What A Cartoon! / World Premiere Toons Posters

Click here for my full Hanna-Barbera index.

At Hanna-Barbera in the mid-1990s I looked for any way the studio could make cool posters. The company had been struggling with a hack image for decades because the management didn’t thing it made any difference. They were making hits and money, right? But by the time Ted Turner arrived in 1992 they hadn’t had a hit in 10 years, and they were making a lot less money.

Hip rock posters were having a revival in exactly the community we wanted to attract, young artists. If we started speaking in their language, maybe Hanna-Barbera could reitroduce itself to the most vibrant creative people.

In 1995 Hanna-Barbera Cartoons embarked on the animation industry’s largest cartoon shorts program since the 1950s. Our sister company, Cartoon Network, would play each of the 48 shorts before their Sunday night movie. These shorts represented maybe the largest commitment to new talent the company had ever launched, and the question became how to convey this dedication to the outside world.

Back in the day of great theatrical cartoons, every short had it’s own poster, putting them on a par with the feature films they played alongside. We decided to support each of our new shorts, and maybe more importantly, each short’s creators, with their own poster in the style of the modern rock poster of the 90s. Designed in house under the creative direction of Bill Burnett we made about 20 posters before it occurred to us that Cartoon Network’s crack marketing team had no idea what to do with them.

See the Hanna-Barbera cartoon poster gallery here.