Posted 8:59 PM by Gene

News hacks have trouble running obits with partnerships. Either when the first partner dies they ignore the second, or if the first one died a long time ago, the second one gets all the credit. The former happened years ago with Fritz Loewe; the latter seems to have happened with Joseph Barbera. We're not sure either he or William Hanna deserves that much applause. The two produced MGM's Tom and Jerry cartoons, at their worst miniatures of sadism; when the studio abandoned cartoons they embraced television, with notorious results: cartoons as marketing machines for vastly overpriced boxes of sugared cereals (BROUGHT to YOU byyyyyyyyy KELLOGG'S!!), the raging copying (The Honeymooners as The Flintstones and The Flintstones as The Jetsons being only the most preposterous examples), the hyperactive backgrounds and non-existent "humor". Animating for their accountants they did hack work even with "special" projects (an Alice in Wonderland show with songs by Strouse and Adams, for one -- not to mention eight feature movies); they further pioneered in bringing the comic-book mentality to the tube with Jonny Quest, which resounds to this day in the dread humorlessness of superheroes in all media. And for all their frenetic production one can question whether Hanna and Barbera were good businessmen: forty years ago they had their own studio (they sold it in '66 to the forgotten Taft Broadcasting), and now it's just celluloid scraps within the TWXSTERS' vaults, and they've faded except for a misplaced nostalgia, and a guilt feeling.