Background

Ethnicity: Hanna described his family as "a red-blooded, Irish-American family."

Hanna was born on July 14, 1910, in Melrose, New Mexico, United States. He was the only boy in a family of seven children. He was the son of William John (1873-1949) and Avice Joyce (Denby) Hanna (1882-1956). His father was a sewage construction superintendent, and the family moved to Baker City, Oregon, where he was involved in building the Balm Creek dam. The family moved to Logan, Utah, before moving to San Pedro, California, in 1917. During the next two years, they moved several times before eventually settling in Watts, California, in 1919.

Education

Hanna studied at Compton High School from 1925 through 1928, where he played the saxophone in a dance band.

Hanna attended Compton City College, where he studied both journalism and structural engineering but had to drop out of college with the onset of the Great Depression.

Career

Hanna had dropped out of college and was working as a construction engineer when he lost his job during the Great Depression, but he found work as an artist at Pacific Art and Title, an animation studio. In 1930 he moved to another cartoon-production company, Harman-Ising Studios, the home of the "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" series. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) hired the company to produce cartoons, for which Hanna, in addition to inking and painting, created songs and lyrics. When MGM added its own animation department in 1937, Hanna became a director there.

Hanna and Joseph Barbera began their association at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's newly-formed animation unit in 1937. Hanna specialised in the technical side of production, such as calculating the number of frames needed for a scene, while Barbera, a former accountant, found his metier as a storyboard artist. They soon struck up an excellent working relationship, and in 1939 came up with a tale about a feuding cat and mouse.

"Tom and Jerry" were originally going to be a dog and a fox, but the other principles behind what became the most successful series of short cartoons in the history of cinema were decided early and never varied; Tom was a bully, Jerry a cheeky, swaggering thorn in his side. Hanna once said: “I always liked Joe's drawings, and when the opportunity came, why, Joe and I worked together. We knew we needed two characters. We thought we needed conflict, and chase and action. And a cat after a mouse seemed like a good, basic thought.”

Yet Hanna and Barbera demonstrated that within these seemingly narrow parameters there was ample play for their creativity, and if the storyline changed little, the comedy was always consistently imaginative - as it had to be in a medium where the plot was conveyed entirely by action, not dialogue.

Their first collaboration, "Puss Gets the Boot," was nominated for an Oscar in 1940. Over the next 15 years, under the supervision of producer Fred Quimby, they produced more than 100 other animated shorts featuring the quarrelsome duo, a tally that brought them another 12 nominations and seven Oscars for features such as "Johann Mouse" (1952).

This remains the highest number of Academy Awards ever given to a series featuring the same characters, and when Tex Avery, the cartoon artist, moved from Warner Brothers to MGM in the 1940s, the studio began to challenge the monopoly that Disney had hitherto enjoyed in animated film.

Hanna and Barbera were not simply skilled artists; they were also highly accomplished technicians who extended the boundaries of their craft. One notable example of this was their mixing for the first time of animation and live film in pictures such as "Anchors Aweigh" (1945), in which Jerry dances with Gene Kelly, and "Dangerous When Wet," which featured an underwater ballet between the two cartoon characters and Esther Williams.

This latter film was released in 1953, but by then cinema attendances were beginning to wilt under the assault of television, and in 1957 Hanna and Barbera were told by MGM to disband their production unit. Instead the pair gave in their notices and, working from Charlie Chaplin's former studios, set up their own company to make cartoons specifically for television.

In order to do this successfully, they needed to find a way of creating animated pictures more quickly and more cheaply. Their solution was to pare down the techniques needed to make Technicolor cartoons, using less detail and movement, more stock footage, and fewer drawings - 300 for a minute of film rather than the 1,000 they produced for MGM.

Hanna-Barbera's first offering for television was "Ruff and Reddy," a tale of a cat and a dog, but they made their fortune in 1958 with the first-ever animated children's television series, "The Huckleberry Hound Show." Its mildly satirical tone attracted adults as well as children, prefiguring the appeal of The Simpsons.

Moreover, at a time when Disney's films seemed to be concentrating on fine drawing, Hanna and Barbera were using animation for its traditional purpose, creating laughter.

One of the regular characters in "Huckleberry Hound" was soon given his own show. Yogi Bear was named for baseball coach Yogi Berra, known for his less than profound utterances ("It ain't over 'til it's over"), while Hanna-Barbera's next success was a parody of Jackie Gleason's program "The Honeymooners." "The Flintstones" (1960) ("They're a modern Stone Age family"), was the first animated program to be shown in a prime time evening slot on American television.

The project Hanna and Barbera are most proud of is "The Flintstones," a project that almost never happened.

"We talked about making them as pilgrims, as Indians, as Italians," said Barbera, “and one of the fellows whose name was Dan Gordon made a sketch of one couple in the skins, like Fred and Wilma. As soon you saw them in these skins, everybody there said at once, ‘That's it.’ Everybody loved The Flintstones, but nobody bought it. They were afraid of it. On the very last day of an eight-day sales pitch, ABC bought the show. If ABC hadn't bought the show, I was ready to go back home, put the artwork in the closet, and that's it. No Flintstones.”

At first, audiences did not warm to this vision of neolithic suburbia, but it soon became a fixture of Saturday morning television, and Fred Flintstone's "yabba-dabba-doo" passed into common parlance. By the mid-1960s, Hanna-Barbera's cartoons were attracting a global audience of more than 300 million people, and in 1966 they sold their company to Taft Productions for $25 million.

After the success of The Flintstones, Hanna conceived several other cartoons in the mid-1960s, including "The Jetsons," "Touche Turtle" and that most effectual, intellectual "Top Cat." Then in 1968, CBS decided to shake up their Saturday morning schedules for children and asked Hanna-Barbera to create new shows for them. The other networks followed suit and soon the company was supplying six hours of cartoons and live-action programs each week.

These included "Penelope Pitstop" and later "Wacky Races," as well as "Captain Caveman" and "The Banana Splits." The most enduring success, however, featured the adventures of four teenage amateur detectives and their craven canine companion, "Scooby Doo," new episodes of which were made into the 1980s. Less of an achievement perhaps, though no less popular, was "The Smurfs" (1982).

In a 1987 interview, Hanna reflected on the early days of the studio: “The early years were more fun to me than the later years. In the early years, I worked more in the creative areas--timing and directing. As the studio grew, I became more involved with administration.”

In the 1990s, Hanna was an executive producer of 20th Century Fox’s feature “Once Upon a Forest” and Universal’s live-action version of “The Flintstones.” He also created two original cartoon shorts - "Hard Luck Duck” and “Wind-Up Wolf" - for the Cartoon Network, making his first solo directing efforts since 1941. He wrote his autobiography “A Cast of Friends” in 1996.

Achievements

• 

  Hanna and Barbera won seven Academy Awards and eight Emmy Awards. Their cartoons have become cultural icons, and their cartoon characters have appeared in other media such as films, books, and toys. Hanna-Barbera's shows had a worldwide audience of over 300 million people in their 1960s heyday, and have been translated into more than 28 languages.
  
  The "Tom and Jerry" series won more Academy Awards than any other animated series.
  
  William Hanna was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame with his producing partner Joseph Barbera in 1994.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Cast of Friends

    (Over the past 60 years, in partnership with Joe Barbera a...)

    1996

• movie

  • Jetsons

    (America's favorite family of the future, the Jetsons, mov...)

    1990

• TV series

  • Tom and Jerry

    (Follow the madcap adventures of the original game of cat ...)

    1954
  • The Scooby-Doo Show

    (The world's most lovable, mystery-solving dog, along with...)

  • The Smurfs

    (Get ready, get set: get Smurfy! Join Papa Smurf, Smurfett...)

    1981
  • Jonny Quest Season

    (Preteen Jonny Quest, the son of a renowned scientist, is ...)

  • Huckleberry Hound

    (Assuming a variety of identities, Huckleberry Hound tames...)

    1959
  • The Flintstones and Friends

    (Join the fun in the town of Bedrock with the this fabulou...)

    1964
  • The Jetsons

    (Meet George Jetson and his quirky family: wife Jane, son ...)

    1987
  • Tom and Jerry

    (They've sure got whiskers ... and they're all heart! Okay...)

    1945
  • Dastardly & Muttley in their Flying Machines 1970
  • Shazzan: The Complete Series 1968

Views

Hanna and his wife Violet were generous contributors and supporters of Mayers Intermountain Hospice.

Quotations: "I really think that Fred Flintstone is my favorite character. I don't know, he yells a lot, and I yell a lot. We're alike in that respect."

Membership

While living in Watts, in 1922, William Hanna joined Scouting. He remained dedicated to Scouting through all his life. He even was awarded for being a Scoutmaster by Distinguished Eagle Scout Award in 1985.

• 

  Eagle Scout , United States

  1922

Personality

Hanna was an avid yachtsman, and would often take employees out for cruises. When battling throat cancer in 1989, he complained that the treatments kept him from his barbershop quartet.

His proudest achievement remained Tom and Jerry, she said: “He still loved them the best.”

Quotes from others about the person

• Hanna's lifelong partner Joe Barbera wrote: "William Shakespeare once asked, 'What's in a name?' For Bill Hanna and myself, the name of Hanna-Barbera inaugurated a lifelong creative alliance that I will always cherish."
  
  "People say, How can you work together for 50 years and never fight?" said Barbera. "I said, We did fight, the very first week, and we haven't spoken since!"
  
  Sarah Baisley, editor in chief of Animation magazine, said: “Most in the entertainment industry credit the two men with having engineered the possibility of TV series animation. They invented the system that really introduced animation for television.”
  
  “Many in the animation industry consider William Hanna to be a master of timing,” said Baisley, who worked for 13 years as head of publicity for Hanna-Barbera Studios. “He also was the first to farm out animation to other countries. He was always generous. People would write him from all over the country and ask to come see the studio. They would drop in, and he would give them a job. He loved to take others under his wing.”

Interests

• saxophone, singing in a barbershop quartet

• Sport & Clubs

  sailing

Connections

Hanna married Violet Blanch Wogatzke on August 7, 1936. Their marriage lasted for over 64 years, until his death.

They had two children: David William and Bonnie Jean.

Father:

William John

1873-1949

Mother:

Avice Joyce (Denby) Hanna

1882-1956

Spouse:

Violet Blanch Wogatzke

July 23, 1913 - July 10, 2014

Son:

David William

Daughter:

Bonnie Jean

Acquaintance:

Tom Ito

In 1996, Hanna, with assistance from Los Angeles writer Tom Ito, published his autobiography.

Friend:

Joseph Roland Barbera

Joe Barbera (1911–2006) and William Hanna worked together for almost 50 years to make many popular cartoons, including "Tom and Jerry," "The Flintstones," and "Yogi Bear."

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194
  2010
• A Cast of Friends In this candid autobiography, Hanna describes the early days of animation, the great friendships among animators, his happy pairing with Barbera, and more.
  1996
• William Hanna and Joseph Barbera
  2011