It's not, I suppose, tragic that Joseph Barbera died Monday. He was 95, after all, and creatively, his best days were certainly behind him.
But with his death, the Golden Age of animation officially draws to a close. Barbera, with his partner Bill Hanna, created Tom & Jerry, the quintessential hyper-violent cat and mouse duo. Despite winning numerous Oscars, Hanna and Barbera never quite got the critical props awarded to Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett or any of the Warner Bros. crew, or the huge commercial success of Disney's features. Still, the best of Tom & Jerry--Mouse In Manhattan, Solid Serenade, Heavenly Puss, the unbelievably awesome Zoot Cat--are among the finest cartoons ever made, beautifully conceived, designed and animated, and with comic timing that couldn't be beat. These guys were as good as anybody.
Unfortunately--or fortunately, if you're a fan--their names are more frequently associated with the work they did after abandoning theatrical shorts for TV animation. Their initial creations for the medium--Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear--certainly paved the way for the future, with simplified design and limited animation, the plot and gags delivered mostly through dialogue. Later H-B TV shows, like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, were even more plot heavy, essentially standard sitcoms that happened to be animated. (It's no coincidence that Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane trained at H-B.)
As TV demanded more product, H-B continued to grind it out, Scooby-Doo, Help! It's The Hair Bear Bunch, Speed Buggy, The Roman Holidays, Where's Huddles?--quality control became a thing of the past. In the seventies, when I was a kid, most of the H-B product was a must to avoid. (For some reason, I really liked Hong Kong Phooey. I have no idea why.)
Still, some of the TV work Hanna and Barbera did is worthwhile. Early Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear benefits greatly from the elegant designs of Ed Benedict and hilarious voice work from Daws Butler, and individual episodes can be quite funny. H-B's TV masterpiece was undoubtedly the classic adventure series Jonny Quest. Chock full o' monsters and mad scientists, big guns and fantastic gadgets, aerial dogfights and giant robot spiders, this was (is) one of the most purely entertaining TV shows ever. Yeah, the animation was still limited, but excellent design (by Doug Wildey) and terrific scripts made a difference, and Hanna and Barbera proved as adept at staging action and suspense as they were at comedy.
Surprisingly, H-B's TV work has been more influential than their splendid theatrical shorts. Contemporary animation directors like Genndy Tartakofsky are clearly influenced by the visual stylings of their early TV work, and Brad Bird's The Incredibles was, among other things, a series of Jonny Quest riffs.
Hanna and Barbera are well represented on DVD. I'm not a big fan of The Flintstones, but it's always worth a look, and the box set of the complete run of Jonny Quest is simply one of the best purchases you could make. The Tom & Jerry shorts haven't been brought to DVD with the loving care of the Looney Tunes collections, but there are a couple of double disc compilations available that will get you started. Watching Zoot Cat, you will laugh, guaranteed, but for some of us, at least, that laughter will be mixed with longing for a level of comic timing we'll likely never see again.
