Joseph Barbera dies at 95

There are icons of our childhood we never totally leave behind.
Yogi Bear. Huckleberry Hound. Fred Flintstone. George Jetson. Scooby Doo. Space Ghost. Hours spent in front of the TV on after-school afternoons, Saturday mornings, prime-time evenings and, lately, late nights. Years spent repeating catchphrases — from "yabba dabba doo" to "ruh-roh" — that are as familiar to us as poetry was to an earlier age.

All those decades, and decades to come, watching the animated work of Joseph Barbera, who died yesterday of natural causes at the age of 95. If the name doesn't immediately ring a bell, link it with that of his late work partner William Hanna, who died in 2001.

Hanna-Barbera — just saying it conjures up memories of television time that should have been spent doing homework or chores.

Hanna and Barbera got their start, and did their best work, in movies, winning Academy Awards and creating their first cartoon team, Tom and Jerry. But TV is what made them — and they, in turn, helped create the TV cartoon as we came to know it.

The output is staggering. Starting with Ruff and Reddy in the late '50s, near-countless shows came and went, including Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Pixie and Dixie, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby Doo, Shazzan, Dastardly and Muttley and The Smurfs. They created many of the cartoons you loved — and most of the ones you hated.

Many of their shows were thinly veiled variations on live-action sitcoms. The Flintstones were cave-people Honeymooners; Top Cat was a feline Sgt. Bilko. And many more of them were simply variations on each other —The Jetsons being The Flintstones moved out of the past into the future.

And even as children, we knew that many of them, well, weren't very good. Hanna-Barbera pioneered a simplified, inexpensive form of animation for TV, and it showed. Their cartoons lacked the beauty of Disney and the wit of Warner Bros.

Eventually, of course, their problems became part of their appeal. Laughing at the ever-repeating backgrounds of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon — the way poor Huckleberry Hound seemed to run in place as the same tree whizzed past behind him — was one of the later joys of the experience. It's why Cartoon Network can get so much mileage out of mocking them on Adult Swim.

Yet in the end, in spite of, or perhaps because of, their limitations, the cartoons were hopelessly endearing. Snagglepuss with his "heavens to murgatroid" and his "exit, stage left." Muttley with that stupid snicker. Yogi and Boo-Boo with their simple desire for a "pic-a-nic basket." Or more deeply, Jonny Quest with his desperate need to please his father.

It's the stuff of which childhood is made — and Barbera made it. That's a legacy few in TV can match.

THE HANNA-BARBERA LEGACY

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera's Tom and Jerry won seven Academy Awards; Hanna-Barbera later won eight Emmys and a Governors Awards from the Television Academy. Among the duo's famous animated productions:

- Tom and Jerry (1941)
- Ruff and Reddy (1957)
- Huckleberry Hound (1958)
- Quick Draw McGraw (1959)
- The Flintstones (1960)
- Yogi Bear (1961)
- Top Cat (1961)
- The Jetsons (1962)
- Magilla Gorilla (1964)
- Jonny Quest (1964)
- Secret Squirrel and Atom Ant (1965)
- Space Ghost (1966)
- Birdman and the Galaxy Trio (1967)
- The Banana Splits (live action/animated, 1968)
- Scooby-Doo (1969)
- Josie and the Pussycats (1970)
- Super Friends (1973)
- The Smurfs (1981)

Source: IMDB.com; emmy.org