Toy OTD: McFarlane Hanna-Barbera Figures, Series 2: The Flintstones - Fred & Dino

The McFarlane Hanna-Barbera action figure line, while in concept is something that I've been eagerly waiting for, in reality turned out to be a pretty uneven affair. The figure choices were repetitive, and the posing ranged from terrific to awkward at best. Still, series two did show marked improvement over series one, so it's a shame that series three never made it to toy shelves.

This figure is one of series two's highlights! It's a great situation from the original show, looking like it was lifted right from a frame grab (I'd like to think that I influenced the choice of this figure - I did submit this idea to McFarlane, but received no answer, so who knows?). The color choices are really nice, though the paint work itself is a little rough (I remember my figure being pretty discolored upon opening it - that matte finish stuff seems to rub off onto other parts mighty easily).

There's almost no articulation at all, aside from Fred's neck (to help align his face to Dino's) and his feet, which kick as you turn a small wheel on the back of the display base. It works, but it's clunky enough that you wonder if it was really worth the rise in price point to do. The base itself is simple - no branding or logos - and themed to the characters. Nice!

The blister packaging is pretty good, allowing a wide, clear view of the toy for those (like me) who like to check paint jobs. I wish the larger art were more retro-looking (like the figure itself), but it's still above average as far as domestic toy packaging goes.

Unfortunately, this line sold rather poorly, so this figure is still very easy to get - it costs $12.94 + shipping at animerpm.com. You might be able to find it for an even lower price on eBay. Good luck!

Toy OTD: Ideal Magilla Gorilla Plush ('60s)

You don't see this construction approach used often anymore, but I like it: a vinyl head or face attached to a plush body. You can play to the strengths of both materials, each to its advantage: the precision of vinyl to get a more on-model face, and the cuddliness of a plush. I'm assuming it's too hard to anchor down a vinyl head to meet today's safety standards - or maybe it's simply a lot more expensive.

For a plush, there's a lot of detail: the tie, pants, suspenders, differently-colored shoes, 'shoelaces', even the little bars on the suspenders! The colors may not be spot-on, but they're close enough to evoke the character properly. The head sculpt is appealing, and the paint work is pretty tight, considering the era that the toys was made. Of course, the 'airbrushed' highlights in the mouth and ears are particularly nice!

If you buy plushes, you're probably going to have balance issues, and sure enough this toy can't stand or sit on its own. It's a shame that the design couldn't commit to one or the other, but the looks is so fun and colorful (not to mention accurate) that it helps to make up for it.

If you want to get a Magilla of your own, you can buy one at gasolinealleyantiques.com for $95.00 + shipping. Have fun!

The KarateGuard

This may be the last Tom & Jerry cartoon with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's input. It's a little derivative, and there's some story problems, but as short film franchise resurrections go, it's pretty good!

Another Joe Barbera Obituary

NY TIMES: Joseph Barbera, Half of Cartoon Duo, Dies at 95
By DAVE ITZKOFF Published: December 19, 2006

Joseph Barbera, an innovator of animation who teamed with William Hanna to give generations of young television viewers a pantheon of beloved characters, including Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

A spokesman for Warner Brothers said he died of natural causes, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Barbera and the studio he founded with Mr. Hanna, Hanna-Barbera Productions, became synonymous with television animation, yielding more than 100 cartoon series over four decades, including “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?,” “Jonny Quest” and “The Smurfs.”

On signature televisions shows like “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons,” the two men developed a cartoon style that combined colorful, simply drawn characters (often based on other recognizable pop-culture personalities) with the narrative structures and joke-telling techniques of traditional live-action sitcoms. They were television’s first animated comedy programs.

Before that, Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna had worked together on more than 120 hand-drawn cartoon shorts for MGM, dozens of which starred the archetypal cat-and-mouse team Tom and Jerry. The Hanna-Barbera collaboration lasted more than 60 years. The critic Leonard Maltin, in his book “Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons,” wrote that Mr. Barbera’s strength was more in his drawing and gag writing while Mr. Hanna had a good sense of comic timing and giving characters warmth.

“I was never a good artist,” said Mr. Hanna, who died in 2001. But Mr. Barbera, he said, “has the ability to capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Born Joseph Roland Barbera on March 24, 1911, in the Little Italy section of Manhattan and raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Mr. Barbera tried his hand at banking, playwriting and amateur boxing before the successful sale of a sketch to Collier’s magazine encouraged him to pursue a career as a cartoon artist. He wrote a letter to Walt Disney, then a rising star of California’s animation industry, in search of employment; Mr. Disney apparently promised to look Mr. Barbera up on a subsequent visit to New York, but the proposed meeting never took place.

Instead, Mr. Barbera began his animation career on the East Coast. After a four-day stint with the animator Max Fleischer, he began writing gags and drawing cartoon cels for the Van Beuren Studios in 1932. When the studio shut down in 1936, he found work at the Terrytoon Studios in New Rochelle, N.Y., but one year later was lured away to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s animation unit in Culver City, Calif.

It was at MGM that Mr. Barbera was first paired with Mr. Hanna, a veteran cartoon writer and musical composer and lyricist. After toiling on a short-lived series of animated shorts based on the Katzenjammer Kids comic strips, the two men formed a plan to produce their own material.

As Mr. Barbera recalled in an interview in Michael Mallory’s book “Hanna-Barbera Cartoons,” “In desperation one time, we were sitting in a room waiting for the place to fold, and I said to Bill: ‘Why don’t we try a cartoon of our own?’ ”

Their first such project for MGM, a 1940 theatrical short called “Puss Gets the Boot,” introduced audiences to a relentless cat named Jasper, perpetually frustrated in his pursuit of a crafty mouse called Jinx. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Over the next 17 years, the occasionally sadistic antics that Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna devised for their anthropomorphic rivals — rechristened Tom and Jerry — would earn MGM another 13 Oscar nominations and seven statuettes.

Though MGM put Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna in charge of its animation division in 1955, the studio closed the unit two years later. So the two turned to their side company, H-B Enterprises, which they had established to produce animated television commercials, and began working full time on television programs.

Their first series, “The Ruff & Ready Show,” had its debut on NBC in December 1957. That was followed in 1958 by “The Huckleberry Hound Show,” about a powder-blue pooch who spoke and sung (badly) with a Southern drawl. That series later won an Emmy and yielded a spinoff show for one of its supporting characters, an Ed Norton-like forest denizen named Yogi Bear.

Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna revisited the template of “The Honeymooners” in 1960 to create their most popular series, “The Flintstones,” a half-hour animated sitcom about two families living in the Stone Age suburb of Bedrock. It appeared in prime time on ABC and was a top-20 show in its first year.

Despite its fanciful setting, “The Flintstones” hewed to sitcom conventions, using sight gags and one-liners that centered on the domestic squabbles of the prehistoric couple Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Propelled by a catchy, brassy theme song, “Meet the Flintstones” (introduced in the show’s third season), and Fred’s thunderous yell, “Yabba-dabba-doo!” “The Flintstones” ran for 166 episodes over six seasons.

In the succeeding years, Hanna-Barbera produced numerous prime-time, syndicated and Saturday-morning cartoon shows, from 1962’s futuristic family comedy “The Jetsons” to the 1973 adventure series “Super Friends” to such 1980s-era toy tie-ins as “Shirt Tales” and “Challenge of the GoBots.” The studio also produced eclectic projects like the 1978 television special starring the heavy-metal rock band KISS and a 1973 film adaptation of E. B. White’s novel “Charlotte’s Web.”

In 1990, Hanna-Barbera was acquired by Turner Broadcasting (now part of Time Warner), where it continued to produce animated programming for syndication and for the Cartoon Network cable channel, including “Dexter’s Laboratory” and “The Powerpuff Girls.” In 1998, Hanna-Barbera’s studios were moved to a Warner Brothers office building, and by 2001, the company had been absorbed by Warner Brothers’ animation division.

Mr. Barbera remained active in animation. He worked as an executive producer on such recent television series as “What’s New, Scooby-Doo?” He was also a writer, director and storyboard artist on the 2005 cartoon “The KarateGuard,” his first theatrical Tom and Jerry short in more than 45 years.

His survivors include his wife, Sheila, and three children from a previous marriage: Jayne, Lynne and Neal.

Mr. Barbera’s influence can be found today in prime-time animated series like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” and in cartoons that satirize the Hanna-Barbera style, including “The Venture Brothers” and “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.” His own work continues to be seen on the cable channel Boomerang, which broadcasts vintage Hanna-Barbera programming 24 hours a day.

Though he was often asked to explain the enduring popularity of his cartoons, Mr. Barbera was reluctant to subject his life’s work to close analysis. “To me it makes little sense to talk about the cartoons we did,” he wrote in a 1994 autobiography, “My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century.” “The way to appreciate them is to see them.”

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Wow! They mentioned "KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park". Somebody sure did their homework.

Joe Barbera, 1911 - 2006

YAHOO! NEWS/AP: Cartoon creator Joe Barbera dies
By SUE MANNING, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 18, 6:43 PM ET
LOS ANGELES - Joe Barbera, half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team that produced such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and the Flintstones, died Monday, a Warner Bros. spokesman said. He was 95.

Barbera died of natural causes at his home with his wife Sheila at his side, Warner Bros. spokesman Gary Miereanu said.

With his longtime partner, Bill Hanna, Barbera first found success creating the highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons. The antics of the battling cat and mouse went on to win seven Academy Awards, more than any other series with the same characters.

The partners, who teamed up while working at MGM in the 1930s, then went on to a whole new realm of success in the 1960s with a witty series of animated TV comedies, including "The Flintstones," "The Jetsons," "Yogi Bear," "Scooby-Doo" and "Huckleberry Hound and Friends."

Their strengths melded perfectly, critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his book "Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons." Barbera brought the comic gags and skilled drawing, while Hanna brought warmth and a keen sense of timing.

"This writing-directing team may hold a record for producing consistently superior cartoons using the same characters year after year — without a break or change in routine," Maltin wrote.

"From the Stone Age to the Space Age and from primetime to Saturday mornings, syndication and cable, the characters he created with his late partner, William Hanna, are not only animated superstars, but also a very beloved part of American pop culture. While he will be missed by his family and friends, Joe will live on through his work," Warner Bros. Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer said Monday.

Hanna, who died in 2001, once said he was never a good artist but his partner could "capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I've ever known."

The two first teamed cat and mouse in the short "Puss Gets the Boot." It earned an Academy Award nomination, and MGM let the pair keep experimenting until the full-fledged Tom and Jerry characters eventually were born.

Jerry was borrowed for the mostly live-action musical "Anchors Aweigh," dancing with Gene Kelly in a scene that become a screen classic.

After MGM folded its animation department in the mid-1950s, Hanna and Barbera were forced to go into business for themselves. With television's sharply lower budgets, their new cartoons put more stress on verbal wit rather than the detailed — and expensive — action featured in theatrical cartoon.

Like "The Simpsons" three decades later, "The Flintstones" found success in prime-time TV by not limiting its reach to children. The program, a parody of "The Honeymooners," was among the 20 most popular shows on television during the 1960-61 season, and Fred's shout of "yabba dabba doo!" entered the language.

The Jetsons, which debuted in 1962, were the futuristic mirror image of the Flintstones.

"It was a family comedy with everyday situations and problems that we window-dressed with gimmicks and inventions," Barbera once said. "Our stories were such a contrast to many of the animated series that are straight destruction and blasting away for a solid half-hour."

The show ran just one season on network TV but was often rerun, and the characters were revived in the 1980s in a syndicated show. Barbera said he liked the freedom syndication gave the producers, with none of the meddling from network executives.

"Today, Charlie Chaplin couldn't get his material by a network," he once said.

Even so, the influence of Hanna-Barbera was felt for decades. In 2002 and again in 2004, characters from the cartoon series "Scooby-Doo" were brought to the big screen in films that combined live actors and animation.

Hanna-Barbera, meanwhile, received eight Emmys, including the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1988.

"Joe Barbara was a passionate storyteller and a creative genius who, along with his late partner Bill Hanna, helped pioneer the world of animation," said friend, colleague and Warner animation President Sander Schwartz. "Joe's contributions to both the animation and television industries are without parallel — he has been personally responsible for entertaining countless millions of viewers across the globe."

Neither Hanna, born in 1910, nor Barbera, born in 1911, set out to be cartoonists. Barbera, who grew up in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, originally went into banking. Soon, however, he turned his doodles into magazine cartoons and then into a job as an animator.

Hanna, who had studied engineering and journalism, originally went into animation because he needed a job.

Although not the hit factory it was in the '50s and '60s, the Hanna-Barbera studio remained active through the years. It eventually became a subsidiary of Great American Communications Co., and in 1991 it was purchased by a partnership including Turner Broadcasting System, which used the studio's library when it launched cable TV's Cartoon Network in 1992. Turner is now part of Time Warner.

Funeral arrangements were pending, Miereanu said. In addition to his wife, the animator is survived by three children from a previous marriage, Jayne, Neal and Lynn.

Associated Press Writer Polly Anderson in New York contributed to this report.

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I Watch Stuff! got there first with the 'exit, stage left' headline, so I figure I'll just play it straight. Check out Cartoon Brew for a nifty caricature and cool Joe stories from co-workers and friends!

I never got to meet either of them or visit the studio, even though their work was a huge influence on me. I was crushed when the company left the old building near Universal Studios, and the characters were absorbed into the Cartoon Network roster. I just hated the idea that the studio didn't exist any more, and (as more and different logos got tacked onto them) that there might come a time where most people wouldn't know where their cartoons came from.