The Hanna-Barbera Story - A Biography
About this book
Melrose, New Mexico native William Hanna and New York City-born Joseph Barbera first teamed together while working at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in 1939. Their first directorial project was a cartoon entitled Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which served as the genesis of the popular Tom and Jerry series of cartoon theatricals. Hanna and Barbera served as the directors and story men for the shorts for seventeen years, winning seven Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) between 1943 and 1953 for their work. By 1956, they had become the producers in charge of the MGM animation studio's output. Outside of their work on the MGM shorts, Hanna and Barbera periodically moonlit to work on outside projects, including the original title sequences and commercials for the hit television sitcom I Love Lucy. MGM decided in early 1957 to close its cartoon studio, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release.This biography goes behind the work of Hanna-Barbera.