Joseph Barbera

At 95 years old, Joseph Barbera physical status not available right now. We will update Joseph Barbera's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

During high school, Barbera worked as a tailor's delivery boy.: 28  In 1929, he became interested in animation after watching a screening of Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance. During the Great Depression, he tried unsuccessfully to become a cartoonist for a magazine called The NY Hits Magazine. He supported himself with a job at a bank, and continued to pursue publication for his cartoons. His magazine drawings of single cartoons, not comic strips, began to be published in Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, and Collier's—the magazine with which he had the most success.: 35–36  Barbera also wrote to Walt Disney for advice on getting started in the animation industry.: 105  Disney wrote back, saying he would call Barbera during an upcoming trip to New York, but the call never took place.: 38

Barbera took art classes at the Art Students League of New York and the Pratt Institute and was hired to work in the ink and paint department of Fleischer Studios. In 1932, he joined the Van Beuren Studios as an animator and storyboard artist.: 38–42  He worked on cartoon series such as Cubby Bear and Rainbow Parades, and an earlier Tom and Jerry. This Tom and Jerry series starred two humans; it was unrelated to Barbera's later cat-and-mouse series, although both of these cartoons are adopted the name that created in 1821 book titled Life in London, written by Pierce Egan. When Van Beuren closed down in 1936, Barbera moved over to Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio.: 53–54

In 1935, Barbera created his first solo-effort storyboard about a character named Kiko the Kangaroo. The storyline was of Kiko in an airplane race with another character called Dirty Dog. Terry declined to produce the story. In his autobiography, Barbera said of his efforts ...

The original storyboard, which had been passed down through the Barbera family, went on sale at auction in November 2013.

Lured by a substantial salary increase, Barbera left Terrytoons and New York for the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in California in 1937.: 58–59 : 106  He found that Los Angeles was suffering just as much from the Great Depression as Brooklyn and almost returned to Brooklyn.: 201

Barbera's desk was opposite that of William Hanna. The two quickly realized they would make a good team.: Foreword  By 1939, they had solidified a partnership that would last over 60 years. Barbera and Hanna worked alongside animator Tex Avery, who had created Daffy Duck and co-created Bugs Bunny for Warner Bros. and directed Droopy cartoons at MGM.: 33 : 18

In 1940, Hanna and Barbera jointly directed Puss Gets the Boot, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best (Cartoon) Short Subject. The studio wanted a diversified cartoon portfolio, so despite the success of Puss Gets the Boot, Barbera and Hanna's supervisor, Fred Quimby, did not want to produce more cat and mouse cartoons believing that there were already enough cartoons of those in existence.: 75–76  Surprised by the success of Puss Gets the Boot, Barbera and Hanna ignored Quimby's resistance: 45  and continued developing the cat-and-mouse theme. By this time, however, Hanna wanted to return to working for Rudolph Ising, to whom he felt very loyal. Barbera and Hanna met with Quimby, who discovered that although Ising had taken sole credit for producing Puss Gets the Boot, he never actually worked on it. Quimby, who had wanted to start a new animation unit independent from Ising, then gave Hanna and Barbera permission to pursue their cat-and-mouse idea. The result was their most famous creation, Tom and Jerry.: 78–79

Modeled after the Puss Gets the Boot characters with slight differences, the series followed Jerry, the pesky rodent who continuously outwitted his feline foe, Tom. Hanna said they settled on the cat and mouse theme for this cartoon because "we knew we needed two characters. We thought we needed conflict, and chase and action. And a cat after a mouse seemed like a good, basic thought." The revamped characters first appeared in 1941's The Midnight Snack.: 46  Over the next 17 years, Barbera and Hanna worked exclusively on Tom and Jerry, directing more than 114 popular cartoon shorts. During World War II, they also made animated training films.: 92–93  Tom and Jerry relied mostly on motion instead of dialog. Despite its popularity, Tom and Jerry has often been criticized as excessively violent.: 42 : 134  Nonetheless, the series won its first Academy Award for the 11th short, The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943)—a war-time adventure. Tom and Jerry was ultimately nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning 7, more than any other animated series featuring the same characters. Tom and Jerry also made guest appearances in several of MGM's live-action films, including Anchors Aweigh (1945) and Invitation to the Dance (1956) with Gene Kelly, and Dangerous When Wet (1953) with Esther Williams.

In addition to his work in animated cartoons, Barbera and Tom and Jerry layout artist Harvey Eisenberg moonlit to run a comic book company named Dearfield Publishing. Active from 1946 to 1951, Dearfield's titles included "Red" Rabbit Comics, Foxy Fagan, and Junie Prom.

Quimby accepted each Academy Award for Tom and Jerry without inviting Barbera and Hanna onstage. The cartoons were also released with Quimby listed as the sole producer, following the same practice for which he had condemned Ising.: 83–84  Quimby once delayed a promised raise to Barbera by six months .: 82  When Quimby retired in late 1955, Hanna and Barbera were placed in charge of MGM's animation division. As MGM began to lose more revenue on animated cartoons due to television, the studio soon realized that re-releasing old cartoons was far more profitable than producing new ones.: 2–3, 109  In 1957, MGM ordered Barbera and Hanna's business manager to close the cartoon division and lay off everyone by a phone call.: 2–3, 109  Barbera and Hanna found the no-notice closing puzzling because Tom and Jerry had been so successful.

In 1957, Barbera reteamed with his former partner Hanna to produce cartoon films for television and theatrical release. As they had at MGM, the two brought their different skills to the company; Barbera was a skilled gag writer and sketch artist, while Hanna had a gift for timing, story construction, and recruiting top artists. Major business decisions would be made together, though each year the title of president alternated between them.: 120 : 77, 146  A coin toss determined that Hanna would have precedence in the naming of the new company,: Foreword  first called H-B Enterprises but soon changed to Hanna-Barbera Productions. Barbera and Hanna's MGM colleague George Sidney, the director of Anchors Aweigh, became the third partner and business manager in the company, and arranged a deal for distribution and working capital with Screen Gems, the television division of Columbia Pictures, who took part ownership of the new studio.: 81–83

The first offering from the new company was The Ruff & Reddy Show, a series which detailed the friendship between a dog and cat. Despite a lukewarm response for their first theatrical venture, Loopy De Loop, Hanna-Barbera soon established themselves with two successful television series: The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Yogi Bear Show. A 1960 survey showed that half of the viewers of Huckleberry Hound were adults. This prompted the company to create a new animated series, The Flintstones. A parody of The Honeymooners, the new show followed a typical Stone Age family with home appliances, talking animals, and celebrity guests. With an audience of both children and adults, The Flintstones became the first animated prime-time show to be a hit. Fred Flintstone's signature exclamation "yabba dabba doo" soon entered everyday usage, and the show boosted the studio to the top of the TV cartoon field. The company later produced a futuristic version of The Flintstones, known as The Jetsons. Although both shows reappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, The Flintstones was far more popular.

By the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera Productions was the most successful television animation studio in the business. The Hanna-Barbera studio produced over 3000 animated half-hour television shows. Among the more than 100 cartoon series they produced were The Quick Draw McGraw Show, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, The Magilla Gorilla Show, The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show, Scooby-Doo, Super Friends, and The Smurfs. The company also produced animated specials based on Alice in Wonderland, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as the feature-length films Charlotte's Web and Heidi's Song.: 228–230

As popular as their cartoons were with 1960s audiences, they were disliked by artists. Television programs had lower budgets than theatrical animation, and this economic reality caused many animation studios to go out of business in the 1950s and 1960s, putting many people in the industry out of work. Hanna-Barbera was key in the development of an animation technique known as limited animation,: 75 : 54  which allowed television animation to be more cost-effective, but often reduced quality. Hanna and Barbera had first experimented with these techniques in the early days of Tom and Jerry.: 74, 115  To reduce the cost of each episode, shows often focused more on character dialogue than detailed animation. The number of drawings for a seven-minute cartoon decreased from 14,000 to nearly 2,000, and the company implemented innovative techniques such as rapid background changes to improve viewing. Critics criticized the change from detailed animation to repetitive movements by two-dimensional characters. Barbera once said that their choice was to adapt to the television budgets or change careers.: 75 : 54  The new style did not limit the success of their animated shows, enabling Hanna-Barbera to stay in business, providing employment to many who would otherwise have been out of work. Limited animation paved the way for future animated series such as The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, and South Park.

In December 1966, Hanna-Barbera Productions was sold to Taft Broadcasting (renamed Great American Communications in 1987) for $12 million.: 162, 235–236  Barbera and Hanna remained at the head of the company until 1991.: 16 : 151  At that point, the company was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System for an estimated $320 million. Turner began using Hanna-Barbera's television catalog as material for its new Cartoon Network cable channel in 1992, and by the mid-1990s Hanna-Barbera was producing several original series for Cartoon Network, among them Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner, owners of Warner Bros., who would eventually absorb Hanna-Barbera into Warner Bros. Animation.

Barbera and Hanna continued to advise their former company and periodically worked on new Hanna-Barbera shows, including shorts for the series The Cartoon Cartoon Show and feature film versions of The Flintstones (1994) and Scooby-Doo (2002). In a new Tom and Jerry cartoon produced in 2000, The Mansion Cat, Barbera voiced the houseowner.

After Hanna's death from throat cancer in March 2001, Hanna-Barbera was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation, with the unit dedicated to the Cartoon Network original series spun off into Cartoon Network Studios. Barbera remained active as an executive producer for Warner Bros. on direct-to-video cartoon features as well as television series such as What's New, Scooby-Doo? and Tom and Jerry Tales. He also wrote, co-storyboarded, co-directed and co-produced The Karate Guard (2005), the return of Tom and Jerry to the big screen. His final animated project was the direct-to-video feature Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale (2007).

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