THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406080412
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
DATELINE: 940612 LENGTH: Medium
Television.
{REST} The budgetary powers at beleaguered MGM noted astutely that re-releasing an old theatrical Tom and Jerry would bring in 90 percent of the income generated by a new one. And making new ones cost money, but re-releasing old ones did not.
A single brusque phone call effectively closed the cartoon studio and laid off the entire staff.
Observes Barbera in his nose-thumbing, score-settling new autobiography: ``With that phone call, conveyed to us second hand, a whole career disappeared.''
My Life in 'toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century (Turner Publishing, 250 pp., $19.95) is the scrappy testimony of an elastic man. Barbera, then 46, and his tenacious partner bounced back from sudden oblivion - just like their ever-battered but ineradicable characters - to create a video empire overnight.
By 1960 Hanna-Barbera had produced for network TV ``The Ruff and Reddy Show,'' ``Huckleberry Hound,'' ``Pixie and Dixie,'' ``Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy,'' ``Quick Draw McGraw,'' ``Snooper and Blabber,'' ``Yakky Doodle,'' ``Hokey Wolf,'' ``Snagglepuss'' and - last, but by no means least - ``Yogi Bear.''
Smarter than the average unemployed cartoonists.
They did it with a ``limited'' shorthand animation technique that used 3,000 drawings for a five-minute TV cartoon, about one-tenth the standard number for the motion picture product. It worked on the smaller screen. They also subordinated chase to story and added dialogue, which enabled voice masters like Daws Butler, Don Messick and Mel Blanc to carry characters instead of the art.
There are those who will point out that that's what Warner Bros.' Bugs Bunny was already all about, and that Jay Ward of ``Crusader Rabbit'' and ``Rocky and Bullwinkle'' fame was considerably more hip with his arch asides-to-the-adults stable. But nobody worked harder than Barbera. He was, and remains, a hustler.
``With all those shows going,'' he writes, ``I found myself betting my future, my business, and the welfare of my wife and family on a family of Neanderthals in a neolithic suburb called Bedrock.''
``The Flintstones,'' which borrowed heavily from live-action TV's ``Life of Riley'' and ``The Honeymooners,'' became the first prime-time cartoon sitcom, precursor to ``The Simpsons'' and ``Beavis and Butt-head.'' Brought to you by R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco giant, and Miles Laboratories, makers of Flintstones Chewable Vitamins for children. It was prehistoric, all right.
Yabba-dabba-doo.
Now it is a megabucks feature from Steven Spielberg.
``You're never done working,'' says Barbera, now 83 and still at it. ``No sooner do you sell a project than you've got to do everything needed to deliver it while simultaneously getting to work on inventing a new product.''
My Life is, in fact, a book about selling. You want it to be about wild and crazy guys having a ball creating gags for a living. Well, forget the warm-and-fuzzies; Hanna-Barbera, just like MGM, is a business.
After more than half a century of partnership, the two bosses of ``the General Motors of animation'' aren't even pals.
``The fact is,'' confesses Barbera, ``we hardly ever talk to one another. Indeed, over the past 30 years, we have hardly ever gotten together socially. We have almost nothing in common.''
Some of the most interesting scenes in Barbera's account are endless encounters with sundry unsympathetic bigwigs and boards of directors who scratch and belch through the animator's program proposals with the overt impatience of street kids in Algebra I.
Barbera admits that as his relations with sponsors grew closer, those with his first wife and kids got farther apart.
``We have all gone on to live our own lives,'' he reports, ``yet we have tried to remain as much of a family as possible.''
Barbera is particularly proud of the fact that the breakfast food folks from Battle Creek once ran a door-to-door survey in which they showed families and children a picture of Yogi and Boo Boo and asked, ``What does this make you think of?''
Overwhelmingly, the response was: ``Kellogg's Corn Flakes.``
by CNB