SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BEAR

On the 69^th Birthday of Hanna Barbera, we raise our cap to the cartoonists who put strong characters ahead of snazzy graphics to animate ten billion tea-times…

Some struggles are more creative than others 

For example, I have continually exhorted my eldest offspring to soar the emotional heights in her songwriting, to dig deep into her feelings and experiences, to crystallize a thought, observation or episode that surfaces the universal in the unique…  

But for several years now I have also been suggesting that she discovers, and then covers, a children’s TV theme tune or two from a far-distant era (to a Millennial) which has lain dormant, but never forgotten, in the minds of millions…

Let’s face it, you only have to mention the name ‘Bagpuss’ to instantly turn back the years for Gen X Brits.

So you can just imagine the kind of global impact that must have generated by the two cartoonists who set up shop in 1416 North La Brea Avenue,* 69 years ago this week.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

Joseph Barbera, the son of first generation Sicilian immigrants, was born in 1911 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

William Hanna was born in 1910 in Melrose, New Mexico, when New Mexico was so new it wasn’t even a state yet.** 

The Two Mouseketeers

WWII was not the only global conflict which kicked off in 1939. Faced with an existential threat from Disney’s army of animators and Warner Brothers’ emerging Wabbit-led menagerie, MGM Studios tasked Hanna and Barbera with upgrading its stable of cartoon characters.  Their first offensive was far from promising. When the rivalry between a dog and fox failed to win studio hearts, they changed the combatants to, you guessed it, a cat and mouse. Jasper And Jinx burst forth onto a waiting world the following year in Puss Gets The Boot. The In House reaction was lukewarm, but an Oscar nomination soon turned that around.  It also saw the cartoon’s producer, Rudolf Ising, being replaced by MGM’s head of animation, Fred Quimby, even though he wasn’t a fan of the cartoon.  That would also soon change.  Jasper and Jinx, re-christened Tom and Jerry, would receive  a further 12 Academy Award nominations and snag 7 Oscars -and all the gongs went to Quimby not Hanna and Barbera.

It was the screens that got smaller

While most of us Boomers (and beyond) only ever saw Tom And Jerry on the TV, they had been filmed, at great expense, for theatrical release.  Which is kind of ironic given that it was partly TV’s decimation of cinema audiences that forced MGM to shut down its animation studio in 1957.

...And the budgets shrank with them

With the MGM closure, Hanna and Barbara were left to their own resources, which were nowhere nearly sufficient to compete with the major production houses.  At least on paper. But what they lacked in funding, they more than made up for in their understanding of their craft.  And what their cartoons lacked in fine detail, they more than made up for in and the quality of the comedy writing and characterisation - voice, visual and personality.   In little more than a decade, this no-frills approach would provide the mainstay of UK tea-time TV for generations…

1958  - Yogi Bear                                                                                                                                       1960  - The Flintstones                                                                                                                            1961  -  Top Cat.                                                                                                                                    1962  -  The Jetsons.                                                                                                                                 1965  -  Atom Ant and Secret Squirrel                                                                                                  1968  -  Wacky Races                                                                                                                               1969  -  Scooby Doo

And maybe if Disney had followed their lead, they might not have needed to purchase Pixar off Steve Jobs after an extended drought of animation success?

In The Business of Pleasure, necessity is frequently the mother of invention, just as unlimited budgets can sometimes endanger the very greatest of stories from Cleopatra to Catch-22, Pearl Harbour to Heaven’s Gate and Apocalypse Now -and even The Greatest Story Ever Told. 

The introduction to a highly influential 2022 paper*** goes further by suggesting that it is the very language itself that constrains our view of constraints:

‘Constraints have an overwhelmingly negative connotation, evoking a lack of volition and perhaps even the absence of fun. They may conjure up dictatorships, censorship, confinement, and barriers to overcome, rather than challenges to welcome and embrace. The very word constraint, from the Latin for binding - tying together, and therefore confining – suggests a forceful and confining nature, as does limitation, which sometimes refers to an enclosure with boundaries of some kind. Creativity, on the other hand, often conjures up metaphors of blue-sky, open-field, outside-the-box, unbounded possibilities. It is not surprising, therefore, that the role of constraints in creativity has been deemed paradoxical -the very constraints that would seem to impede creativity actually often facilitate it.’

Which I’d kind of figured out already.  Partly due to my 50 year involvement in The Business of Pleasure, and partly because, well… I’m smarter than the average bear, Boo-Boo!

DT 10 July, 2026

*Kling Studios, 1416 North La Brea Avenue, Hollywood, was the former Charlie Chaplin Studios, built by Chaplin in 1917. After Hanna and Barbera, Muppet Maestro Jim Henson would move in.

**New Mexico became the 47th US state in 1912

***How Constraints Impact Creativity: An Interaction Paradigm Catrinel Tromp and Robert J Sternberg. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, And the Arts, American Psychological Association, 2022