Joseph Barbera

In 1937, he moved to California, and while working at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Barbera met Hanna. The two men began a collaboration that was at first best known for producing Tom and Jerry. In 1957, after MGM dissolved its animation department, they co-founded Hanna-Barbera, which became the most successful television animation studio in the business, producing programs such as The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, Top Cat, The Smurfs, Huckleberry Hound, and The Jetsons. In 1967, Hanna-Barbera was sold to Taft Broadcasting for $12 million, but Hanna and Barbera remained heads of the company. Hanna and Barbera directed seven Academy Award-winning films and won eight Emmy Awards. Their cartoon shows have become cultural icons, and their cartoon characters have appeared in other media, such as films, books, and toys. Hanna-Barbera's shows had a worldwide audience of over 300 million people in the 1960s and have been translated into more than 28 languages.

Joseph Roland Barbera was born at 10 Delancey Street in the Little Italy, Lower East Side section of Manhattan, New York, to Italian Sicilian immigrants Vincenzo Barbera (1884–1969), born in Castelvetrano and Francesca Calvacca (1892–1974), born in Sciacca. Joseph Barbera's grandmother, also named Francesca, was born in Sciacca as well, as stated in his autobiography, My life in 'toons, in which he also described himself as Sicilian. He grew up speaking Italian, he had two brothers, Larry (1909–1982) and Ted (1919–1994), both of whom served in World War II. As a member of the United States Army, Larry participated in the invasion of Sicily. Ted was a fighter pilot with the United States Army Air Forces and served in the Aleutian Islands Campaign. Barbera's father, Vincent, was the prosperous owner of three barbershops who squandered the family fortunes on gambling. By the time Barbera was 15, his father had abandoned the family, and his maternal uncle Jim had become a father figure to him. Barbera displayed a talent for drawing as early as the first grade. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1928. While in high school, Barbera won several boxing titles. He was briefly managed by World Lightweight Boxing Champion Al Singer's manager but soon lost interest in boxing. In 1935, Barbera married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Earl. In school, they had been known as "Romeo and Juliet". Barbera and his wife briefly separated when he went to California. They reunited but were on the verge of another separation when they discovered that Dorothy was pregnant with their first child. They had four children: two sons, Neal and an infant boy who died two days after his birth, and two daughters, Lynn and Jayne, who has been a producer in her own right. The marriage officially ended in 1963. Shortly after his divorce, Barbera met his second wife, Sheila Holden, sister of British rock and roll singer Vince Taylor, at Musso & Frank's restaurant, where she worked as bookkeeper and cashier. Unlike Dorothy, who preferred to stay at home with the children, Sheila enjoyed the Hollywood social scene that Barbera often frequented.

During high school, Barbera worked as a tailor's delivery boy. In 1929, he became interested in animation after watching a screening of Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance. During the Great Depression, he tried unsuccessfully to become a cartoonist for The NY Hits Magazine. He supported himself with a job at a bank and continued to pursue publication for his cartoons. His magazine drawings of single cartoons, not comic strips, began to be published in Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post, and Collier's—the magazine with which he had the most success. Barbera also wrote to Walt Disney for advice on getting started in the animation industry. Disney wrote back, saying he would call Barbera during an upcoming trip to New York, but the call never occurred. Barbera took art classes at the Art Students League of New York and the Pratt Institute and was hired to work in the ink and paint department of Fleischer Studios. In 1932, he joined the Van Beuren Studios as an animator and storyboard artist. He worked on cartoon series such as Cubby Bear and Rainbow Parades and an earlier Tom and Jerry. This Tom and Jerry series starred two humans; it was unrelated to Barbera's later cat-and-mouse series, although both of these cartoons adopted the name coined in Life in London, a 1821 British novel written by Pierce Egan. When Van Beuren closed in 1936, Barbera moved to Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio. In 1935, Barbera created his first solo-effort storyboard, a prospective eleventh film featuring Kiko the Kangaroo. The storyline was of Kiko in an airplane race with another character called Dirty Dog. Terry declined to produce the story. In his autobiography, Barbera said of his efforts: "I was, quite honestly, not in the least disappointed. I had proven to myself that I could do a storyboard, and that I had gained the experience of presenting it. For now, that was enough." The original storyboard, passed down through the Barbera family, went on sale at auction in November 2013.

In 1957, Barbera reteamed with his former partner Hanna to produce cartoon films for television and theatrical release. The two brought their different skills to the company as they had at MGM. Barbera was a skilled gag writer and sketch artist, while Hanna had a gift for timing, story construction, and recruiting top artists. Major business decisions would be made together, though each year, the title of president alternated between them. A coin toss gave Hanna precedence in the naming of the new company first called H-B Enterprises but soon changed to Hanna-Barbera Productions. Barbera and Hanna's MGM colleague George Sidney, the director of Anchors Aweigh, became the third partner and business manager in the company and arranged a deal for distribution and working capital with Screen Gems, the television division of Columbia Pictures, who took part ownership of the new studio. The first offering from the new company was The Ruff & Reddy Show, a series which detailed the friendship between a dog and a cat. Despite a lukewarm response for their first theatrical venture, Loopy De Loop, Hanna-Barbera soon established themselves with two successful television series: The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Yogi Bear Show. A 1960 survey showed that half of the viewers of Huckleberry Hound were adults. This prompted the company to create a new animated series, The Flintstones. A parody of The Honeymooners, the new show followed a typical Stone Age family with home appliances, talking animals, and celebrity guests. With an audience of both children and adults, The Flintstones became the first animated prime-time show to be a hit. Fred Flintstone's signature exclamation, "yabba dabba doo", soon entered everyday usage, and the show boosted the studio to the top of the TV cartoon field. The company later produced a futuristic version of The Flintstones, known as The Jetsons. Although both shows reappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, The Flintstones was far more popular. By the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera Productions was the business's most successful television animation studio. The Hanna-Barbera studio produced over 3,000 animated half-hour television shows. Among the more than 100 cartoon series they produced were The Quick Draw McGraw Show, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, The Magilla Gorilla Show, The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show, Scooby-Doo, Super Friends, and The Smurfs. The company also produced animated specials based on Alice in Wonderland, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cyrano de Bergerac, and feature-length films Charlotte's Web and Heidi's Song. As popular as their cartoons were with 1960s audiences, they were disliked by artists. Television programs had lower budgets than theatrical animation, and this economic reality caused many animation studios to go out of business in the 1950s and 1960s, putting many people in the industry out of work. Hanna-Barbera was key in developing of an animation technique known as limited animation, which allowed television animation to be more cost-effective but often reduced quality. Hanna and Barbera had first experimented with these techniques in the early days of Tom and Jerry. To reduce the cost of each episode, shows often focused more on character dialogue than detailed animation. The number of drawings for a seven-minute cartoon decreased from 14,000 to nearly 2,000, and the company implemented innovative techniques such as rapid background changes to improve viewing. Critics criticized the change from detailed animation to repetitive movements by two-dimensional characters. Barbera once said that they chose to adapt to the television budgets or change careers. The new style did not limit the success of their animated shows, enabling Hanna-Barbera to stay in business, providing employment to many who would otherwise have been out of work. Limited animation paved the way for future animated series such as The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, and South Park. In December 1966, Hanna-Barbera Productions was sold to Taft Broadcasting, renamed Great American Communications in 1987, for $12 million. Barbera and Hanna remained at the head of the company until 1991. The company was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System for an estimated $320 million. Turner began using Hanna-Barbera's television catalog as material for its new Cartoon Network cable channel in 1992, and by the mid-1990s, Hanna-Barbera was producing several original series for Cartoon Network, among them Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. In 1996, Turner merged with Time Warner, owners of Warner Bros., who would eventually absorb Hanna-Barbera into Warner Bros. Animation. Barbera and Hanna continued to advise their former company. They periodically worked on new Hanna-Barbera shows, including shorts for the series The Cartoon Cartoon Show and feature film versions of The Flintstones (1994) and Scooby-Doo (2002). In a new Tom and Jerry cartoon produced in 2000, The Mansion Cat, Barbera voiced the house owner. Ten days before Hanna's death from throat cancer in March 2001, Hanna-Barbera was absorbed into Warner Bros. Animation, with the unit dedicated to the Cartoon Network original series spun off into Cartoon Network Studios. Barbera remained active as an executive producer for Warner Bros. on direct-to-video cartoon features and television series such as What's New, Scooby-Doo? and Tom and Jerry Tales. He also wrote, co-storyboarded, co-directed, and co-produced The Karate Guard (2005), the return of Tom and Jerry to the big screen. His final animated project was the direct-to-video feature Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale (2007).

On December 18, 2006, Barbera died of natural causes at his home in Studio City, Los Angeles, California aged 95, ending a seventy-year career in animation. His wife Sheila was at his side at the end; he was also survived by three children from his first marriage: Jayne (who worked for Hanna-Barbera), Lynn, and Neal. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.