The joint efforts of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera have had a powerful and lasting impact on television animation. Since the late 1950s, Hanna-Barbera programs have been a staple of television entertainment. Furthermore, a great many of the characters originally created by Hanna and Barbera for the small screen have crossed the boundaries into film, books, toys, and all manner of other media, becoming virtually ubiquitous as cultural icons.

     The careers of comedy writer Bill Hanna and cartoonist Joe Barbera merged in 1940, when both were working in the Cartoon Department at MGM Studios. Their first joint effort was a Tom and Jerry cartoon entitled Puss Gets the Boot (1940). Dozens of Tom and Jerry episodes were to follow. When MGM closed its cartoon unit, nearly two decades after Hanna and Barbera began working there, the two decided to try their collaborative hand at creating material for television. In 1957, already having gained a solid reputation as animators working in film, the pair successfully approached Columbia's Screen Gems television studio with a storyboard for Ruff and Reddy, a cartoon tale about two pals, a dog and a cat.

     The ensuing success of Ruff and Reddy as wrap­ around segments for recycled movie cartoons (including Tom and Jerry) proved to be the beginning of a lengthy partnership in television animation. In late 1958, Hanna and Barbera launched Huckleberry Hound, the first cartoon series to receive an Emmy Award. This half-hour syndicated program featured, in addition to the title character, such cartoon favorites as Yogi Bear, Pixie and Dixie, Augie Doggie, and Quick Draw McGraw. This latter character, like numerous others who began their "careers" in one Hanna-Barbera creation, went on to an enormously successful series of his own.

     In 1960, when a survey revealed that more than half of Huckleberry Hound's audience comprised adults, Hanna and Barbera turned their efforts toward creating a cartoon for prime time. The result was The Flintstones, a series that drew on and parodied conventions of popular live-action domestic sitcoms, most specifically in this case Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners. The comical pref!lise of a "typical" suburban family living in a cartoon "Stone Age," with home appliances represented as talking prehistoric animals and frequent celebrity guest stars (authentic voices with caricatured bodies) enabled The Flintstones to attract both child and adult audiences during its initial run on ABC (1960-66). The Jetsons, a "space-age" counterpart to The Flintstones, joined its predecessor in prime time in 1962.

     Unlike The Flintstones, The Jersons would last only one season in ABC's evening schedule. However, in the late 1960s both programs became extremely popular in Saturday morning cartoon line-ups and subsequently in syndication. The programs were so successful as reruns that in the 1980s, 51 new episodes of The Jetsons were produced, as were TV specials and movies based on both The Flintstones and The Jetsons. Flintstones spin-off series for children, including Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm (1971-72 and 1975- 76), The Flintstones Comedy Hour (1972-74), and The Flintstones Kids (1986-90), also have appeared since the original series ceased production.

     Other popular Hanna-Barbera series have included children's cartoons such as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969, plus a number of subsequent Scooby-Doo series); The Smurfs , a concept based on a Belgian cartoon series and first brought to Hanna-Barbera by network executive Fred Silverman (1981); Pac-Man (1982); Pound Puppies (1986), and Captain Planet (1994).

     A series of ownership changes began for Hanna­ Barbera Productions in the 1990s. First, the company was acquired by Turner Broadcasting Systems (TBS) in 1991. TBS itself was then acquired by Time-Warner in 1995. As part of the huge media conglomerate that is now AOL Time-Warner, Hanna-Barbera has combined resources with its longtime rival Warner Bros., producers of Looney Toons cartoons. Hanna-Barbera and Looney Toons fare accounts for the bulk of the programming on the popular Cartoon Network cable service. Since the 1970s, Hanna-Barbera has produced, in addition to the cartoons, a number of films and specials for television, including The Gathering (1977), The Stone Fox (1987), and Going Bananas (1984), as well as live-action feature films, including The Jetsons: The Movie (1990), The Pagemaster (1994), The Flintstones (1994), and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000).
     Prior to William Hanna's death in 2001, the long and productive partnership between him and Joseph Barbera yielded some of television's most successful and enduring programs. Cartoon series such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Huckleberry Hound are as popular with audiences today as they were when first shown. While this is evidence of the timeless entertainment value of animated programming, it also re­flects the astute business sense of Hanna and Barbera and their ability to recognize trends in the entertainment industry.

     After decades of exposure to audiences worldwide, many individual Hanna-Barbera animated characters have become so familiar to audiences that they have to some extent transcended their original program contexts. An obvious example is the Flintstones characters, which have achieved international recognition through television series, specials, theatrical film, and their display on every imaginable consumer product (most licensed by Hanna-Barbera).