Cartoon Network Studios

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Cartoon Network Studios, the successor to Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc., is an American animated cartoon studio that has produced television animation, following in the footsteps of Hanna-Barbera, creators of animated television and motion picture releases for over forty years. The original Hanna-Barbera company was founded in 1944 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera as H-B Enterprises, through which the pair used to do freelance television commercial production. After MGM shut down its animation studio in 1957, H-B Enterprises became Hanna and Barbera's full-time job. Hanna and Barbera immediately began producing television cartoons such as The Ruff & Reddy Show and The Huckleberry Hound Show, making their company one of the first dedicated to producing cartoons for television. By 1960, re-incorporated as Hanna-Barbera Productions, the company had become a leader in television animation production.

While regularly criticized for its use of limited animation techniques, Hanna-Barbera Productions produced successful prime-time, weekday afternoon, and Saturday morning cartoons for all three major networks, and for syndication as well, along with a sporadic amount of feature film projects. Over a two-decade span of success, Hanna-Barbera introduced many successful cartoon series, including The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Yogi Bear Show, Jonny Quest, and Scooby-Doo, all of which would go on to become icons of American pop culture.

From approximately 1970 to 1983, Hanna-Barbera Productions was the most successful television animation studio in the world, almost exclusively dedicated to producing Saturday morning cartoons. The company's fortunes declined some after weekday afternoon syndication became the most successful venue for television animation. In 1991, the company was purchased by Turner Broadcasting, primarily so that Turner could use its 300-plus cartoon series library as the basis of the programming for its new Cartoon Network cable television channel. Re-christened H-B Production Company in 1992, and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons in 1993, the studio continued without active regular input from William Hanna or Joseph Barbera, who both went into semi-retirement yet continued to serve as figureheads for the studio.

During the late-1990s, Turner turned Hanna-Barbera towards primarily producing new material for the Cartoon Network. in 1997, Time Warner, the current owners of the Hanna-Barbera empire, closed down the H-B studio on Calhuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, California and had the Hanna-Barbera staff move to the main Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. With Hanna's death in 2001, Hanna-Barbera was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation, and Cartoon Network Studios assumed production of Cartoon Network output. Cartoon Network Studios continues to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Time Warner, producing material for broadcast on the Cartoon Network and Kids WB. The Hanna-Barbera trademark is only used to market properties associated with Hanna-Barbera's "classic" works such as The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo.

1 History
2 List of notable Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network Studios productions
3 See also
4 External links

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History

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The beginnings of Hanna-Barbera

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera first teamed together while working at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studio in 1939. Their first directorial project was a cartoon entitled Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which served as the genesis of the popular Tom and Jerry cartoon series.

Hanna, Barbera, and MGM live-action director George Sidney formed H-B Enterprises in 1944 while continuing working for the studio, and used the side company to work on ancillary projects, including early television commercials and the original opening titles to I Love Lucy.

After an award-winning stint in which Hanna and Barbera won eight Oscars, MGM closed their animation studio in 1957, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release. Hanna and Barbera hired most of their MGM unit to work for H-B Enterprises, which became a full-fledged production company starting in 1957. The decision was made to specialize in television animation, and the studio's first series was The Ruff & Reddy Show, which premiered on NBC in December 1957. In order to obtain working capital to produce their cartoons, Hanna-Barbera made a deal with the Screen Gems television division of Columbia Pictures in which the new animation studio received working capital in exchange for distribution rights.

By 1960, H-B Enterprises was reincorporated as Hanna-Barbera Productions, and had become a leader in television animation production. While regularly criticized for its use of limited animation techniques, Hanna-Barbera Productions produced prime-time, weekday afternoon, and Saturday morning cartoons for all three major networks in the United States, and for syndication. The studio also produced a few theatrical projects for Columbia Pictures, including Loopy De Loop, a theatrical shorts series and feature film projects based on their television properties.

The company never had a building of its own until 1963, when the Hanna-Barbera Studio, located at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. in West Hollywood, California, was opened. The Columbia/Hanna-Barbera partnership lasted until 1967, when Hanna and Barbera sold the studio to Taft Broadcasting while retaining their positions at the studio.

From 1969 to about 1983, Hanna-Barbera Productions was the premiere television animation studio in the world, almost exclusively dedicated to producing Saturday morning cartoons. The company's fortunes declined some after weekday afternoon syndication became the most successful venue for television animation.

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Television cartoons

Hanna-Barbera was the first animation studio to successfully produce animated cartoons especially for television; until then, cartoons on television consisted primarily of rebroadcasts of theatrical cartoons. Other Hanna-Barbera works included a theatrical cartoon series, Loopy De Loop, for Columbia Pictures from 1959 to 1965; and the opening credits to the ABC/Screen Gems television show Bewitched. Later, H-B would use the Bewitched characters as guest stars on The Flintstones.

Many of Hanna-Barbera's original TV series were produced for prime-time broadcast, and they continued to produce prime-time TV cartoons up until the early 1970s. Such shows as The Huckleberry Hound Show (and its spin-off, The Yogi Bear Show), Quick Draw McGraw, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, The Jetsons, and especially The Flintstones were originally broadcast during prime-time hours, competing with live-action comedies, dramas, and quiz shows.

The Flintstones in particular became a top-rated show. "The Blessed Event", the February 22, 1963 episode which depicted the birth of Pebbles Flintstone, was the highest-rated episode in the show's history, mirroring the I Love Lucy birth episode.

But the Hanna-Barbera studio especially captured the market for animated TV shows produced for syndication and Saturday mornings, grabbing the majority of TV cartoon production and holding it for over thirty years.

Over a two-decade span of success, Hanna-Barbera introduced many successful cartoon series, including The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Yogi Bear Show, Jonny Quest, and Scooby-Doo, all of which would go on to become icons of American pop culture.

During the 1970s in particular, most American TV cartoons were produced by Hanna-Barbera, with the only competition coming from Filmation and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, plus occasional prime-time animated "specials" from Rankin-Bass, Chuck Jones, and Bill Melendez's Peanuts.

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Quality controversy

The Hanna-Barbera studio has been accused of contributing to the decrease in quality of animation and TV cartoons from the 1960s through the 1980s. This relates to their being one of the first studios to do animated cartoons for television and dealing with constrained budgets. The perception of cartoons as a "kid's medium" made them a low priority for television executives. For example, one 22-minute (30 minutes with commercials) episode of Josie and the Pussycats in 1970 had the same budget--$45,000--as one 8-minute Tom and Jerry short from the late-1940s. Such budgetary constraints demanded a change in production values.

Hanna-Barbera introduced limited animation, popularized in theatrical animation by UPA, on the television series The Ruff & Reddy Show as a way of reducing costs. This led to a reduction in animation quality. The studio's solution to the resulting criticism was to go into features, producing both higher-quality versions of their TV cartoons (Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! in 1964, The Man Called Flintstone in 1966, and Jetsons: The Movie in 1990) and adaptations of other material (Charlotte's Web in 1973 and Heidi's Song in 1982).

The field of animation reached its low point in the mid-1970s, even as the audience for Saturday morning cartoons was at its peak. The strong focus on scripting and dialogue that had carried the earlier cartoons was more or less gone by 1973, as the studio's output had increased to the point that story quality had to take a backseat to production output. By this time, most Hanna-Barbera shows had degenerated into variations on but a few themes, with each successful formula (The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, SuperFriends) milked dry through repetition. Various animation short-cuts became unfortunate Hanna-Barbera trademarks, such as plots being advanced by characters seen only as "talking heads," and crashes and disasters happening just off the frame, heard but not seen. The soundtracks rather than the visuals carried the majority of the plot and humor of the cartoons. This era of H-B animation is frequently skewered by Adult Swim (most notably Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law) and in many of Robert Smigel's "TV Funhouse" segments on Saturday Night Live.

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The slow rise and fall

The state of the field of animation changed during the 1980s, thanks to competitors' syndicated cartoon series based upon popular toys and action figures, including Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Rankin-Bass' Thundercats. The Hanna-Barbera studio fell behind, as a new wave of animators and production studios introduced variety into the market for TV cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s.

Throughout the '80s, Hanna-Barbera churned out shows based on familiar licensed properties like The Smurfs, The Snorks, Pac-Man, The Dukes of Hazzard, Shirt Tales, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, and Challenge of the GoBots, and also produced several ABC Weekend Specials. Some of their shows were produced at their Australian-based studio (a partnership with Australian media company Southern Star Entertainment), including Drak Pack, Wildfire (animated series), The Berenstain Bears, Teen Wolf, and CBS Storybreak. H-B also aligned themselves with Ruby-Spears Productions, which was founded in 1977 by former H-B employees Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. H-B's then-parent Taft Broadcasting purchased Ruby-Spears from Filmways in 1981, and Ruby-Spears often paired their productions with Hanna-Barbera shows.

H-B also had a habit of making "kid" versions of popular characters in the 1980s, including The Pink Panther and Sons, The Flintstone Kids, Popeye and Son, and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. In 1985, Hanna-Barbera launched The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, a weekend-only program that introduced new versions of old favorites like Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, The Snorks, and Richie Rich alongside brand new shows like Galtar and the Golden Lance, Paw Paws, Fantastic Max, and Midnight Patrol. The following year, H-B produced Yogi's Great Escape, the first entry in its Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10, a series of 10 original telefilms based on their popular stable of characters, including the popular crossover The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones.

Throughout all of this, both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears were subject to the financial troubles of parent company Taft Broadcasting, and had gradually moved away from producing everything in-house, deciding instead to outsource some of the production to studios in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan. Hanna-Barbera in particular was also held down by the demands of TV networks, mainly ABC, who insisted on rehashing Scooby-Doo many times over; this stifled creativity, leading many of the better writers and creative people to leave in 1989. They responded to a call from Warner Bros. to resurrect their animation department, ultimately developing Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs.

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The Turner rebound

In 1990, the bottom fell out: Taft Broadcasting (which had since changed its name to Great American Broadcasting in 1988) went bankrupt, and both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears were put up for sale. In 1990, Hanna-Barbera and much of the original Ruby-Spears library were acquired by Turner Broadcasting.

Turner President of Entertainment Scott Sassa turned to an unusual choice to lead the failing studio. Fred Seibert was a cable television branding guru who had created the MTV and Nickelodeon branding and marketing, and had invented Nick-at-Nite, but he had never worked in cartoon production. He immediately filled the gap left by the departure of most of their creative crew during the Great American years was a new crop of animators, writers, and producers, including Pat Ventura, Donovan Cook, Craig McCracken, Genndy Tartakovsky, Seth MacFarlane, David Feiss, Van Partible, and Butch Hartman and new production head Buzz Potamkin. In 1992, the studio was renamed as H-B Productions Company, changing its name once again to Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc. a year later.

In the early 1990s, Hanna-Barbera created cartoon series like Tom and Jerry Kids Show (and its spin-off, Droopy: Master Detective) and The New Adventures of Captain Planet (a sequel to the original DiC/TBS Productions series Captain Planet and the Planeteers), and the ill-fated Yo Yogi!. They also introduced shows that were quite different from their previous releases, including Wake, Rattle, and Roll, 2 Stupid Dogs, Swat Kats, and The Pirates of Dark Water. In the mid-'90s, Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network (which introduced many Hanna-Barbera shows to a new audience) launched Seibert's innovation, the back-to-the-future concept of cartoon shorts World Premiere Toons (a.k.a. What A Cartoon), which introduced a brand new stable of characters and, in a way, changed Hanna-Barbera forever.

The first original Cartoon Network series to emerge from the World Premiere Toons project was Genndy Tartakovsky's Dexter's Laboratory. Others programs followed, including Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, and The Powerpuff Girls, the last series to use H-B's famous swirling star logo (first used in 1979). H-B also produced several new direct-to-video movies featuring Scooby-Doo (released by Warner Bros.) as well as a new Jonny Quest series, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest.

After the merger between Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner in 1996, the conglomerate had two separate animation studios in its possession. Though combined corporately , Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. Animation operated separately until 1998. In 1998, the Hanna Barbera building was closed and the studio was moved to Sherman Oaks, California.

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The Cartoon Network Studios era

Image:CartoonNetworkLogo1.jpgAround 1998, the Hanna-Barbera name began to disappear from the newer shows from the studio in favor of the Cartoon Network Studios name. This came in handy with shows that were produced outside of Hanna-Barbera, but that Cartoon Network had a hand in producing, like aka Cartoons' Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Kino Film's Mike, Lu and Og, and Curious Pictures' Sheep in the Big City, as well as the shows the studio continued to produce, like The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Samurai Jack.

When William Hanna died in 2001, an era was over. The last official Hanna-Barbera production was Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase, which was co-produced with Warner Bros. Television Animation. After 2001, Hanna-Barbera was completely absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation and further Cartoon Network projects were handled by Cartoon Network Studios.

Though the Hanna-Barbera name remains for "classic" productions based on properties like the Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, and others, the studio that does the bulk of the work is Cartoon Network Studios, which continues the traditions made from its founding fathers while creating new paths of their own.

In 2002, a brand new Scooby-Doo series What's New, Scooby-Doo? was released. Despite being produced at Warner Bros. Television Animation, the copyright message at the end of each episode states the author as "Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc." This is the only recent series in which Hanna-Barbera's name is mentioned as the author (as Cartoon Network's series are copyrighted by the channel itself).

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