From the LA Times’ Charles Solomon :
Joseph Barbera, who, with his longtime partner William “Bill” Hanna, created such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Jonny Quest, died of natural causes Monday at his Studio City home. He was 95.
During the 1940s, Barbera and Hanna were MGM’s blue-ribbon cartoon directors, winning seven Oscars for the “Tom and Jerry” shorts. After MGM closed its animation unit in 1957, they moved to television, where they created a series of hits in the 1960s, beginning with “The Flintstones,” the first animated series in prime time.
By the 1970s, Hanna-Barbera was the dominant studio in Saturday morning cartoons, making shows for the three major networks and accounting for as much as 70% of the so-called kid-vid programming in some seasons.
“The Huckleberry Hound Show,” their first half-hour program, premiered in syndication in 1958, starring a laconic blue dog who spoke in a Southern drawl. Huckleberry was quickly upstaged by “Yogi Bear,” which scored an even bigger hit when it debuted in 1961.
Yogi, who frequently proclaimed he was “smarter than the average bear,” used his devious intelligence to swipe food from campers’ “pic-a-nic baskets” in Jellystone National Park.
Sadly, Barbera had to live long enough to serve as executive producer of a film starring Stephen Baldwin as Barney Rubble.
My one major impression from meeting with Mr. Barbera around 1988 was that he had no idea of the cultural significance of his shows and viewed the entire affair as a sort of… comedy visualizer reaching an audience looking for humor. “Yeah we tried that show and the kids loved it.” I rephrased questions about Scooby Doo and the Flintstones Kids both reflecting baby boomer values (as young adults in 1969 and as the babyfied child totems of boomers in the early 80s) to no avail. Filmation had a known (and admitted) conservative bent (moralizing on Lassies Rescue Rangers or Masters of the Universe for instance), but Joe Barbera seemed honestly unaware of the cultural significance of, let’s say, Wait Til Your Father Gets Home or Roman Holidays as anything more than “Back then everyone wanted the next All in the Family, so we gave them a cartoon version for the kids.”