Hanna-Barbera

The partnership of William Denby "Bill" Hanna (July 14, 1910 – March 22, 2001) and Joseph Roland "Joe" Barbera (March 24, 1911 – December 18, 2006) yes, it was NOT, in fact, created by a woman named Hanna Barbera began at MGM's animation studio, where the pair created Tom and Jerry and spent almost 20 years directing their cartoon shorts. After MGM got out of the cartoon business in 1957, Hanna and Barbera founded their own studio, which would come to dominate Western Animation on television for decades.

The studio's extremely prolific half-century-plus output included classic cartoon series like The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Space Ghost, and The Smurfs (1981) (the show that stopped them from going bankrupt in the 1980s and later indirectly revitalized all of American animation when Cartoon Network aired Hanna-Barbera shows due to nostalgia and made its own shows due to the success of the airings); the Emmy-winning live-action Made-for-TV Movie The Gathering; and a handful of feature films, most notably a popular adaptation of Charlotte's Web (1973). It was also responsible for the infamous live-action acid sequence in KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, as well as countless other projects.

Hanna-Barbera pioneered the use of many Limited Animation techniques, such as Ring Around the Collar, to produce cartoons on a low budget quickly enough to meet a television schedule. As a result, a lot of Hanna-Barbera shows put the emphasis more on the voice acting and the writing/gags than the actual animation process itself. Although other animators who enjoyed better budgets in different circumstances, such as famed Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones, would dismiss this approach as "Illustrated Radio", these practices allowed H-B to continue producing works and employing in times where other studios struggled, and manage to continue doing so well into the 1980s and 1990s. In 1967, the company was purchased by Ohio-based Taft Broadcasting (yes, related to that Taft), which also owned a bunch of regional theme parks such as King's Island in Ohio and Carowinds in North Carolina, and thus Hanna-Barbera properties became prominent at these parks, lasting for years after Taft spun them offnote , and when Taft acquired syndication company Worldvision Enterprises (the former ABC Films) in 1979, this meant that not only did H-B have easier access to the syndication market, but Taft television stations also had a built-in cartoon supply — this was most apparent on independent stations owned by Taft, which were free from commitments to network programming (Taft owned as many as five independent stations at once: KTXA in Dallas-Fort Worth, KTXH in Houston, WCIX in Miami, WDCA in Washington, D.C., and WTAF in Philadelphia).

In the late 1980s, Taft (which later renamed itself to Great American Broadcasting) faced a lot of internal and financial issues, chiefly stemming from a hostile takeover led by junk bond trader Carl Lindner. This had a major impact on the fates of Hanna-Barbera and its siblings. As a way of cutting costs, they began to look to sell off the studios. The first sale happened in 1988, when a buyout was reached for Hanna-Barbera's Australian division. That entity became the Southern Star Group and took the rights of the shows and specials produced by that sub-entity. The problems still continued, however, as this led to an exodus of '80s Hanna-Barbera staff to go help revitalize the Warner Bros. Animation studio. In the early 1990s, GAB decided to put Hanna-Barbera and sister studio Ruby-Spears up for sale as well.

In 1991, a deal was struck between GAB and Turner Broadcasting (with funding from Apollo) that resulted in Turner purchasing Hanna-Barbera and its library. Turner also purchased the Ruby-Spears library, but not the studio, which became its own entity again. It was here those libraries merged and the HB shows were united with the predecessor shorts Bill and Joe had done for MGM, but are legally not in the same library. note Under the new ownership, everything that was in planning but not funded was put on hold (indeed, Turner was planning to shut the studio down and simply continue to utilize the library. Then-president David Kirschner convinced Ted not to, partially because of H-B being in production on expensive theatrical productions; Kirschner eventually turned H-B's feature animation into the semi-separate Turner Feature Animation, which only was able to produce The Pagemaster and Cats Don't Dance before being absorbed into Warner Bros. Feature Animation), and in 1992 Turner launched Cartoon Network. The HB libraries and MGM libraries, along with the pre-August 1948 color Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies library and most of the Harman-Ising Merrie Melodies acquired when Turner bought out MGM in 1986note . This combined library, along with some other material, made up a good chunk of the schedule at the dawn of the network. However, as the channel grew, so did the initiative to bring new original content to the channel. The studio at the time had an influx of younger talent that had been brought in to fill the gap left by the earlier exodus. In 1994, Hanna-Barbera was internally reorganized as Hanna-Barbera Cartoons and with a new sub-entity that began to refocus their efforts towards what was originally called "World Premiere Toons", essentially allowing many of the younger members of the studio to launch their own pilots in the hopes of becoming new original shows. Originally this was only seen as a sub-division while the rest of the studio made their efforts to switch over from other channels.

In 1996, Time Warner merged with Turner Broadcasting, putting them under the same corporate roof as Warner Bros., all the ironic given H-B had a few years earlier lost a good amount of its staff to WB. This reunited a few H-B shows that had been in the hands of Warner Bros.note , and reunited the pre-1948 color Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies and the Harman-Ising Merrie Melodies with the rest of the library.note From this point Hanna-Barbera was slowly merged into Warner Bros. Animation, with the intent that the new company didn't need more than one animation studio. This, however, didn't go entirely smoothly. note Just before the then-imminent death of Bill Hanna in 2001, Cartoon Network programming and the units producing them were spun out into their own entity (Cartoon Network Studios) under the Turner silo and Warner Bros. assumed the production of Scooby-Doo, the company's longest-running franchise and picked up all their legacy properties with Hanna-Barbera credited as the copyright holder under the Warner Bros. silo. By this point in time, the Cartoon Cartoon efforts had dominated the studio's output, in comparison to other general Hanna Barbera productions, and from here on out the earliest Cartoon Cartoons (including The Powerpuff Girls)note stopped being associated with Hanna-Barbera as well. This period also saw most of the classic Hanna-Barbera shows leave Cartoon Network, the foundation of which had been inspired by Turner's purchase of the library, to spin-off network Boomerang. The evergreen Scooby Doo franchise would be the lone holdout on the main network.

In 2016, Warner Bros. announced plans to create a Shared Universe of animated films based on Hanna-Barbera properties, provided that the 2020 animated feature SCOOB! did well. SCOOB! presented itself as a modern-day Alternate Continuity, using elements from various HB shows and altering them. Warner Bros. hoped this film would also lead to a greater presence of Hanna-Barbera characters in the theatrical market, whether they be animated, live-action, or hybrid, but it was not a success.

On March 4, 2019, in a major shakeup of WarnerMedia (which would merge with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022) by their new owners, AT&T, Warner Bros. took control of Cartoon Network and its production operations, ultimately bringing Hanna-Barbera and the Cartoon Network properties under one roof again for the first time in 18 years. While the shakeup brought no major alterations at first, April 2021 saw Cartoon Network Studios Europe (the branch of Cartoon Network Studios that produces The Amazing World of Gumball and other shows) be rebranded as Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe. This change gives Hanna-Barbera a physical studio presence for the first time in 20 years; the studio's logo is an homage to its 1966 and 1974 logos, while its endcap also revives the trademark "swirling star" element. The Direct-to-Video film Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo! Meets Courage the Cowardly Dog marks the first Crossover between a classic Hanna-Barbera property (Scooby-Doo) and a Cartoon Network original show (Courage the Cowardly Dog) since the earliest days of the restructuring. In addition, HBO Max, WBD's flagship streaming service, hosts material from both the Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network libraries, with other library programs licensed to Tubi or Howdy, the SVOD service owned by Roku.

As a consequence of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, the SCOOB! sequel, Holiday Haunt, was shelved indefinitely (although its production would be completed) and the Scooby DTV film franchised stopped after 2023's Scooby-Doo! and Krypto, Too!. Conversely, a Flintstones theatrical animated film would begin development at Warner Bros. Pictures Animation.

Like in the early days of Cartoon Network and Boomerang, Hanna-Barbera's classic shows are the bedrock of MeTV Toons (a joint venture between WBD and Weigel Broadcasting), which airs them in coordination with a studio initiative to fully restore the library from the original negatives and clear outstanding music rights issues of afflicted shows.

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