“Yabba Dabba Doo!” “Zoinks!” “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”
If you recognize these catchphrases, chances are you watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons in the 1960s and ’70s.Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., the animation studio that created “The Flintstones” and “Scooby-Doo,” made avast majority of those cartoons.
From 1966 to 1987, Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting, Inc. owned Hanna-Barbera. The most prominent reminder of this connection is Kings Island, which Taft built in 1972 to showcase the Hanna-Barbera characters.
Taft Broadcasting began in 1937 as Radio Cincinnati, Inc., an off-shoot of the Cincinnati Times-Star newspaper owned by Charles Phelps Taft, brother to President William Howard Taft. Radio Cincinnati owned WKRC radio (550 AM) andbranched out to WKRC-TV Channel 12 (originally Channel 11) in 1949.
In 1966, Taft purchased Hanna-Barbera for $12 million. “We have felt for some time that our most logical area for diversification and expansion is in the field of entertainment film production,” Hulbert Taft Jr., chairman of Taft, said at the time.Founders William Hanna and Joseph Barbera continued operating their animation company as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Taft.
From ‘Tom andJerry’to ‘Yogi Bear’
Hanna and Barbera met in 1937 while working in the animation department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio in Los Angeles. One day, Barbera asked his colleague, “Why don’t we do a picture on our own?”
Their first cartoon, “Puss Gets the Boot” in 1940, starred a cat and mouse that became the famous cartoon duo “Tom and Jerry.”
Hanna and Barbera produced 114 “Tom and Jerry” theatrical cartoons, which earned seven Academy Awards for best short subject and 12 more nominations. “Cat Concerto,” in which Tom performs Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” while Jerry crawls inside the piano, won the 1947 Oscar and is named among the 50 greatest cartoons of all time as chosen by animators.
As theaters stopped running cartoons, most of the animation studios closed in the late 1950s. Hanna and Barbera wisely turned to television. In 1951, they had made the original, mostly forgotten, opening titles for “I Love Lucy,” animating stick figures of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
They created their first cartoon for television, “The Ruff and Reddy Show,” in 1957. “Instead of $45,000 for five minutes like we had at MGM, we got $2,700,” Barbera said in an 1987 interview. “When we first sold ‘Ruff and Reddy,’ Bill and I were taking in $40 a week for ourselves. I did the storyboards at home. My daughter Jayne colored in the drawings.”
A smaller budget meant they had to use fewer frames per second of film. Disney cartoons used 24 frames per second, each frame a different drawing. Hanna-Barbera cartoons used repeated frames so there were only eight or 12 different frames per second.
This limited animation style had its detractors. Legendary “Looney Tunes” animator Chuck Jones called it “illustrated radio” because of the cartoons’ reliance on talking rather than movement.
“Limited animation saved the entire industry,” Barbera said. “Nobody was working.”
Hanna-Barbera made up for the limitation by creating a wealth of new and popular characters, such as Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, the Jetsons and Jonny Quest.
The company was referred to as “the General Motors of animation,” churning out show after showin the 1960s and ’70s. Hanna-Barbera produced as much as two-thirds of the Saturday morning cartoon lineup some years.
‘Meet the Flintstones’
In 1960, Hanna-Barbera debuted “The Flintstones,” about a “modern Stone Age family,” that was the first primetime cartoon. Critics hated the show at first, but it thenwon them over. “The Flintstones” made history as the first animated series nominated for an Emmy for best comedy.
It was also the first success with non-animal cartoon characters. “There has been no luck with humans in animated cartoons,” Barbera told reporters in 1960. “We looked at many characters and they all resembled commercials. But the minute we put cavemen costumes on them, the characters looked very humorous. They’re a spoof on human beings.”
The show laid the groundwork for “The Simpsons” as a primetime animated sitcom. In 2013, TV Guide ranked “The Flintstones” the second-greatest TV cartoon of all time.
‘Scooby-dooby-doo!’
During the years of Taft Broadcasting’s ownership, Hanna-Barbera’s biggest hit was “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” in 1969, featuring Scooby-Doo, the snack-loving Great Dane, and the gang in the Mystery Machine.
Each week the teens and their dog solved spooky crimes, often with the help of animated versions of real-life guests stars like Don Knotts, Sonny & Cher and the Harlem Globetrotters. The monsters usually wound up being people wearing costumes who “would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.”
Hanna-Barbera also had a hit with “Super Friends” in 1973, the first show to feature Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman together. The superheroes’ headquarters,the Hall of Justice, was a half-dome building that clearly resembles Cincinnati’s Union Terminal.
The task of designing the Hall of Justice fell to Al Gmuer,a longtime Hanna-Barbera background supervisor. His original design was similar, but it was reworked by the studio as the Union Terminal look-alike, Gmuer told The Enquirer in 2009.
“In the long run, I hated that building,” Gmuer said. “The way it’s designed, it was not easy to draw. I had nightmares about that damn building.” But its place is fixed in pop culture history.
Kings Island built for Hanna-Barbera characters
In 1969, Charles Mechem, Taft Broadcasting’s chief operating officer, was looking for a way to promote the Hanna-Barbera characters and settled on an amusem*nt park. Taft purchased nearby Coney Island and announced its closure in favor of building a new park, Kings Island, in 1972.
Familiar Hanna-Barbera characters helped sell the park to customers. Kids couldshake hands with Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone or the Banana Splits, then hang out in the Happy Land of Hanna-Barbera with kid-friendly rides like the Scooby-Doo roller coaster, Jetson’s Jet Orbiters and Gulliver’s Rub-A-Dub.
Our History:Kings Island opened 50 years ago. Take a look back in time
The centerpiece attraction was the Enchanted Voyage, a boat ride much like It’s a Small World that took kids inside a giant television set to see animatronic Hanna-Barbera characters. The ride’s catchy song, “All in My TV,” told of “cartoon friends and funny faces” that “live in my TV.” Many were obscure, such as Gulliver and Moby Dick.
Enchanted Voyage is fondly remembered by folks. It was remade with “The Smurfs” (Hanna-Barbera’s last megahit show) in 1984, then was cleared out in 1991.
Carl Lindner’s Great American Broadcasting Co. took over Taft in 1987 and sold off the Hanna-Barbera library in 1991 to Turner Broadcasting System (owned by Cincinnati native Ted Turner). In 1992, Turner launched Cartoon Network, a 24-hour cable channel showing nothing but cartoons, the bulk of them from the Hanna-Barbera archives. Hanna-Barbera was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation in 2001.
As Snagglepuss would say, “Exit, stage left.”
The Hanna-Barbera characters remain beloved by many and ingrained in our pop culture, whether Fred Flintstone is hawking vitamins or Scooby-Doo is remade in CGI for the big screen.
But you won’t find Scooby and the others at Kings Island anymore. Since 2010, the kid’s area has been Planet Snoopy.
Sources: Enquirer archives, “Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning,” Norman Rockwell Museum, “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” by Jerry Beck, Kings Island, TV Guide, Wikipedia
