Joseph Barbera, 1911-2006

Most of you know by now my love of animation - most notably the classic American animation before the television era. As much as the Hanna-Barbera studios can be blamed for lowering the bar with limited animation for TV starting with Ruff and Reddy, the team also did some outstanding theatrical work early on. Tom and Jerry won audiences, Oscars and admiration with its wordless wit, its thunderous use of sound and its superb writing.

While many purists like to wag fingers at their TV product, there were many inventive and classic shows in the mix (how great was Top Cat?). For every Hokey Wolf, there was a Jetsons. You took the so-so because you knew they'd eventually reward you with a wow.

I met Joe Barbera in New York in the early '90s. He loved to talk about his craft - and like a proud father, he loved all his creations equally. I absorbed every word from this man who, with William Hanna, practically defined animation in the modern era. Although they never got the same respect as Chuck Jones or Tex Avery, they did what they loved, and they both lived to ripe old ages, as most animators usually do.

Even though they won numerous Academy Awards while working for MGM, I was proud to be the sole voice of the cartoon short which brought the first Oscar nomination to Hanna-Barbera as a company, The Chicken From Outer Space. Funny story, actually. Cartoon Network gave 50 animators a shot at making short cartoons for a series called "What A Cartoon!" under the Hanna-Barbera studio banner. John Dilworth, the director of "Chicken," put the finished cartoon in an animation show at L.A.'s Nu-Art theater - a little more than a month before it was supposed to premiere on Cartoon Network. He calls me from New York at 6am to tell me it earned an Oscar nomination the morning the nominations came out. Did Hanna-Barbera know it got nominated - or even shown in a theater for that matter? "I don't know," he replied sheepishly. He thought he really blew it. Two hours later, he calls back - they were delighted, and they ended up promoting its TV premiere as an Oscar nominee - Cartoon Network's first. We were petrified for a couple of hours there.

I'm in no way unique. They gave so much work to so many people, there's hardly anyone in this town who hasn't done even the most peripheral job with Hanna-Barbera. We were all lucky to have people like Joe Barbera and his peers to give us the gift of laughter through two-dimensional characters who could out-act humans any day. We lost one of the great ones today. Joseph Barbera, forever 95.

Comments

[Diamond Joe]

Anyone who blames Hanna-Barbera for lowering the bar for TV animation doesn't know much about TV animation. Compared to most TV cartoons ("Clutch Cargo," anyone?), H-B output was downright lush.

Granted, it's not a patch on the golden age of theatrical animation. But how could it have been? Even Warner Bros., at their peak of production, with four complete units working, couldn't have filled a single half-hour cartoon's 17-episode order in a year.

Considering the inevitable economics of television-- producing far more product for less money --H-B did extremely well under the circumstances. Purists may wince at some of the shortcuts they pioneered-- Xeroxing cells; painting the bulk of a character into the background and only doing cells of the moving parts --but I prefer to see it as finding ways to do more with the animation dollar.

If anything, H-B raised the bar. I'm a child of the '70s, and didn't know how good I had it until I saw what the previous generation of kids had had to watch. Look at the downright minimalist stuff the other studios were bringing out in the '50s and '60s, and tell me I'm wrong.