Before the rise of basic cable, Saturday mornings for many children in America were spent watching cartoons on one of three available television channels. From 1958 through the 1980s, a majority of those cartoons bore the Hanna-Barbera imprint. Creating scores of popular series such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Scooby-Doo, Super Friends, and The Smurfs, Hanna-Barbera was an animation powerhouse.
Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning is the first museum exhibition on the world’s most successful animation partnership. It opens tomorrow at the Norman Rockwell Museum and runs through May 29th.
The exhibit provides a glimpse of the extraordinary story of how two astute businessmen reacted to a dying film animation industry and revolutionized a new format for their product, while hiring the best talent in the business, and explores how their product transformed over the years and adapted through government restrictions, corporate changes, and changing viewing habits.
To talk about the exhibit we welcome - Jesse Kowalski - Curator of Exhibitions at the Norman Rockwelll Museum. We also welcome Tony Benedict started in the animation industry as an in-betweener on Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in 1956. Benedict began at Hanna-Barbera as a writer on the Yakky Doodle segment of The Yogi Bear Show in 1961, and quickly moved on to write for several series, including The Magilla Gorilla Show, The Peter Potamus Show, The Flintstones, Top Cat, Ricochet Rabbit, and The Jetsons, for which he wrote the script which introduced the family’s pet dog, Astro.
