer animation studio and from various cartoon/movie studios like Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Animation, and Walt Disney Productions. By 1958, they began to expand and added more sound effects to their library.
Some of their famous sound effects included a rapid bongo drum take used for when a character's feet were scrambling before taking off, a "KaBONG" sound produced on a guitar for when Quick Draw McGraw, in his Zorro-style "El Kabong" crime fighting guise, would smash a guitar over a villain's head, the sound of a car's brake drum combined with a bulb horn for when Fred Flintstone would drop his bowling ball onto his foot, an automobile's tires squealing with a "skipping" effect added for when someone would slide to a sudden stop, a bass-drum-and-cymbal combination called the "Boom Crash" for when someone would fall down or smack into an object, a xylophone being struck rapidly on the same note for a tip-toeing effect, and a violin being plucked with the tuning pegs being raised to simulate something like pulling out a cat's whisker.
There are also some other sound effects like the crazy laugh sound done by veteran voice actor Daws Butler, a boing drum combined with a wiggle device for when something bounces off, other drum and cymbal crashes, a big bite performed by the voice of Muttley himself, a high frequency spring plucked four rapid times for when a laser gets shot, a big stone bell heavily bonked by another big stone for a Bronk effect, and a musical instrument vinged seven times for a slow motion replay of a clip, called Charlie Brown's Slo-Mo Take.
The cartoons also used Castle Thunder, a thunderclap sound effect that was commonly used in movies and television shows from the 1940s to the 1980s. Other common sounds such as Peeong (a frying pan hitting sound with a doppler effect) and Bilp were used regularly in all of its cartoons. Starting in the 1960s, other studios began using the sound effects, including Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Universal Animation Studios, Disney Television Animation, Film Roman, MGM Animation, Cartoon Network Studios, DiC Entertainment, Hasbro Studios, Warner Bros. Animation and others.
By the 21st century, almost every animation studio was using the sound effects. Like Hanna-Barbera was in the 90s, they are used sparingly, while some cartoons and non-animated movies and shows like Warner Bros. Animation's Krypto the Superdog, Nelvana's The Magic School Bus, Disney's Bonkers, Spumco's Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon, and A&E's Parking Wars, make heavy use of the classic sound effects, mostly for a retro feel. Some Hanna-Barbera sounds show up in various sound libraries such as Valentino and Audio Network. Hanna-Barbera Records (the studio's short-lived record division) released a set of LP records in the late 1960s entitled Hanna-Barbera's Drop-Ins, which contained quite a few of the classic sound effects.
This LP set was only available for radio and television stations and other studios. In 1973, and again in 1986, Hanna-Barbera released a second sound effect record set, a seven-LP set entitled The Hanna-Barbera Library of Sounds, which, like the previous set, contained several of the classic sound effects. Like the previous set, this was only available to production companies and radio/TV stations. The 1986 version was also available as a two compact-disc set.
Oct 17, 2019 · Updated October 17, 2019. All Hanna-Barbera shows list, featuring TV series created by Hanna-Barbera, with pictures from the show when available. Series and programs made by TV creator Hanna-Barbera are listed below alphabetically, with additional information such as when the show first aired and what network it aired on.
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Hanna-Barbera Poland, a Polish branch of the American studio, opened up and dealt with the promotion and distribution of animated H-B content and is most well known for releasing VHS tapes with Polish music distributor P.P. Polskie Nagrania, which mostly consisted of numbered compilation releases of Hanna-Barbera shows on one tape. This would ...
Apr 28, 1996 · Hanna-Barbera Productions is a production company based in Los Angeles, California. Discover new TV shows and movies from Hanna-Barbera Productions and where you can watch them.
