Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna Barbera.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah, Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who have shared in their entertainment tradition.

And now your host, Greg Airbar.

Thank you, Chris Anthony.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.

I'm Greg Airbar, author of Hanna Barbera, The Recorded History from Modern Stone Age to Meddling Kids, on sale now.

Please get a copy and I think you'll like it a lot.

But most importantly, we are here with the person whom Animation magazine has named one of the 100 most important people in animation.

And he's also worked for almost every major studio, independent studios.

He is extremely much an advocate for the animator, which makes him a great guest for this show because we talk so much about the people of these studios.

So without any further ado, I want to welcome Mr.

Tom Cito.

Hi, how you doing, Greg?

And Tom, first of all, tell us specifically what your position is at USC.

So I'm a professor of animation and animation history at the University of Southern California.

And at USC and the Center of Cinematic Studies where you teach, I want point out because I put a picture of this in the book, there is a huge wall filled with various donors to the building of this edifice, which I believe George Lucas helped design.

And one of those contributors on a great big old plaque is Hanna Barbera production.

So there's still a presence there.

But welcome to our program.

And just like to start with, as we often start, did you always want to draw pictures?

And I know you're a Brooklyn kid just like Joe Barbera.

How do you go from that to what you do?

Yeah.

Yeah, I was born and raised in Brooklyn as the son of a fireman, and I like drawing pictures When I was a kid and for any kind of like Boomer, being raised in the 50's, the family always had the Sunday newspapers with the Sunday funnies.

So I would look at the Sunday funnies and I'd try and copy them and, you know, I thought that'd be great.

And then when I got to school, I found out that the class artist doesn't get beat up as much.

It sounds good to draw as I started drawing.

And then I was lucky enough to get into a vocational school that specified the arts called the High School of Art and Design.

It's the same school that Ralph Bakshi and Keith Haring and a number of other well known people and, you know, went to in Manhattan and that kind of broad my horizons.

And one of the instructors there showed me how to make my cartoons move.

And I said, wow, this is great.

This is a lot of fun.

And then I found out you can make a living doing this.

There was a group called the SEFO, which is the International Animation Society.

It got started in the 60s and they would have a meeting once a month and everybody would get together, like all the New York artists would all get together and go.

You got a job?

No.

You working?

No.

And then we moved to California.

The business and animation is very, very different in New York.

And also the voice actors, some of the greats.

There are not as much household names as they are in Los Angeles, and there are some great people out there and great animators.

Oh yeah, that's true.

There's some excellent people.

And there was people that moved back and forth, like the great Disney animated Bill Tyler, who did the Devil on Ball Mountain and all in Grumpy and Snow White.

At a certain point he relocated back east, I think after World War 2 and was working for Paul Terry and for Paramount.

But then also he came out, I think at the very end of his life in the 1960s, he was doing some work in Hanna Barbera.

I had a colleague at Filmation who when he was young was a runner, used to drive tight luck from home to the studio at H and BI.

Don't remember exactly what shows that he worked on, but he was sort of in ill health, like he had had a stroke or two and all.

He'd be a little out of it, but just the fact that he was still working there was just fantastic.

Hanna Barbera in the 70s especially became sort of a lifeboat for a lot of golden age generation animators.

Bill and Joe were very loyal to the people that, you know, had built the industry and would give work to some artists that were like down on their luck or frail or something.

There was an animator named Hicks Loki, and Hicks was a lead animator on Fantasia, on Dance of the Hours, you know, like the alligator and the hippo dancing together and all.

Hicks did a lot of beautiful sequences on that.

But he had retired by the 70s.

But then I guess like a member of his family, I think his granddaughter or something was born with an eye problem and needed like serious surgery, serious medical attention.

And also Hicks came out of retirement and Bill and Joe gave him work.

He would work out of his house and all.

And I remember like, I'd accompany this other assistant and we would drive out to Hicks's house and this ancient little man, he looked like a little apple doll or something.

You know, he would walk out, you know, with his hands full of, of animation scenes.

And he's like, I got this thing here.

It's Godzilla versus the smug monster or kelp monster or something, I don't know.

Oh yeah, the Godzilla of our power with the fabled Jana of the Jungle.

Yeah, yeah.

The voice of Godzilla was Ted Cassidy was like Lurch from The Addams Family.

I met him once in the parking lot of H&B.

And it's funny, you know, because like, I'm 6 foot even and I was talking with a friend who was 6 two and when Ted walked past us, we were all looking up at him like, wow, that's a really big guy, you know, but very sweet man.

He was very nice personality.

Yeah, what a voice.

Frankenstein Junior.

And on the Huckleberry Finn show, he was.

Oh, and he was The Giant and Jack and the Beanstalk.

He was.

And he could do comedy, too.

He wasn't always a villain he could become.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, Although like in Godzilla, he mostly roared.

A lot of fans would love to see that again, but like some of these series because there are other entities involved.

It's complicated.

It's not impossible, but it's complicated.

Which leads me to 1 film that you worked on, which in many ways was a Seminole film and yet never released on DVD, never on Blu-ray, which it would be so great to see on Blu-ray.

A lot of great veteran animators and then some brand new animators worked on it.

Also very young Jerry Beck, and that would be Raggedy Ann and Andy.

A musical adventure.

Oh yeah, yes.

A strange movie because it was almost an indie underground film and at the same time a great big expensive musical with merchandise and all of that.

Yeah, it kind of was like a forerunner of the big animated musicals of the 1990's.

The music was written by Joe Raposo, you know, he wrote.

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

It's not easy being green and all.

It had backing from IT and T and all.

And what's fascinating was you really saw on that film a changing of generations because there was a big generational gap that occurred in the late 50s and 60s, not only in animation but in live action as well.

Because Steven Spielberg talked about his first job directing episodes of Night Gallery.

He says everybody on my crew is in their 60s, you know, and he's like 26 or whatever, you know?

And it was the same thing on Raggedy.

And it's like all the assistants and Inbetweeners were in their like, teens and 20s, and all the animators were in their 60s and there was nobody in the middle.

That's because if you were trying to get into the entertainment or film in the early 60s, people would tell you don't bother, it's dying, everything's dying, forget it, you know, waste of time.

I wonder how many genres and platforms have been declared dead that are still with us.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's kind of going on right now at AI and everything.

Everybody's saying, oh, the whole film business is going to collapse, everything's going to die.

You know, I have a book in my collection written by Hollywood Agent called The Decline and Fall of Hollywood and How It Collapsed.

And it's written in 1964.

We're all still here.

Yeah.

My thing I would say is of stop motion, because after Jurassic Park in 1994, everybody thought that's the end of stop motion.

Everything is going to be digital from now on.

Even Ray Harryhausen was kind of depressed.

He was like, I don't know if there's any future, but nowadays there's more stop motion being done than in 1950.

It's amazing.

And the like us always doing stuff.

Like US stuff, they had a display a few years back and those sets, our works of art loaded with detail.

It was like fine museum pieces.

But it doesn't necessarily matter what the medium is.

What matters is how how it touches you and how it just captures an audience.

That's true.

That's true, yeah.

And just to get back into H and BA little bit, since we're talking about these classic films, what was wonderful about working at H&B?

Started there like around 1978.

And I also worked a bit in the 80s.

Well, first of all, it was huge.

You know, it was like 3000 employees or whatever.

It was very large.

And just walking down the hallway was like animation history.

I'd look at 1 cubicle and that is Dave Tendler, an animator who worked for Max Fleischer.

He did Betty Boobs and Popeyes, you know.

And then there was Cosmo Ancelotti who was assistant director to Ralph Bakshi on Fritz the Cat.

And then there's Nick Nichols, who's a Disney animator, director of shorts, just all these people.

And of course, The MGM people like Mike Law, you know, Ray Patterson, Ed Barge and all, they were all there.

Jack Ozark was another Fleischer animator.

You just met all these people walking around and they all had wonderful stories.

I remember up the block from Hanna Barbera, there was a little market called the Oak Crest Market.

You've been there for for many, many years.

And some of the elderly guys during the afternoon break, like around 2:00 or something, would stroll up to the market to get a pint of bourbon for their desk for the late afternoon shot or something.

And I remembered that Mister Barbera got in contact with the manager and told me, says don't charge them, just keep the tab, send it to me the end of the month and I'll pay it.

These guys were incredibly, you said loyal.

Yeah, you mentioned this a little while ago.

By the way, folks, if you friend Tom Seto and follow him because he beyond animation, has an extraordinary grasp of history and you get daily, sometimes more than daily pieces of entertainment and animation history, but also world history.

And it's told in such an easy to swallow away.

It's quite a delightful thing.

And you look forward to that.

One of them said that at one point, I think when you were there, Hanna Barbera, as far as artists had about 1400, not only the biggest company, but the biggest employer probably in history in the industry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're very large.

At their peak, around 1979, they were doing 12 series plus commercials, plus the feature.

I think they started a Heidi's song, Yes, like right around that time, the place was just bursting at the seams.

And they had satellite studios in Australia and in Spain, Taiwan and all these places.

You know, one of the thing about the the old folks we're talking about on Godzilla and everything as well as Superfriends, I got to assist this fellow named Ken Muse.

Oh, Kenny Muse was one of the Tom and Jerry animators going back to the 40s.

You know when you see Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry the Mouse and anchors away, a lot of that's Ken Muse.

He did a lot of that work on that stuff.

Brilliant animator, absolutely brilliant.

Long life and hard living, you know, like that.

At the end of his life, he was kind of frail.

He'd walk with two canes and kind of bent over.

I can sympathize.

I'm doing that right now.

And it's funny because he had done the scene of Superman talking while he's flying, and he had animated the hair going in the wrong direction.

Like the hair was going forward.

There's still Superman flying backwards instead of, you know, being blown by the wind.

So I brought it over to Kenny and to kind of show him.

I said, you know, this little correction needs to be here.

And Kenny was just just follow the roughs.

Just follow the roughs.

Like, okay, so I went over to my supervisor of cleanup.

He was a fellow named Jay Sawberry.

And I explained to him the problem.

And Jake took a pencil and started to reanimate it.

And I said, why doesn't Kenny retire?

He's obviously, like, struggling.

And Jay suddenly, like, stood up, like Thumper being upbraided by his mother, you know?

And Jay said, Mr.

Barbera says Kenny is one of the men who made this studio.

So as long as Kenny wants to work, Kenny can work.

And with ageism being an issue, that is an extraordinary thing.

Fritz Freling came back.

You know, they worked with him way back in the harmonizing days and Cats and Jammer Kids, which he couldn't stand working on.

Then when Warner folded, he came over and did some work on the 1st Yogi Bear feature and whatever people needed.

It's like, hey, come back, we got a lot of work to do.

We know you're good and IT.

Was a funny anecdote.

A friend told me that he ran into Tex Avery, you know, pulling in the parking lot because Tex was working there at the very end and he had worked with tech at the Patty Frailing and he saw Tex pulling into the parking lot.

And he said the text, what are you doing here?

You know, and H&B and text rolled the window down, said hey, don't you know if this roll, the elephants come to die?

One way to look at it, but it's also where the legends to keep working because Lord knows when you get up there, you got a lot of prescriptions to fill.

You got a lot of doctor visits and you really need to keep got to get part time jobs, got to get out their work.

And it doesn't end for a lot of people, obviously.

And you know, the great thing about it, the two, and the plus side is these guys had men and women.

Actually there's a lot of amazing women doing stuff there too, like Helen Comar and Mabel Gesner and things.

I learned a lot from them.

The amazing thing is when you look at, especially at the early 60s Hanna Barbera stuff, the people animating had done full animation.

They had done beautiful high quality animation.

So when they had to go to limited, they knew exactly where to shortcut so that you weren't conscious of that.

This is just a trick to save money.

They know exactly how to style the thing so that it seemed obvious.

And there's a lot of beautiful, you know, like working with those early designs, like Ed Benedict designs of Yogi Bear and Boo Boo and all this stuff.

They're just fun to draw.

You pick it up in like 15 minutes and you can animate it full, you can animate it limited, you can hold the drawing.

They always look good.

And that's not an accident.

There's a lot of experience and intelligence went into their design.

One of the things I notice about Tom and Jerry's and studying even more on Anna Barbara than I than I had all my life was when you look at those Tom and Jerry's, you see what Bill and Joe both.

Joe would board it and then Bill would had this timing and there are held cells there, especially with Tom.

So they knew sometimes less is more.

They knew how to really make it work.

Even when they had the luxury of big budgets and in prime time, those shows were still more expensive than live action shows.

So their first group of programs, you know, through like 66, I like to look at those as the TV equivalent of the, you know, the five gems of Disney, the Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

Because even though there was great stuff after and also low budget stuff, those really were the foundations of work and they are still Marvel still.

I mean, Johnny Quest occasionally race, did a move, a karate move and it was full.

You know.

Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

But you know, when people in live action speak to each other and Hanna Barbera stuff is verbal, they don't necessarily move their heads a whole lot either.

I mean, they don't necessarily just nod back and forth like Yogi might do.

But it's television.

And in television, that worked.

Yeah, yeah.

And they were designing for a small screen.

They weren't designing for a large screen.

And also the resolution on a lot of TV sets wasn't as good as it is now with digital and all.

So they took that into account.

In terms of the grayscale, they knew like the majority of TV's were still black and white, so they had to design for that.

Simply.

I just say one of my favorite examples I love to use is there was a Yogi Bear once where Yogi and Booboo were being chased by this dog.

And Don Messick did the voice.

And when the dog barked, he didn't bark.

He went Yelp, yo.

Yeah, the only thing.

So he's chasing them through a park and going, yo-yo, yo, like this.

And they run into a cave.

And when the dog follows them into The Cave, Yogi and Boo Boo have dressed up as Mary Poppins and and a baby in a perambulator.

So she's sitting there with her umbrella and the baby's there.

And the dog just kind of sticks his head in and goes, yo-yo, yo-yo.

And then they cut to a close up of Yogi and Yogi says, stoop that wreck it.

Don't you see there's a baby here?

And then it come back to the dog and it's just the eyes.

The dog looks up, the dog looks like the baby, and then the dog goes yo-yo yo.

So damn funny and it's so simple.

Yeah, there's a moment in Pebbles birth episode where Fred wraps up Dino in the blankets and thinks it's Wilma and takes Dino to the hospital and and when the policeman stops them, Dino is making all these adoring glances and fluttering his eyelashes.

And Dino, it was really the poses, it was the skill of these people that made it work.

Yeah, yeah, it's true.

They know exactly where to cut corners.

And it didn't look cheap.

It always looked good.

And they had to sustain it.

And so the later cartoons were different and they were seriously over budget when Taft came in.

And that's one of the reasons of the change.

They poured way too much money into their shows like Walt Disney did, and they had to change things.

But elements of what they did well still showed up in later cartoons.

And the great thing also too, I said with all these old professionals is that they were the masters of their craft.

They knew exactly what they were doing.

Oh, interesting thing too about working for them.

And that is Walt Disney had this whole thing from very early on where he insisted nobody call him Mr.

Disney, it has to be Walt.

So everybody's on a first name basis.

There's always Walt and Tom and Skip and whatever like that.

Hannah Barbera, unless you were part of Bill and Joe's MGM family, like unless you worked with them on Tom and Jerry's, when you address them, it was Mr.

Hannah and Mr.

Barbera.

And we were OK with that.

That's why.

You know that's what you do and.

You know, Hannah was always like, very, he was very methodical and everything.

Like Joe Barbera was kind of a jocular, you know, hey, how you doing?

Kind of like very good at meetings and things like that.

And Hannah was very precise.

He was always like, yes, no good.

Fixed that, changed that very fast.

And like you said, he didn't draw like the way Joe did, but he was very good at timing.

And The thing is working with television is that you had to time out these shows.

You couldn't write like 2 hours worth of script.

Somebody's got to shave it down to like it would actually fits into like a 26 minute TV show really more like 20 minutes with commercials.

He was very meticulous with his stuff.

He was always timing shows out.

You know what a stopwatch show and what I heard from other people would happen would sometimes on the weekends he would invite a bunch of the top directors or animators to a party on his boat and everything.

So they would all get on his yacht or something.

They'd sell out like Catalina or something and barbecue and beers and all.

He would hand out sheets and have them time shows.

This was Bill.

Yeah, that's.

Yeah, this was Bill.

He was always working.

Well, you know, these guys loved making cartoons and they just kept going into work no matter who owned the company.

And they loved other people that loved making cartoons.

It was pretty astonishing that until they were physically unable, they never really stopped working.

Yeah, Mr.

Hanna at the end of his life really kind of suffered bad from Alzheimer's, but he still kept coming to work.

He'd still be there all the time, he and Joe both.

And I was working then at then it was Warner Brothers because Ted Turner had bought Hanna Barbera from Taft, and then Ted had merged it into Time Warner.

So now it's considered Warner Brothers.

But Bill and Joe still had their own offices.

And we had to get a briefing about what to do if you find Mr.

Hannah and he's lost because one day, like, somebody found him, like standing in a stairwell staring at the ceiling.

But I mean, the mind was still there and all, but just, it had these lapses and all his chauffeur, Carlton was telling me one time about they did a tribute to Bill and Joe.

They got some sort of municipal award.

So they were downtown at city center in Los Angeles.

And as Carlton was driving Mr.

Hannah back to the studio, up to Hollywood, they were driving down Hollywood Blvd.

and Hannah suddenly said, pull over, Pull over right here.

Like, what?

Oh, OK, let's see.

He pulled the car over, and Hannah got out.

And all it was was like a bunch of storefronts.

So, you know, boarded up, just looking kind of like derelict.

There's really nothing there.

And Hannah stood in front of this one storefront and said it was here.

It was right here.

What he was alluding to was that it was the Mints Studio from 1930, which was like one of his first jobs.

Like he first got hired as a painter or a cell polisher or something.

And he just stood there looking at this boarded up store and he started weeping, you know, then got back in the car and everything, and then they just went on.

But just that memory hits you.

Yeah, the long range memory, yeah.

Here's a question about the actual animation of a Hanna Barbera cartoon or even a filmation when I know with filmation they use the stock Hanna Barbera to a degree did, but they were still different.

When you animate it but you've got a repeated movement like a head tilt, you know, is every sheet going to have that on it or do you indicate that the heads tilting in each thing because the body is all in pieces?

So how do you actually animate all the pieces?

Do you chart it or what?

Because you're not using as many pieces of paper.

Yeah, it's charted.

It's try to like they have, they'll have like head bobs.

This will be like H1 will be the head up straight, H 6 will be the head down with a few in betweens.

And it's a standard sort of head Bob.

And just in like the eye blinks were standardized and the mouth system, we had this very elaborate system, but it's just called 8 E mouths, which was like the A mouth, the B mouth, the C mouth.

And when you were doing dialogue, you basically just expose those drawings.

You just say #3 #7 #9 number one, number one again #3 and that would be the mouth.

Movements.

And then what would you draw?

You draw around that.

Yeah, you would.

If you're using pre-existing stuff, the studio expected you to sort of work into the show at least like 30% reuse.

And again too, it's like Fred Phone Stone runs the same, talks the same, they just changed the backgrounds.

How did they do those famous Fred's house runs forever and Yogi's forest runs forever?

How did they slip the papers through and where there's a seam or something?

Or was it 1 great big sheet?

Yeah, there's a specific way, like it's a long piece of paper.

It's got the artwork in the center with blank on either side, and the end of one side matches to the beginning of the other side.

So as you pan it through, when it gets to that point, they would take the piece of paper and put it back on the pegs from the beginning and run it again.

And the artwork was designed in such a way that you wouldn't notice, like you wouldn't see a seam or anything.

So that's why when thread Flintstones running, you see the same window go go by the same chair.

We call them bicycle pants.

Yeah, it's called a bicycle pan.

Oh, so that's how it's because it's like I keep looking for the seam or some sort of a a break and you can never see it because getting in the end is identical.

Oh yeah, that's all very carefully planned out.

And the mouth movements too are they're not just flapping lips.

There is a precision to how you use them and how you chart them.

And you know what's funny is in the Man called Flintstone, it's funny.

My sister and I both noticed this at the beginning when the statue is being operated on.

You don't know it's a gargoyle that fell off a roof.

There's a close up of a doctor and he says that's enough and he actually mouths the F and it's like wow.

Yeah, yeah, the F mouth, yeah, FS and VS and things like that, that was all worked out.

At Filmation, was there even a larger percentage of reuse and the stock being expected?

Yeah, I think so.

I think it's about the same when we're doing the He Man show and He Man had a lot of physical action characters fighting and things like that.

And one of the cameraman was a weightlifter.

So we would have him go on the roof and he would do the He Man licks and live action and then they would match that, you know, turn it into an animated character.

It was all sort of like a stock system.

So stock 1 is He Man standing there talking and then there's the run and then there's the one of him swinging his sword.

All those things were like calculated to be used again and again.

Could Johnny Quest be considered the show that proved you could do action and a lot going on, even though there wasn't tremendous amounts of movement all the time?

That's true, yes.

Yeah, very much so.

Doug Wilde, he did the designs on that.

And Doug Wilde, he was a great action adventure cartoonist.

He had done comic book things and all, and he introduced me to Jack Kirby and all the superhero guys.

But Doug figured out a way to like make the designs interesting enough and all that.

Even if they don't move a lot, it still look good.

But like you mentioned, in places there's still full animation.

Like I think if you look at the Johnny Quest, like opening title sequences, there's a cut of like 3 snakes crawling along the ground and that's all fully animated.

If you ever try to animate a snake, it's hard.

It's like there's no shortcuts, you know?

You just have to animate it.

Yeah, you do see occasionally even in the 70s stuff you will see the occasional like wow, they, they had to do a little bit more here because that's not a movement.

They do all the time.

You have to look for it, but it's there and, and you're right, there's plenty to look at.

And now that we're getting better, high quality, quality, high res looks at this, especially shows like Space Ghost and Herculoids, the art direction and the choices of color.

You know, you had backgrounds by Walt Paraguay on scooby-doo.

They were lush.

They were gorgeous.

Yeah, Paraguay was one of the art directors of Disney's 101 Dalmatians.

That's the thing too, is that, you know, a lot of people think that there was a Disney group and there's a Hannah Barbara group and there's a filmation group and all in Los Angeles.

There was one pool of talent.

There was like a lot of artists.

And sometimes they go from studio to studio, they move around and all.

And the studios knew that.

They stayed in regular communication.

Like 1 friend of mine that was in the Disney training program.

This is like in the late 70s and he wanted to leave Disney's, you know, he was going to quit and work someplace else.

He gave his notice.

He went back to his desk.

He sat down, the phone rang.

He picked up the phone and it was the supervisor to Hanna Barbera going, do you want a job?

And he's like, how did you know?

You know, because those guys all knew each other, like the head of animations supervisor, the animators name is Bill Kyle, and the head of cleanups name is Jay Sawberry.

And they all worked at Disney's before.

So they were in regular connection with the people at the other studios.

They knew that people could come in and hit the ground running because especially at HB and Filmation, you had to produce the footage.

Yeah, You know, when filmation started to go under in the mid 80s, a number of the cleanup artists and layout artists and effects artists were picked up by Disney for The Little Mermaid because they had to expand.

And the thing about these artists is that they don't fuss.

They don't have egos, whatever.

They turn out the footage.

So you have the star animators doing beautiful stuff, but then you also have people who just get it done.

Right.

Do you know what the story was?

Because I've heard various stories and it's kind of sad, you know, because Lou Shimer from all accounts was a wonderful fellow and he wanted to keep animations of mestic as long as he could.

And he did bring in people who weren't experienced to give them a shot.

And filmation was just cranking at one time.

I mean, they invented the 65 episode format daytime, and everybody basically stepped right in and did the same thing.

But they invented it and they were making so much.

What happened?

Well, I think the big shows like He Man and Shira and all, You know, ran its course.

It had its craze and everything when everybody loved him.

Lou tried to do some theatricals like Happily Ever After and some other things that didn't turn out that well.

It was also that time period of the 1980s where you had what was called the Vulture Capitalists.

Basically what people would do is that an investment company would buy their way onto a board of directors.

Like they'd buy up enough stock of your company so that they could become a part of that company.

And if they could seize control of the company, they're basically stripping off its assets, bankrupted and then take the write off in taxes.

That happened in a lot of different companies.

This is the time period also when Roy Disney was able to wrest control of the Disney company away from Ron Miller, his uncle's son-in-law, and take control.

And but Roy was experienced in a sort of 1980s type of business.

What happened to Filmation was there was this company that will L'Oreal Nestle's the European cable stations were becoming popular.

You know, the 24 hour news and 24 hour this and they want to animation product for their children's programs in Europe and all.

And Filmation kept control of all their library, the Hanna Barbera library and the Warner Brothers library and stuff had been leased out a long time ago.

So that's what they were like all over the networks and all and smaller stations.

Disney kept control of theirs and Filmation kept control of theirs.

So getting control of Filmation was you got their library of like whatever was like 4060 years worth of cartoon shows.

That's what they were really after even more than the production company.

Filmation had sold itself to Westinghouse and is being run by Westinghouse.

And basically the deal was worked out between Westinghouse and L'Oreal to basically like take control of Filmation.

And they got in just after I think President Carter had passed some sort of law about 60 day notice for planned Closings, something like that.

So they got in just in time so that they could shut down the studio before that law went into effect because they really, he wanted the library of cartoons instead.

And it was a shame.

Yeah.

I kind of saw it was happening a little bit.

And that's, I jumped to work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in England at that point.

And then friends called me up and said, Tommy, you're right.

The whole thing's going down.

And it's like, I didn't know I was that right.

I was like, I tell you a cute Little Joe Barbera story, too, because we were telling some Hannah stories.

The great movie star Jack Nicholson got his start as a Gopher, you know, an errand boy at MGM under Hanna Barbera around 1957.

And he could see there's some caricatures of the crew, and there's a kid named Jack Jackie.

And of course, Jackie went on to become Jack Nicholson and became a top star and all.

It was somewhere like in the early 90s Hanna Marbera.

We're getting a lifetime achievement.

Oscar.

I was there that night, too.

That was a big deal for them to be there and all.

And Nicholson at that time was in his prime, and he was always sitting down front with his sunglasses on and his tuxedo and all, and sort of holding court.

And we're waiting for the evening to begin.

Everybody's was sitting down and all.

And just as a joke, Joe Barbera walked up behind Jack Nicholson, like right behind his seat, leaned in his ear and said, Hey, Jackie, go get me a Coke.

And Nicholson turned around, looked at him, and that big smile came on.

And he said anything you say, Mr.

Barbera, I.

Love that there's another parallel to in your career having worked on one of the greatest scenes in motion pictures that those of us sitting in the theater and I went back to Rodger Rabbit over and over again.

When all those characters are on the screen singing smile, darn you smile.

I felt vindicated.

I felt like they have all gathered it changed the world.

I mean, as far as our world.

And there was a film that was astonishing with how it blended live action with animation.

But you mentioned Gene Kelly and Jerry the mouse and Ken muses work.

And I assume that the optical printer that a fireworks developed at that time.

I can't confirm this, but I think that helped with the seamless technique.

Patricia Ward Kelly, the widow of Gene Kelly, said she was watching Roger Rabbit with Gene Kelly.

And he said we did this and, and when you compare the two sequences, 1945, you know, and then what?

A 1988.

88.

Yeah, 88 and there was some augmentation electronic, you know, computers, there are ways to blend it with practical mechanics and electronic.

They didn't have that in 1945.

And it's still beyond belief how he could.

And it was because Gene Kelly was so good at precision dance, right?

You could swing Jerry around on his leg like that.

Yeah, One thing people don't notice when you look at the scene with Jerry dancing with Gene Kelly and anchors away, it's a Formica shiny floor, and Jerry is casting a shadow just like Gene is.

So Gene's like natural shadow because the lighting, Jerry's shadow had to be drawn in by an effects department who had to draw Jerry upside down dancing like matching his feet.

And then that had to be meticulously painted and then blend it in.

The thing is that if it's perfect, you don't notice because it looks natural.

So like when Jessica Rabbit runs down an alleyway in the dark and she's throwing off like 3 cast shadows.

Those shadows all had to be animated by hand and they all had to be perfect.

And if it works, you don't notice.

So it was that kind of precision to achieve that idea, Bob Zemeckis, the director, told us early on when we were starting the picture.

He says I'm not making some serial commercial here.

You got to believe the tunes and the human beings are in the same spot.

They've got to touch each other, they got to mess each other's hair, they got to pull each other's clothes.

We need contact and everything.

It can't just be he's over here and he's over here.

You suspend belief.

And it worked.

Actually, Rodger was like one of the last films using the traditional optical process.

We call it mat and Rodo.

So it's like travelling mats and compositing on the optical printer because digital was just coming into to its own, like it really wasn't really there yet.

So when one of the weasels is holding a pistol, we couldn't create a digital pistol that looked real.

So they would take a real pistol, put it on the end of a stick and got somebody from Muppets to like hold it up.

And then you had to match the character hand to hold a gun.

The scene in Roger of the Ink and Paint Club, you know, all the waiters and bartenders are tunes and as human beings and as where Jessica's singing.

They built that entire club on a set 12 feet off the ground so that you can have people from Muppets underneath holding these wooden dowels, holding trays with drinks, checks and all the kind of like physical stuff that you would have in a restaurant.

And, and, and and they were all running around underneath while the human beings are on the set on top.

And then we had to match the characters to all of all those positions.

The world changed when that came out as far as animation and what you could do.

People like Jerry back and you and Leonard Maltin and John Kane.

Maker, you know, you were The Pioneers of anybody even studying animation.

So here's the movie that like, brings it all together, all these characters all at once, and Roger creating a character who belonged in the contemporary and in the classic.

And all of us who were working on it, and I'll love the old characters.

We were raised on those 1930s and 40s characters, and they get a chance to be able to do those.

It was like the dream of a lifetime.

It was so much fun to be able to animate Yosemite Sam, all those characters and do them well, as full and as beautiful as possible.

You know, coming out of the 1980s, you can't be violent.

Characters can't hit each other, they can't do anything.

You know, the old Warner Brothers stuff where characters would give each other dynamite or hit each other with a mallet or something.

You couldn't do that anymore.

And then we got Roger and Roger's like got all this insanity and crazy stuff.

You know, I remember reading the script and I came in the next day to Bob Zemeckis and said, this is really good.

Like, are we going to do this for real?

And he almost looked a little offended.

He's like, of course we are great.

Like, I'm just, you know, because I'm so used to projects when they say they're going to do something great and then they like undercut it and homogenize it to when it's boring.

But this, it stayed all the dynamic and all the stuff and, and everybody loved it.

It's a major historical moment, your transition into teaching and working with young people.

How do they view not only the respected classics, Looney Tunes and the Tom and Jerry's?

Do they also know about the television stuff, or if they've never seen it, how they react to it?

I think it's a challenge to us as teachers to keep reintroducing this stuff to everybody because it fades from memory very quickly.

The average college student right now graduating college was born like in about 2006, 2007.

So they had never lived a day in the 1900s, like we're from the past century and like 911 means as much to them as Pearl Harbor means to us.

You know, it was a very important thing, but it happened before we were born.

So they look at a lot of that stuff that way.

So you have to kind of keep reintroducing it to the students and going, no, you know, you should look at this, this is very good.

This is an important thing to master.

And that's saying everybody, they should always do the same stuff.

But, you know, it's like actors with Shakespeare.

This is your fundamentals.

And if you know this well, you can take on any assignment and you could take on any project.

All these British actors that show up at the Oscars and all, they're all Royal Shakespeare Company.

Patrick Stewart was standing with a spear behind Laurence Olivier.

Once.

You know, they could do comedy, they could do horror, they could do drama, they could do period pictures, they could do modern things because they've got that grounding and the fundamentals.

And that's what I try to push to the students.

Know your fundamentals.

Do you encounter students who have that spark in the back of their eyes and and start saying, you know, I'm going to look in the more of this?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's very nice when you see you're getting through to them and you see that spark pop up.

Something my old animation teacher taught me in the 70s as a fellow named Howard Beckerman.

Howard had worked for Paramount and Terry Tunes and all in New York.

But he would say in a group of students, maybe you have like about 15 or 20 or something, maybe about four or five are really focused and they're really drinking up everything you're giving them.

And he says teach to them because they're going to be the professionals.

Because you can see they already got the fire in the valley.

Like they wanted to do it.

Even like 4 out of 20 that's still pretty good.

Yeah, the the ones who like myself and my wife, we were the ones who waited till the class was over and then walked up to the desk and asked more questions.

Yeah, yeah.

That's it.

I just did a college presentation and it's same thing happened.

Two young people had a million questions and I was like thank you, thank you.

There is hope.

It won't go away, and there will always be those who either pick up on it.

Because when we were kids, we saw old movies that were before our time and said, I got to watch more of these Busby Berkeley's, They're nuts.

And Hitchcock, you know, they were all before.

But wow.

And people only knew the Walt Disney stuff as something that came to the theaters every seven years.

They didn't think about it was made in 1942 something.

Yeah, I would talk to students about the original Snow White.

And I said what's great about Snow White is that Walt Disney tried very hard so that the film wouldn't date.

He didn't want pop illusions of the time or cliches or things like that that were very popular at the time.

So basically it's a 1937 movie, So you can watch this movie from 1937 and enjoy it like today.

And I said, how many 1937 movies do you go out of your way to see?

Like, you know, I really want to see the life of Emil Zola, you know, but you could look at Snow White.

I mean, the Warner Brothers stuff went the other way where it was like, full of pop illusions.

It's full of swing music and a lot of jokes about jitterbugging and things like that.

And I'm constantly having explained to students, OK, this is what a gas rationing card was and this is what a blue plate special meant, you know?

My wife was going through some of her family artifacts and we found an A card and I was so excited.

Wow, you know how it is with these A cards.

Exactly.

You know when he was falling with the dog.

Yeah, and the very first Yosemite Sam, you know, somebody Sam's chasing bugs through this train and bugs goes into this one's boxcar and locks the door.

And, you know, somebody seems banging on the door.

He's going open the door, Rabbit open the door, I see, open the door.

And then he looks at the audience and goes, you notice I didn't say Richard.

And I've seen this cartoon like 8000 times, you know, and it never registered.

One day I was driving through Pasadena and on public radio they had the thing called The Old Time Radio Show, where they would play classic radio broadcasts from the 30s and 40s.

And they said, we're going to play a Top 40 hit by Louis Jordan and the modern Heirs from 1940.

Open the door, Richard.

And standing there right in the middle of traffic, I'm like.

I finally get that joke.

Yeah, Yeah.

You know, Hanna Barbera didn't do it as much in their cartoons, but the record albums, because Charlie Shows wrote them all.

He wrote jokes he wanted to write.

And so it took me decades.

References to Gus Grissom and lots of LBJ jokes and historical references, and it took me years.

But it's so much fun.

You don't have to get every joke.

It's like when the showrunners of, I think it was Phineas and Ferb, I said, how do you get away with the obscure stuff?

He said.

We follow it with something that isn't so that when they say, oh, no one's going to get that.

They say, yeah, but they'll get the next one, don't worry about it.

Let's talk about some of your books, because you got a whole shelf of them.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

Yeah, Well, I started originally.

The first book I wrote was The History of the Animation Unions, because I was always fascinated about the great Disney strike of 1941, Again, because I knew a lot of that older generation.

If you asked them what's the most important thing that happened in 1941, you figured they would say Pearl Harbor or something like that.

It's like, no, the Disney strike that was like the big turning point in a lot of careers.

Like a lot of people went through that strike, you know, and you don't realize people like the director of Charlie Brown Christmas was in the Disney strike.

You know, he was an assistant a lot of famous New Yorker cartoonists and all involved in it, like Sam Kobin.

So I had a chance to talk to a lot of artists about that.

I also wrote a history of computer graphics called Moving Innovation because I saw the digital revolution happening.

Now it's 30 years ago, but I remember when it was people were saying computers are coming, computers are coming, they're going to put us all out of work.

Like that didn't happen.

One of the things that came out recently was I wrote a cookbook, which was kind of odd, called Eat, Drink, Animate the Animators Cookbook.

And the joke originally was that years ago when I was working on Raggedy Ann and Andy, Richard Williams had me assist the animated Grim Natwick.

And Grim Natwick was this animator who, like lived to be 100 years old.

He designed Betty Boop like he sat with a blank piece of paper and created Betty Boop for Max Fleischer.

And also he was a lead animator on Snow White.

He taught Chuck Jones how to animate.

Astounding man.

I was absolutely terrified working for him.

He was actually very nice, you know, but I was so intimidated.

I was like, you know, 19 or 20 like that.

But then when it was all over, his way of saying thank you was he gave me his personal chili recipe because he really liked chili.

I said, OK, you know, and it's funny because I noticed that a lot of artists who you work in a virtual medium, when you're working on something that's not tactile, that you're just creating it, characters who come to life and images and all the way you relax when you want to like kick back and all is to do something physical.

So a lot of programmers I know like the garden, refinish furniture, and a lot of people like to cook.

So I was talking to my publisher and I said, you know, I've got Grim Networks chili recipe, and I've got Walt Disney's chili recipe.

And Mark Davis gave me Mary Blair's martini.

You know which Grim?

Natwick said, you haven't lived until you've had Mary Blair's martini.

And then I have some friends at Ghibli in Tokyo who gave me Miyazaki's personal recipe for ramen noodles.

Yeah, I said, apparently Miyazaki, when the staff was working late, they would all take turns cooking.

And when it was his turn to cook, he had a favorite ramen recipe that he made.

And it's funny because I started to ask people, and actually I have a recipe of Bill Hanna's.

I talked to Bill's family and I said, yeah, Dad loved to like, cook this particular type of trout.

So I got a Bill Hannah recipe.

I got Frank Thomas from Chuck Jones.

It's like something that people didn't expect to be asked.

It's like, do you have a favorite recipe?

I know we could talk more and I hope you can come back and we'll just pick subjects and just go with it because you are so close to all of these great people and you're doing such great work by sending more young people out into it.

One of the silly stories, a quick one, but you know, Joe Barbera used to love to tell stories about Fred Quimby, who was the producer of the Tom and Jerry cartoons in the early 50s when the I Love Lucy show got started.

Everybody kind of knew in the 50s that like this thing, television is coming on and it's taking over and people aren't going to movies anymore.

They're staying home and they're watching television.

But we got to figure out how to make animation for television, how to make it work.

And Bill and Joe actually freelanced animating some those station bumpers for the I Love Lucy show.

They did a very limited the sort of caricatures of Lucy and Desi introducing the show.

And Quimby was trying to talk to them and he says, you know, those station bumpers, were they introducing of the I Love Lucy?

That's what you should be doing that like, like.

And inside, Joe is going.

You know why I ought to.

Oh, that's great.

See, I love these stories and I thank you again for sharing this kind of stuff because it is a human story about people who made great cartoons and we're all different and fascinating and that's that's what we're trying to bring folks.

So thank you again.

Mr.

Tom Seto.

Professor Tom Seto Mr.

Seto The.

Professor is fine.

The professor and Mary Ann, there we go.

And thanks to all of you for listening, giving nice reviews, and subscribing.

And I couldn't be more grateful because this is something that has become something truly wonderful for all of us.

So thank you again and until next time, bye bye.

We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera with Greg Airborne.

Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.