Joseph Roland Barbera ( bar-BAIR-ə; Italian: [barˈbɛːra]; March 24, 1911 – December 18, 2006) was an American animator and cartoonist. He co-founded the animation studio Hanna-Barbera alongside William Hanna.
Born to Italian immigrants in New York City, Barbera hesitantly joined Van Beuren Studios in 1932 and subsequently Terrytoons in 1936. 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. In 1991, the studio was sold to Turner Broadcasting System, which merged with Time Warner, owners of Warner Bros., in 1996; Hanna and Barbera stayed on as advisors.
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.
Lured by a substantial salary increase, Barbera left Terrytoons and New York for the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in California in 1937. He found that Los Angeles suffered just as much from the Great Depression as Brooklyn and almost returned to Brooklyn.
Barbera's desk was opposite that of William Hanna. The two quickly realized they would make a good team. By 1939, they had solidified a partnership that would last over 60 years. Barbera and Hanna worked alongside animator Tex Avery, who had created Daffy Duck and co-created Bugs Bunny for Warner Bros. and directed Droopy cartoons at MGM.
In 1940, Hanna and Barbera jointly directed Puss Gets the Boot, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best (Cartoon) Short Subject. The studio wanted a diversified cartoon portfolio, so despite the success of Puss Gets the Boot, Barbera and Hanna's supervisor, Fred Quimby, did not want to produce more cat and mouse cartoons, believing that those were already enough. Surprised by the success of Puss Gets the Boot, Barbera and Hanna ignored Quimby's resistance and continued developing the cat-and-mouse theme.
By this time, Hanna wanted to return to working for Rudolf Ising, to whom he felt very loyal. Barbera and Hanna met with Quimby, who discovered that although Ising had taken sole credit for producing Puss Gets the Boot, he never worked on it. Quimby, who wanted to start a new animation unit independent from Ising, then permitted Hanna and Barbera to pursue their cat-and-mouse idea. The result was their most famous creation, Tom and Jerry.
Modeled after the Puss Gets the Boot characters with slight differences, the series followed Jerry, the pesky rodent who continuously outwitted his feline foe, Tom. Hanna said they settled on this cartoon's cat and mouse theme because "we knew we needed two characters. We thought we needed conflict, chase, and action. And a cat after a mouse seemed like a good, basic thought." The revamped characters first appeared in 1941's The Midnight Snack. Over the next 17 years, Barbera and Hanna worked exclusively on Tom and Jerry, directing more than 114 popular cartoon shorts. During World War II, they also made animated training films.
Tom and Jerry relied mostly on motion instead of dialog. Despite its popularity, Tom and Jerry has often been criticized as excessively violent. The series won its first Academy Award for the 11th short, The Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943)—a war-time adventure. Tom and Jerry was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning seven, more than any other animated series featuring the same characters. Tom and Jerry also made guest appearances in several of MGM's live-action films, including Anchors Aweigh (1945) and, Invitation to the Dance (1956) with Gene Kelly, and Dangerous When Wet (1953) with Esther Williams.