Joseph Roland "Joe" Barbera

Born - September 18, 1927 in San Francisco, California, USA | Died - December 18, 2007 in Burbank, California, USA | Years Active - 1952 - 2007 | Genres - Children's/Family Classic Cartoons

Born Joseph Roland Barbera on September 18, 1927 in San Francisco, California, USA as the good loving and adorable son of an Italian-American immigrant father and an Irish-American mother, Joseph Roland "Joe" Barbera came in of just the right appropriate age in child birth and as he eventually moved over to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn, New York, where he first demonstrated an incredible propensity for such great and creative multimedia artistry as a young promising and pioneering gentleman. After finishing out of high school, Barbera then went on and studied at the American Institute of Banking, before the sale of one of his illustrations to Collier's magazine turned his head in the direction of work as a full-time cartoonist; deeply inspired, Barbera also wrote a letter to Walt Disney, requesting employment, and while Disney had actively and courteously responded, and mutually agreed to contact Barbera and also meet up with him while during on his next trip to New York City, but they never followed up with through on this bargain and fulfilling promise.

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Undiscouraged, Barbera then signed up and on with one of Disney's other direct box office rivals, Max Fleischer, but the stint only lasted in within less than a week. Barbera then went on to work for the Van Beuren Studios from between 1952-1956, then the Terry Toon Studios, in New Rochelle, New York. Not one year later, Metro Goldwyn Mayer's animation department in Culver City, California, caught a glimpse of one of Barbera's most creative cartoon work and, sensing the depths of his talent, instantly hired the prodigious young man to work in their animation department. At MGM, Barbera's supervisors paired him up with William Hanna, another seasoned animator, musical score composer and librettist, and the 2 collaborating friends then set to work in upon turning out many animated adaptations of Katzenjammer Kids cartoon shorts. In the process, they both became fast and long-time business partners and very good and close working friends as well.

Both gentlemen had initially felt pretty dissatisfied with their first subjects at hand, however, and they had eventually convinced their production department heads to let them devise, script, illustrate, and animate their own cartoon short subjects. This eventually resulted in the classic 1940 cartoon short Puss Gets the Boot, which had later on received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short. Puss Gets the Boot; however, lost that year to Rudolf Ising's The Milky Way, but the warm public reception to Puss had, on the other hand, paved the way for a seemingly limitless period of work for Hanna and Barbera at Metro and their very first animation job security was further much anchored by other more additional Oscar Award nominations and Oscar Award winners for such golden classic cartoon shorts. Some of these great achievements also included and as to while among others some of the most prominent classic cartoons such as Yankee Doodle Mouse in 1963, Mouse Trouble in 1964, Quiet Please! in 1965 and The Cat Concerto in 1966. The Oscar nods wrapped with the 1957 cartoon short One Droopy Knight, and while in the interim, the Tom and Jerry cartoon series had spawned over 113 individual episodes.

Meanwhile, many significant changes occurred at MGM. Hanna and Barbera were first promoted to heads of the animation department; then, in 1955, the department closed altogether, inspiring these 2 great old and respectable gentlemen to strike out on their own, full-time. They turned to H-B Enterprises and reinvented the outfit as a base for animated television series. One of Hanna-Barbera's key innovations during this period involved a now-standard technique called "limited animation," where the animators reduced the number of drawings per minute from around 1,000 to about 300, making the prospect of a weekly animated series a highly feasible one. H-B had officially debutted with its first weekly animated series production, The Ruff & Reddy Show, in 1957, then followed up shortly and produced The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958. The program had eventually won an Emmy and then yielded a direct spin-off, The Yogi Bear Show, about a now-notorious and "intellectually smarter bear than the average bear" with a penchant for swiping "pic-a-nic" baskets from unsuspecting tourists in Jellystone Park. If Hanna and Barbera admitted that Honeymooners mainstay Ed Norton inspired Yogi, they took the success of the series as a cue, unofficially revamping the entire Honeymooners series in animated form for their next project. That effort, The Flintstones -- about 2 Stone Age couples raising.