Longtime Hanna-Barbera fan here. Many fond TV memories of Ruff & Reddy, Jonny Quest, Top Cat, Secret Squirrel, Space Ghost, Herculoids, and…and…The Banana Splits! Danger Island! Arabian Knights! (“Size of an elephant!”) Huckleberry Finn!! Somebody bring a paper bag before I hyperventilate! There are very few HB shows that I did not see on TV during the 60s and 70s. Many fond memories remain!
Anyway, just wondering if there’s any interest in sloshing around some HB opinions. No idea where to start, there’s so much possible territory to cover…
I think that virtually The Chicken Man and I are the only other big fans of Hanna Barbera.
I do have a problem with the limited animation (Hanna Barbera shows came literally right after the Golden Age of animation, where you had beautiful animation from Disney, MGM & Warner Bros). But the animation is so droll. But in it’s own way it has this nostalgia to it, and I guess I should give them a break, they had to keep it cheap for the TVs back then.
Anyways, my favorite Hanna Barbera cartoon is Yogi Bear (I had a sig of him last month). I also have a fondness for Secret Squirrel, Snagglepuss, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, and Huckleberry Hound.
I can be honest by saying that while Hanna-Barbera has had a large library of cartoons, not all of them ever grabbed me as much as others. Obviously the ones I loved the most were The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Yogi Bear (I used to like Scooby-Doo, but they had been putting that franchise into excessive overkill for me). Other cartoons like Space Ghost I only got to know about cause of Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. Most of the first Cartoon Cartoons on CN like Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, and Johnny Bravo were originally done by them as well.
Although Hanna-Barbera were the ones that kind of started the idea of limited animation on television, I still feel like there’s some artistry behind their cartoons, probably more in the backgrounds if not the actual character animation. I just bought Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! on DVD to watch, and I thought that film had gorgeous backgrounds. And Hanna-Barbera seems to be mostly remembered for their “flat characters in a walk cycle on a repeated background” that people probably forget that even they had made great animation in their time. The characters in Jetsons: The Movie for example felt more like the quality of an animated Disney feature. Hanna-Barbera is one of those studios I look back to now for classic inspiration.
It’s interesting you mention all of this, and it remidns me of one still I found on one of my favorite animation blogs, Yowp. It’s a blog dedicated to Hanna Barbera, and it’s very informative ( yowpyowp.blogspot.com/ )
Anyway, back to to the still, which I found somewhere on that blog. Look at the trees in the background. I like how they’re all together, and it’s not something that is soley Hanna-Barbera ( I recall Chuck Jones doing something like this once) but nonetheless, it’s a very nice touch. Quite creative
As I mentioned before, the limited animation does bother me, but it adds to the nostalgia to the films, and you see it and you think 'Hanna Barbera" They were on a budget at the beggining and everything, but it’s still a bit disapointing like 5 years after the Golden Age you get what Bill Watterson likes to call “Talking Heads”. It’s a shame, but you love it anyway, you know?
Great comments, complete agreement here! If memory serves, the two primary factors that led to limited animation and the Hanna-Barbera look were the costs of full cel animation and the popularity among animators of the UPA look. Certainly those factors grew increasingly relevant throughout the 1950s and fed directly into the evolution of Hanna-Barbera on TV. Further, some of the Termite Terrace crew worked on the early Hanna-Barbera shows.
I always liked the way the same sound effects would be used over and over in the HB cartoons. It was somehow a comforting aspect of childhood. The sounds are all programmed into my brain, and it’s funny to hear them in other places. “That’s a Jonny Quest laser-beam sound, hey!”
rock-itpop: Another “Quicksdraw” fan here, too. Kabonnngggg!
Yes! Another great thing, the classic sound effects. My favorite is the one when a character crashes into something. That crashing noise.
Oh, and I’m a Quick Draw fan as well! I seem to perfer the Hanna Barberas with talking animals and 50s families in strange settings, as opposed to the mystery solving ones (Scooby doo, that one show that’s basically Scooby Doo with Whales…). I also don’t really like the Smurfs.
You mean, “Breeeekzhhhh!”? Imagine trying to write out those sound effects in a way that someone who never heard them would get it.
Also in the sound realm, the Hanna-Barbera shows from the 60s had some really cool music. Jonny Quest, Danger Island, Space Ghost…all rousing orchestrated themes. Maybe John Barry’s James Bond themes started the trend, because many 60s TV themes were along those lines. And Michael Giacchino certainly wrote similar music for The Incredibles. But sound was a big part of the overall Hanna-Barbera experience, though less frequently mentioned.
I personally got tired of the excessive use of the Hoyt Curtin library. I think a lot of the shows that seemed like simple retreads would’ve been able to have forged their own identities if they weren’t using cues from Jetsons, Flintstones and Scooby-Doo as a template for all their incidental music.
I’m a pretty big HB fan. I watched a ton of Boomerang when I still had cable. I loved every moment of it. There wasn’t a show I wouldn’t watch repeatedly. Even some of the shows that most people wouldn’t look at twice like Josie & the Pussycats in Space or Jabberjaw.
It’s also so much fun to map the evolution or things like character development throughout the history of a franchise. Just take Scooby-Doo for example. Most of the stock traits we all think of when think of the leads were merely projections until they became canon years later. Really, things like the sexual tension between Daphne and Fred simply weren’t there in the original series.
True! First time I heard there was a supposed controlled-substance vibe with the Mystery Machine and Scooby Snacks, it was like…“Huh?” Maybe some young fans grew up with the shows, then somehow morphed their later more mature perceptions onto what they had seen…and it came out in the public eye (or teleplay form, for those creating new versions).
More recently, it’s a bit of a shame that the Scooby movies omit or make fun of the classic ingredient: “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” Kind of like The Lone Ranger without Silver.
