Joseph Barbera, 95, Created Flintstones, Smurfs

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The New York Sun

Joseph Barbera, who died yesterday at 95 at his Studio City, Calif., home, was half of the creative team that launched a thousand Saturday mornings.

Together with partner William Hanna, he created hundreds of cartoon characters, from Tom and Jerry in the 1940s and Yogi Bear in the 1950s through the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo. In 1981, the two unveiled the phenomenally popular show “The Smurfs,” which garnered two Daytime Emmy awards.

The pair began as traditional single-cel-at-a-time animators for the MGM studio, and their early Tom and Jerry cartoons show a high degree of artistry, even if the story lines teetered between the antic and the outright sadistic. Hanna and Barbera won seven Oscars for Tom and Jerry features.

In 1957, the animators were dismissed by MGM. With the studio retaining the rights to Tom and Jerry, the pair was forced to create all-new cartoons on a shoestring budget. Using newfangled Xerox machines and employing Barbera’s 12-year-old daughter Jayne as a colorist, they pioneered “limited animation,” in which many fewer movements per frame needed to be drawn. The results may have discouraged purists, but they certainly fulfilled the requirements of grainy black-and-white television sets.

“The Flintstones,” in limited animation, made its premiere in 1960 on ABC as the first-ever prime-time animated show for adults. Not so loosely based on “The Honeymooners” but set in Paleolithic Bedrock, the show was a smash hit. Now partners with their own studio, Hanna and Barbera went on to produce more than 250 television series and specials. The Cartoon Network recently created the Boomerang Network as a showcase for the Hanna-Barbera library.

Barbera, son of a barber in Little Italy, worked first at the Irving Trust Co. bank in banking before attending the Pratt Institute. He went to work at MGM in 1937.

In 1994, he wrote an autobiography, “My Life in Toons.”

While later Hanna-Barbera cartoons eschewed excessive violence and even advised children to avoid poking electric sockets, Barbera never seemed quite able to get with the program of coddling the younger generation.

“The cat would rig up an anvil over the mouse,” he told the Saturday Review in 1979. “And somehow the cat would get in the way and he’d get hit with the anvil — a 10,000-pound anvil! — and the mouse would peel him off the ground, and you’d hear it like a Band-Aid, right? But the cat was in perfect condition for the next sequence. We can’t do that stuff anymore. They tell me it’s not good for kids to see. I don’t understand what they’re talking about!”

Hanna died in 2001.


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