HANNA, WILLIAM (DENBY); AND BARBERA, JOSEPH (ROLAND)

born July 14, 1910, Melrose, N.M., U.S. born 1911, New York City U.S. motion-picture animators and partners in Hanna-Barbera Productions, founded in 1957. The two collaborated for nearly a half century. William Hanna joined a California engineering firm after studying engineering and journalism. He switched careers to cartooning in 1930 and in 1937 joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) as a director and story man in the animation department. Joseph Barbera was working as a bank accountant with the Irving Trust Company in New York City when he started submitting cartoons to magazines: he sold his first one to Collier's magazine and decided to forsake banking for cartooning. He joined MGM as a sketch artist in the same year as Hanna. At MGM Hanna and Barbera created the Tom and Jerry characters and produced more than 200 films in the series between 1940 and 1957. They won seven Oscars from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their cartoons between 1943 and 1952. After 1957, when they formed their own company, they made a prodigious number of cartoon series for television using a computerized catalogue of character movements. The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, and Huckleberry Hound were among the most popular Hanna-Barbera productions.