Joseph Barbera Passes Away

Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 18, 2006 in Animation |

Sadly animation pioneer Joe Barbera has passed away:

“Joseph Barbera, one half of the team behind such cartoon classics as The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo and Huckleberry Hound, has died, aged 95. With William Hanna, Barbera founded Hanna-Barbera in the 1950s, after the pair had earlier worked on the Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM studios.

Barbera grew up in Brooklyn and started to pursue a career in banking. But his amateur sketches soon became the raw material for cartoons in magazines, which then took him into animation. He met Hanna – who died in 2001 – at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio in the late 1930s and collaborated on a cartoon called Puss Gets the Boot, which led to the creation of the cat and mouse characters, Tom and Jerry. Their 17-year partnership on the Tom and Jerry series resulted in seven Academy Awards and 14 nominations in total.”

Most of us think of Joe for his limited animation done for television, but take a look at this short (Kitty Foiled from 1948) which he co-directed for MGM:

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