Barbera, Joe 1911-2006

(Joseph Roland Barbera)

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born March 24, 1911, in New York, NY; died December 18, 2006, in Los Angeles, CA. Animator, producer, director, and author. Along with longtime partner William Hanna, Barbera was an Oscar- and Emmy-winning producer and director of television cartoons ranging from The Flintstones and Tom and Jerry to The Smurfs and The Powerpuff Girls. Originally contemplating a career in banking, he graduated from the American Institute of Banking and also attended the Pratt Institute. The financial world did not maintain its appeal for him, however, and after two years as a bank clerk Barbera left to explore play writing, drawing, and amateur boxing. His life would change forever when Collier’s magazine accepted one of his cartoons. Encouraged by this, he unsuccessfully tried to obtain work at Walt Disney Studios. Instead, Van Beuren Studios hired him in 1932. The studio went bankrupt during the Depression, and Barbera worked for Terrytoons before being hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937. It was here that he met Hanna, and the two found they complemented each other’s skills well: Hanna was talented in characterization and comic timing, while Barbera had the artistic talent and was a good gag writer. They initially collaborated on an animated adaptation of the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip before creating their own film short, Puss Gets the Boot, in 1940. The short earned them their first Academy Award nomination. Puss Gets the Boot, featured characters Jasper the cat and Jinx the mouse who would later be rewritten as Tom and Jerry. Hanna and Barbera would continue to produce Tom and Jerry cartoons into the mid-1950s, earning seven Oscars and six more Oscar nominations. The team was put in charge of MGM’s animation department in 1955, but it proved to be a short run. Two years later, the division was closed. The two animators decided to concentrate on their already established H-B Enterprises, which they founded to produce animated commercials. Hanna and Barbera would go on to turn it into a television cartoon factory. Renamed Hanna-Barbera Productions, the studio would be the first company to produce prime-time television cartoon series. Beginning with 1957’s The Ruff & Reddy Show, Barbera and Hanna would go on to create such favorites as The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo. By the 1960s and 1970s, Hanna-Barbera cartoons were omnipresent on American television, and shows such as The Flintstones regularly made the top-rated listings and were popular among both children and adults. Keeping up with the times, they continued their success through the 1980s and 1990s with such shows as Space Ghost, The Super-Powers Team, The Smurfs, and The Powerpuff Girls. Also praised for their full-length movie adaptation of E.B. White’s classic children’s book, Charlotte’s Web (1973), which won an Annie Award, the team would run independently until 1990. Purchased by Turner Broadcasting that year, they were later incorporated into the Warner Brothers media conglomerate. In his later years, Barbera primarily worked as an executive producer, though he still sometimes wrote cartoons. One of his last contributions was the 2005 Tom and Jerry cartoon, The KarateGuard, his last cartoon featuring the cat and mouse and the first one he had written since 1960. Frequently credited with making television cartoons a mainstay of American entertainment, Barbera inspired many animators to follow in his footsteps. Among his other awards are seven Emmys, a Golden Globe Award, the Humanitas Prize, and the Governor’s Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Barbera recorded his story in his autobiography, My Life in ’Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in under a Century (1994).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES

BOOKS

Barbera, Joe, and Alan Axelrod, My Life in ’Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in under a Century, Turner (Atlanta, GA), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, December 19, 2006, Section 2, p. 10.

New York Times, December 19, 2006, p. C15; December 22, 2006, p. A2.

Times (London, England), December 20, 2006, p. 58. Washington Post, December 19, 2006, p. B7.