“Great Characters From Great Characters”

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Do some of the classic Hanna-Barbera characters seem familiar.  (Well, they should, since they’ve been around for 30 years or more, but that’s not my point.)  Many of Hanna-Barbera’s most endearing characters were already endeared to the American public when they burst on the screen.  A paradox?  Nope, pure genius.  William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had a trick up their collective sleeves for creating characters that were at once original and yet familiar.  They based their voices and personas on existing comedians of the day.

It isn’t hard to figure out that The Honeymooners was the inspiration for The Flintstones.  Fred is almost a cartoon Ralph Kramden and Wilma is a Stone Age Alice.  But wait, why doesn’t Barney bear more of a resemblance to Art Carney’s Ed Norton?  (You didn’t know there would be a quiz, did you?)  The answer is, Hanna-Barbera had already tapped Carney’s brilliant characterization a few years earlier.  Take a look at Yogi Bear, with his flat hat and occasional vest.  Listen to Yogi’s voice in your head, “He-ey Boo-Boo!”  Now play back your memory of Ed Norton, “He-ey Ralphie Boy!”  Audiences were primed to love Yogi Bear because they already  loved Norton!

Some of the other Hanna-Barbera inspirations are a bit more obscure, but in historical context they make perfect sense.  Before he was cast as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr had a long career as a radio comedian.  His stop-and-go voice pattern was unmistakable.  And his character was eminently lovable.  Who better to serve as the role model for that overzealous thespian known as Snagglepuss? 

Here’s an even tougher one, one you’ll really have to travel back to the late fifties to appreciate.  Listen to Huckleberry Hound’s voice in your head.  (Or better yet, watch the cartoons!)  Picture his laid-back demeanor and easy-going southern disposition.  Nothing ruffles the feathers of this hound of hounds.  Who’s Huck modeled after?  Although today’s audiences know him as Matlock, and older ones among us will forever think of him as Sheriff Andy Taylor, Andy Griffith had made quite a name for himself as a Carolina comedian by 1958.  His slow-talking style and southern charm made Andy’s comedy records very popular and a good choice as a blueprint for the true blue cartoon pooch.

Baba Louie, the Mexican bull, was inspired by the comical twists of the English language by a Cuban star of the period.  Yes, Baba Louie is  a caricature of Desi Arnaz (bet you figured that one out.)  Of course, before I Love Lucy, Desi’s big hit was a song called “Babaloo.”  And none other than the inimitable (but often imitated) Jimmy Durante served as the prototype for Doggie Daddy.  You almost can’t see one without thinking of the other.

There are many more that I’ll let you ponder on your own.  (Maybe tracing the roots of Hanna-Barbera characters could become a popular party game?)

Ironically, many of the Hanna-Barbera characters have outlasted their live-action counterparts.  But to their everlasting credit, Bill and Joe always knew how to make enduring characters out of endearing characterizations.

“Great Characters From Great Characters”
Essay #9 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

“Hidden Talents”

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Fred Flinstone, designed & drawn by Ed Benedict

The whole world knows the names of Hanna and Barbera.  But what about the names Takamoto, Hazelton, Singer and Benedict?

Stumped?  Don’t feel bad.  Hardly anyone recognizes the names of these inspired animators who toiled beside Hanna and Barbera for decades, inventing and refining the television cartoon.

So join me as I tear away their veil of anonymity and blast the limelight on these Hidden Talents!

Meet Iwao Takamoto, head designer of Hanna-Barbera for over thirty years.  A Disney graduate whose mastery of design and layout has influenced every aspect of the studio’s work.  Television legend Fred Silverman once said of him, “As a designer, he’s simply the best in the business.”

Gene Hazelton’s story has intertwined with Hanna-Barbera’s for more than fifty years, ever since their  “Tom and Jerry” days at MGM.  That was Gene who created the initial storyboards for “The Jetsons” and designed the “Pebbles” and “Bamm-Bamm” characters for “The Flintstones.”

Ed Benedict celebrates six decades of animation wizardry, beginning with Disney, Tex Avery, and the earliest days at Hanna-Barbera.  He was the first designer of Ruff and Reddy, The Flintstones, and present-at-the-creation of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, Quick Draw McGraw, and Pixie and Dixie.

Bob Singer was the inventor of the layout that allowed animators to use the same background for different scenes, thereby making television cartoons economically possible.

Four anonymous hard-working stiffs in the cartoon salt mines.  Four inspired artists inventing a new era in entertainment.  Four of Hanna-Barbera’s Hidden Talents.

“Hidden Talents”
Essay #10 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

“The Brilliant Invention of the Five O’Clock Shadow”

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It’s been a well documented how Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera saved the dying art of animation by finding ways to make it possible on a television budget.  But here’s one aspect you probably never noticed or at least never understood.  The real genius behind limited animation is the need for a shave.  Yep.  Ever noticed how Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, George Jetson and Officer Dibble always seem to have a five-o’clock shadow?  Now look at the animal cartoon characters.  Yogi, Boo Boo, Quick Draw, Huck, Dino,  and on and on, all have muzzles or snouts of a different color.  Genius!  Why?  Think about this. How much of a TV cartoon is actual action and how much is characters talking?  And like they say, talk is cheap!

By giving the human and animals a distinct “mouth zone” Hanna and Barbera were able to have the characters’ head on a separate cel level and not have to re-draw it over and over.  The top cel level would contain just the mouth movements.  This enables countless dollars to be saved when characters are in dialogue scenes.  But once the action starts, all bets are off!

So next time you see a cartoon character who needs a shave, think about a world without TV cartoons.  Yikes!  Thank goodness for Hanna, Barbera and stubble!

“The Brilliant Invention of the Five O’Clock Shadow”
Essay #11 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

“Who’s The Rarest Of Them All?”

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In a world of one-hit wonders, how do we judge an artist?  Armies of them seem to burst on to the scene for a brief magic moment, then vamoose into the void.  Only a few — a depressingly few, don’t you think?— manage to hang on for a lifetime of sustained excellence.  Then there’s the rarest of ‘em all — the artist who creates such an immense body of work, so studded with classic achievements, that he comes to almost personify his art form.  In mysteries, for example, think Agatha Christie.  In painting, Pablo Picasso.  In suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.  And in TV cartoons, Hanna and Barbera.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have been creating classic cartoons for over fifty years now.  Together, they’ve invented some of the best-known characters in history and the largest cartoon library in the world.  Tom and Jerry , The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons , Huckleberry Hound, Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo, Quick Draw McGraw… These are only a fraction of the classic characters who continue to cavort in Hanna-Barbera’s 3,500 half-hours of cartoon programming and more 350 series, specials and films.

In a world of one-hit wonders, Hanna-Barbera’s lifetime of achievement is a wonder unto itself.

“Who’s the rarest of them all?”
Essay #12 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

“Seven Oscars and Counting”

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They say that greatness is its own reward, but it doesn’t hurt to have seven Oscars, too.  On my desk are five pages (count ‘em, five) listing all the awards that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have won over the years, from their first Oscar in 1943 right through their two Emmies in 1994.  Fifty-one years of top honors, including more Oscars than any cartoon directing team in history.

Is your mind boggled?  Mine is.  Who else out there has been called up to podiums for more than half a century?  On top of Oscars, there are Emmies, including the first ever given to a cartoon show.  (That was way back in 1960 for “Huckleberry Hound.”)  Not to mention the Governors Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Science, the Humanitas, Christopher, Golden Globe, Iris.  And on and on.

By the way, next time you’re in Hollywood, drop by Hollywood Boulevard and x Street and take a peek at The Joseph Barbera and William Hanna Hollywood Walk of Fame Star.  And please — step on it.

“Seven Oscars and Counting”
Essay #13 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

“Laughing at the Future” by Joseph Barbera

When The Flintstones turned out to be a major success, Bill and I looked around for another idea that we could use to follow America’s favorite Stone Age family.  The obvious solution was to create America’s first Space Age family.  (One of my mottoes is “Why avoid the obvious?”  It’s a question I encourage all aspiring young cartoonists to ask themselves every day.)

And so, we invented The Jetsons. Although similar in their concepts, the two shows had opposite approaches to humor.  Where the Flintstones showed us how the foibles of modern society had roots in the Paleolithic period, the Jetsons warned us that things could get even worse for us in the future — or at least that they wouldn’t  get much better!  Fred’s backbreaking job of smashing rocks at Slate’s gravel pit reminded us that our own occupations weren’t all that bad.  And George Jetson’s complaints about getting sore fingers from pushing buttons seemed funny, considering how much easier he had it compared to those of us stuck in the 20th century!

This year, as The Jetsons   are about to turn 34 years old, some of the show’s predictions about life in the future bear reexamination.  We are living in the future right now (from a 1962 standpoint) and it does look a little familiar.  Technology has created jobs undreamed of in 1962.  (George’s job at Spacely’s Space Age Sprockets is “digital index operator.”  Don’t tell me that doesn’t sound like a 90’s job title!)

Today, computers are in every business and in many homes.  And while they don’t make our lives quite as easy as they do for the Jetsons, they do cause some interesting futuristic problems.  Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has become a major malady among 9-to-5 keyboardists.  (George was ahead of his time even with his health problems!)  Robots like Rosie don’t yet act as our maids, but robots build our cars and make increasing inroads in our daily lives.  The Jetsons magical food preparation device, the Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle, has almost come true in this age of microwavable instant meals.  And picture phones do exist today, even though they are not quite ready for the mass market yet. (Will they ever  get that right over at AT&T?)  Maybe we haven’t started walking the family dog on treadmills, but  how many people work out on treadmills in the gym or in their own homes?

Sadly those jet-powered flying machines that people in the 21st century use to get around town in have not yet materialized.  (We’re still waiting.  Make mine a red convertible.)  And we don’t yet live in mile-high bubble domes like in Orbit City.  (Not a bad idea though, considering the flood, fire and smog problems we’ve been having in L.A.)  But much of the Jetsons world is with us already.  Which is not to say that the original Jetsons episodes don’t still make for entertaining viewing.  In their future world, there is no depleted ozone layer, no disappearing rain forests, and no radioactive waste disposal problems.  You know, escaping into the world of The Jetsons seems like a better idea than ever.

“Laughing at the Future”
Essay #14 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

“In Cartoons, Music Makes the Laughs Grow Louder” by Bill Hanna

Years ago, I got my start working for a cartoon production company run by Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising.  They were the creators and producers of the early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.  It was no coincidence that those early cartoons (along with Disney’s Silly Symphonies) were named after forms of music. Why, the very name of the company—Harman-Ising—had a harmonious musical ring to it.

Music was our inspiration, our jumping off point, you might say.  I used to time out cartoon gags using musical bars and staves, because the timing  in cartoons is so crucial to getting the laugh.  “Timing” is a musical concept, really.  A seven minute cartoon can be seen as a short piece of music, with  pacing and dynamics that can almost be charted, like a musical score.  My love and understanding of music has served me well throughout my cartoon career, because it helped me nudge the laughter out of an audience.

Probably the most enjoyable part of producing cartoons at Hanna-Barbera has been writing the lyrics (and some of the melodies) for many of the main titles of our shows.  I did this while working with our main musical director for many years, Hoyt Curtin.  I believe that Hoyt Curtin is one of the two truly distinctive musical voices to have emerged in cartoons over the last 50 years.  (The other one is Carl Stalling over at Warner Bros.) Like Stalling, who used primarily symphonic orchestral arrangements, Hoyt called upon the dominant musical form of his day.  In Hoyt’s case, that meant the big band sounds of the ’40s and ’50s, which he translated into a series of themes and scores that are maddeningly catchy, effortlessly funny, and utterly unmistakable.  Thanks to him you can tell a Hanna-Barbera cartoon from across the street, just by hearing a few strains of music.

When it came time to write a theme song for one of our new shows, Hoyt and I would get to work.  The lyrics almost always came first.  I would compose the lyrics in my head, jot them down on a sheet of note paper, give Hoyt a call at his home, and recite them over the telephone.  Invariably, Hoyt would call me back within a day or so with a musical composition and sing the thing to me, complete with my lyrics.  Hoyt’s ability to create a bright, lilting melody to match my lyrics time after time was to me nothing short of astonishing.

Over the past 40 years I have attended hundreds of recording sessions, and have gotten to know and respect many talented musicians.  But Hoyt Curtin was the one I spent the most time with.  We worked together.  We sang together.  And we became good friends.

Even today, music plays an integral part in the creation of cartoons for me.  I recently wrote one more title for a short I created for the Cartoon Network.  It’s about a little duck called Hard Luck Duck who is always getting into trouble, and his best friend Harley, an alligator who rescues him.  If you get a chance to see it, listen for the music. And see if it doesn’t play a part in nudging a laugh out of you.

“In Cartoons, Music Makes the Laughs Grow Louder”
Essay #15 (of 15)
Original essay written by Bill Burnett, Creative Director, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, 1993-1996

The Hanna-Barbera Sound Effects Library, 1995 (3)

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From the box set booklet, 1995:

My career began as a sound engineer and producer, and the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library was the first I ever used. That was a lucky break because it was also the best.   The effects were fun to listen to and work with.  They were the first of their kind.  Now, flash forward 20 years and I’m the boss at Hanna-Barbera, and the first thing I wanted to do was to issue a comprehensive technically superior edition of the studio’s greatest effects ever.   (I knew I was right when my former partner called and the firs thing he asked was “When can I get a copy of the effects?”)

Maybe these effects are so great because they have to be:  The budgetary realities of TV cartoon require us to depend on effects to help tell our stories. But more likely they’re great because of the extraordinary talented people who created them.  We talked to TV cartoon pioneers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and sound editors Greg Watson and Pat Foley. In this collection, we’ve included some of their reminiscences dating back to the 1930’s.  I think you’ll enjoy the priceless sound effects secrets and behind-the-scenes information as much as I did.

Although small portions of the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library have been issued before in many other forms, this four CD set of over 2,200 effects represents the most comprehensive collection of Hanna-Barbera sound effects ever assembled (and it includes, for the first time anyway, our top-10 list of the most popular sounds used here at the studio). Sound Ideas, under the supervision of our team of editors, assisted in selecting the effects with special care: they’re digitally remastered with state-of-the-art noise reduction techniques to make them sound cleaner-and funnier-than ever before.

I’m sure you will enjoy using them as much as we do.

Fred Seibert
President, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons
1995

More about the sound effects library here.

Hanna-Barbera Sound Effects Roundtable 1995 (2)

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This sound effects box was one of my favorite projects from my time at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.

From the original booklet, 1995:

Sound Effects Round Table

The Hanna-Barbera sound effects are legendary and so are the men behind them. We put together this imaginary roundtable discussion by combining separate interviews with four of the driving forces behind this library of cartoon sound effects. The interviews with William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, Greg Watson and Pat Foley were conducted on April 2, 1993.

Joe Barbera: We realized early on that sound effects were just as important in limited animations they were in full animation. In fact, more important. So we never cut back on sound effects. See, the idea was, you would do an animation that was Tom & Jerry for twenty years. And they won seven Oscars, and you would rally finesse them. I mean, you did a pencil test on every single scene. And you studied them and reworked them, and honed it down as good as you could. Then suddenly, because of the company’s problem…not our, because we were rolling very well…they closed the MGM animation studio. So now what happens is, you go around to the various possible sources and are turned down by everyone because they said nobody could afford to do animation for television. To give you an idea, at MGM, we were averaging $45,000 for five minutes. And eventually we made a quick deal with Screen Gems for five minutes for $3,000. How do we put in all the gags and stuff with, let’s say, 8,000 drawings instead of 26,000 drawings? You have to draw of every piece of knowledge and ingenuity that you ever could think of relating to animation.

JB: In cutting back, we had to use every trick to put over the feeling of motion and animation, like using camera shakes, truck-ins, dissolves, quick cuts. And miraculously, it worked. NBC picked up the very first one, which was called “Ruff & Ready.” And then I went to Chicago and sold the Huckleberry Hound show. Basically the material we were dong had good sound effects. We used the best sound effects people…it had good visual artwork and painting, funny characters, good stories. The one thing it had less of was drawings. Because it’s a hand business, and the more drawings you have, the more expensive the product is. That was called limited animation. And we were the ones that started it in the studio on LaBrea. When Huckleberry Hound won an Emmy the very first year, it showed that it wasn’t the amount of drawings, it was the material that was carrying it.

Bill Hanna: Our sound effects library I know goes back to the early days for MGM, which was 1937. Actually, it goes back even further. I started working at Harman and Ising Studios in 1930. Fred McAlpin…a true pioneer…worked at Harman-Ising at the time. When McAlpin was taken from Harman-Ising to MGM, I’m assuming he took the entire Harman-Ising library with him.

JB: McAlpin used to build all kinds of equipment at MGM. I mean he’d have a doll rod bent back, attached to a piece of metal which would hit something else and make a clang or a wack. He did a lot o that building.

BH: All of that was done on a stage where we would record that effect. They had all kinds of things: dishpans, guns, pop things, whistles, slide whistles. All of hat stuff was there, and McAlpin would always be over there banging stuff and creating sound effects. He did our sound effects for all of the Tom & Jerrys.

JB: McAlpin was a builder of all kinds of equipment. And I think he was taking all that lumber home later on for himself. (Laugh) He was a dedicated sound effect guy, and he’d handle a multiple assortment of sounds that way.

BH: Once your library is built up to a proper size, you can get any effect you need right from your library. You don’t have to go in and bang things around anymore.

Greg Watson: When Bill and Joe left MGM, the company gave them the privilege of taking a long a nucleus of sound library.

BH: This was all done on 35mm soundtrack.

JB: There were rows of 35mm sound effect tracks all staring at you with every kind of sound you could imagine written on them, and they would say things like “loud rattling” and “soft rattling” “eerie sounds, not too scary.”

Pat Foley: Some of these old effects, they try to redo them, you know, to figure out how they were originally done. Bu I don’t know how they were originally done! They’re just amazing how they did them. Some of the riccos…shotgun ricochets…various animation sounds when they ricco off stage. I really don’t know. I don’t think that they actually got a gunshot. I don’t know how they did it.

GW: When we moved, it fell to my lot to collect the effects that we wanted to keep. I picked things I knew would be difficult to get a hold of. Things, for example, that we couldn’t expect to make ourselves. Riccos, jet planes, railroad trains, and stuff like that.

PF: The sound library is a thing that has evolved. When I got here in 62’, they already had the makings of a library that they got from MGM.

GW: We got to Hanna-Barbera with that nucleus, and then we began to expand. And we were a little primitive at the time. For example, there was a sound we used for Fred Flintstone’s feet when he was getting started with his buggy, you know, with his cement mixer thing. I actually recorded the patting feet on the leather sofa in Bill Hanna’s office with the flats of my hands.

PF: We all did everything. I was doing sound effects and cutting music.

BH: You remember in the Tom & Jerry cartoons they didn’t speak, it was all effects. You remember how Tom would scream? I did all of the screams for Tom.

PF: Most sound effects libraries, they travel around.

GW: That sort of thing was the order of the day when we began. Later on, though we did collect some sounds from other studios who were very gracious about it. I remember once, I was all by myself at night in the cutting room at Sunset and LaBrea. Charlie Chaplin’s old studio. As I was working, I heard a woman scream. In the dead of night it was an unsettling thing. But what I didn’t realize was that another editor was working over on the other side of the lot and he had run this scream on his moviola. So I went to investigate the next day and I found a very nice fellow over there cutting sound effects, and I asked him if I could borrow a Jeep sound. And he gave me a whole library of Jeep sounds. Starts and stop, and high speed/low speed idling, the whole works, which really was a boon at the point.

JB: In those days, sound editors were working with 35mm negatives, and they’d have moviolas, right? And they’d be running the film on one head and sound effects on another head. And you looked at it, you’d say ‘no, I don’t think that’ll do it, we need a bigger cymbal whack.’ So they’d go out and get another piece of film and lay it right on the moviola. And they wouldn’t even spool it up. They would just let it hang down, and we’d play that again to see how it worked with the music and the voice tracks.

GW: There was a lot of experimentation, you bet.

JB: When you lay it into the picture, it looks right with the picture, or it makes you smile or chuckle, that’ the right sound effect.

GW: Some of our effects were manufactured by running concurrent sound on adjacent tracks, and after they were mixed in the dubbing room, we found that the mixture was rather attractive. So we slipped those out, looped them and saved time. Sometimes it’s quite funny where a single effect would not have been that funny.

PF: And a lot of times you find an effect by accident. You would be playing something at a higher speed, or playing it backwards, and you say, wow, that sounds kinda neat. So you stop, and then you will transfer it so that it would play in the right direction for you and you have a funny new sound.

GW: Years ago when I was real young going to movies I noticed in watching some of these Disney cartoons that the juxtaposition of two different kinds of sounds was funny. For example, a low sound followed by a shrill sound right on the heels of a lull. It had a humor to it that really shook me up.

JB: And of course, as you know in our cartoons, if Fred runs across a living room, that living room is three miles long. So you have to make the sound effect pretty funny. And you also know if the newsboy delivers the paper to the Flintstones, it’s a big slab of rock. He says ‘paper’ and he throws it right through the window and usually Flintstone grabs it and gets knocked flat. Well, now you have to decide there, is it a bone-crushing hit, or is it a funny hit? You can’t be cruel, even though you hit somebody with a square of rock which is four or five inches thick and will decimate anybody. And those are the decisions that have to be made.

BH: Both Joe and I have been involved in countless dubbing sessions. I’ve done timing on all those Tom & Jerry cartoons. I would always write-in ‘splat,’ or ‘swish’ or ‘foops’ or whatever. Something that would denote whether it’s a clank or a soft splash or something. I would hear them in my mind and write them on the bar sheets.

PF: Generally the way it started, cartoons were scored in an effects type way, where the music made the zips, and wind whistles and the xylo runs, running up and down. Hoyt Curtin did a lot of that. He was a conductor and a music writer who did numerous, numerous shows for us for years. He had this one group of boings he put together we called Hoyt’s Boings. And it’s an assortment of different effects.

BH: Hoyt Curtin scored practically all of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

PF: There’s a sound called a blip. We call it a blip, but it’s something like a boink. We use it for somebody getting hit on the head or something like that. Some of the names of these sounds don’t make any sense to anybody but to the people who are using them.

GW: We had an editor with us in the early days named Don Douglas. He most recently was working at Universal, and he created a thing by combining violin plucks, you know, pizzicato, and a couple of other sounds, and we called it “Pixie and Dixie Hop”.

PF: A lot of the sounds that I have created, I created for a specific sequence where Fred was singing a song to Wilma, and Fred was running and he tripped. We wanted to get a nice stubbed toe thing, and we stumbled onto an accidental thing when we ran a blip backwards. We used it, and from then on I called it “Pat’s Blip”, because it was a sound that we hadn’t heard before. You’ll find it on our library.

JB: All of this was really a tremendous amount of research and work. But the fellows were good. They got some darned good sound effects.

PF: A lot of times we make our own, like letting the air out of a balloon, and the balloon swizzles all around. And we’ve had big balloons that we’d blow up and let loose in front of a mike, and kind of twirl it around the mike.

GW: We have one sound that we used a lot. I loved it myself, it’s called ‘heavy metal hit.’ It was a combination of a ringing metal hit, low pitched, and some kind of a soft sound. And we got that from Sam Horta. Sam has had his own editing company for quite awhile. He’s still working. We used to call it Sam’s Metal ht.

PF: They were really inventing new sounds in all the pictures. And sometimes the way of making the sound’s kind of funny. We had this mouse and they were washing windows, and they were going around and around and around the window and rub rub rub rub. We didn’t have a sound effect for that, but I had once watched somebody on a sound effects stage do it and I said, we can do what they did. What they did as they stand real close do the rub their teeth. And as they rub their teeth, the teeth get dry and pretty soon you get a squeak squeak squeak squeak. And when you’re close to a mike, that sounds just like you’re rubbing real hard on glass…squeak squeak squeak squeak. You wouldn’t think that’s the way you got a sound for rubbing on glass, but it works.

GW: Somebody came up with a rosin string sound. They put rosin on a rag and rubbed a violin string and it gave you a good stretching, tension sound as though things were going to snap. And we used a violin pick and rise, where the violinist plucked the string and after he plucked it he slid his finger up the string so that the sound became more shrill. That’s the sort of thing we would use, like, when someone pulls Tom’s whiskers out.

BH: Years ago, so much of an animated cartoon was done to music. There was a bar sheet designed that had treble and bass clefs all across the top of the sheet, a sheet probably 18 inches wide and about 12 inches tall. We would divide that into bars and set tempos, so many frames to a beta. A 2/10 beat or a 2/16 beat…whatever. We would set tempos for the music and write in there wherever we would want a sound effect. They used to write the music to accommodate the sound effects.

JB: Scott Bradley cued musically every move on the screen. That’s how they used to do it. Now you cue it by pulling out your music library and cutting it in to fit.

BH: I have studied music practically all my life and I have worked with the musicians here on every cartoon that we’ve been involved with.

GW: I have a set of drums actually, cause I used to play drums. Believe it or not, having played drums helped me a good deal in turning out rhythmic sound effects.

PF: You get a percussionist in there and that’s how a lot of these sounds were designed. You go to a music session and you get a percussionist, and he’ll bring out his wares. He’ll have his wind whistle and things like that, and various coconut gallops and blop gallops that would be the animals trotting or something like that.

GW: That’s how we got “Temple Block Riot”. A whole bunch of sounds real fast. We used it for different things, sometimes for rushing motion on somebody or something like that.

PF: And there’s “Kim’s bass drum and cymbals.” Designed by Kim Speers, who’s now with Ruby/Speers. He was an editor here when I started, and he named it after himself. And what it was, it was a variation of cymbals and a bas drum being played simultaneously and it made a nice hit, like when Fred, you know, runs into a tree. It’s a bass drum and cymbal hit. And there’s “Crazy Bass Drum and Cymbals.” That’s probably 15 different combinations of these bass drums and cymbal hits.

JB: Now we have such a tremendous library, you can pretty much whip together almost any sound you want out of the variety of sounds we have.

PF: Everybody eventually renames some of these things, you know, because they go from studio to studio, they will use an effect…like if I had designed that one for Fred stubbing his toe, then all of a sudden somebody else uses it for somebody hitting somebody on the head. It just get used on down he line. And when you hear the sound you say, oh, that should be him stubbing his toe! It’s a very creative area, and there’s more than one way to use an effect as we find out.

GW: Nowadays I hear sound effects in commercials that came from Hanna-Barbera.

PF: I know that a lot of the stuff that we have created here I hear on Saturday morning shows and other animated shows done by other producers. And also I’ve heard certain effects that are on radio shows and things like that.

GW: Some of them are so definite, it’s impossible to miss them. There was one sound that we seldom used because it sounded like a social blunder – a gas pass, if you know what I mean. We called it ‘bork.’ And I heard that recently on a commercial.

PF: I recognize our effects. You know, after you listen to them for so long, you recognize them.

GW: When editors left they often took some sound effects with them after working at Hanna-Barbera – And some of them ended up cutting commercials, so naturally the sounds are going to show up.

PF: Sound effects editors travel around. It’s not like music. There’s no way that you can keep sound effects. Other editors come here, they like some sounds, they create sounds, then when they leave they take ‘em with them.

JB: You had to care about sound effects to work here. The intent, the drive, was to make the sound effects different. Otherwise you would just be repeating the same stuff over and over again. Like for instance, I had a little kid come in here as a visitor. In fact you might know him, Gary Coleman, he had his own show for awhile. This little guy walked in to me, he was really a bright, bright little guy, and he said to me, ‘You have some shows on Saturday morning and they’re lousy.’ So I’m about to punch him out, you know? I can do that, he’s a little guy. But I said, ‘Lousy? What do you mean?’ He says, ‘Yeah, you have two shows and you use the same sound effects on each show.’ That shows you what a smart kid he was. So I then dared to ask him, ‘What shows are you talking about? Well, it wasn’t our shows! It was two shows being done by another company. This smart little guy laid it on me. But it gives you an idea of how you don’t fool around with Mother Nature. Or a good cartoon fan.

More about the sound effects library here.

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.