Founded on July 7, 1957 by Tom and Jerry creators and former MGM Cartoons employees William Hanna and Joseph Barbera along with George Sidney,[3] it was headquartered in Los Angeles at the Kling Studios from 1957 to 1960, then on Cahuenga Boulevard from 1960 to 1998, and subsequently at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Sherman Oaks from 1998 to 2001. Notable among the productions that the company produced include The Huckleberry Hound Show, the incarnations and spinoffs of The Flintstones, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo (until 2001), the opening credits of Bewitched and The Smurfs.

The name continues to be used for copyright, marketing and branding purposes for former properties now produced by Warner Bros.. William Denby "Bill" Hanna and Joseph Roland "Joe" Barbera met at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio in 1938, while working at its animation unit.

[12]: 83–84 Sequences for Anchors Aweigh, Dangerous When Wet and Invitation to the Dance and shorts Swing Social, Gallopin' Gals, The Goose Goes South, Officer Pooch, War Dogs and Good Will to Men were also made.

[15] Sidney and several Screen Gems alumni became members of the studio's board of directors and much of the former MGM animation staff—including animators Carlo Vinci, Kenneth Muse, Lewis Marshall, Michael Lah and Ed Barge and layout artists Ed Benedict and Richard Bickenbach—became the new production staff[15] while Hoyt Curtin was in charge of providing the music.

Several animation alumni joined – in particular former Warner Bros. Cartoons storymen Michael Maltese and Warren Foster as head writers, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears as film editors and Iwao Takamoto as character designer.

[15] After reincorporating as Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., The Quick Draw McGraw Show and the theatrical cartoon short series Loopy De Loop followed in 1959.

Walt Disney Productions laid off several of its animators after Sleeping Beauty (1959) bombed on the box-office during its initial theatrical run, with many of them moving to Hanna-Barbera shortly afterwards.

Jackie Gleason considered suing Hanna-Barbera for copyright infringement, but decided not to because he did not want to be known as "the man who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air".

[22] In 1966, Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles and Space Ghost debuted, and by December of that year the litigation had been settled, Taft finally acquired Hanna-Barbera for $12 million and folded the studio into its corporate structure in 1967 and 1968,[16] becoming its distributor.

Hanna and Barbera stayed on while Screen Gems retained licensing and distribution rights to their previous produced cartoons[16] and trademarks to the characters into the 1970s and 1980s.

[16][23] Shazzan, The Banana Splits, Wacky Races and its spin-offs (Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop) and Cattanooga Cats followed from 1967 to 1969.

Josie and the Pussycats, The Funky Phantom, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Speed Buggy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Inch High, Private Eye, Clue Club, Jabberjaw, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels and The New Shmoo built upon the mystery-solving template set by Scooby-Doo, with further shows built around teenagers solving mysteries with a comic relief pet of some sort.

It's the Hair Bear Bunch!, Sealab 2020, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home and Hong Kong Phooey aired, Charlotte's Web, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, was released on March 1, 1973 by Paramount Pictures, to moderate critical and commercial success, and was the first of only four Hanna-Barbera films not to be based upon one of their famous television cartoons (the other three being C.H.O.M.P.S., Heidi's Song and Once Upon a Forest).

Then-ABC president Fred Silverman gave its Saturday-morning time to them after dropping Filmation for its failure of Uncle Croc's Block.

Super Friends, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Richie Rich, The Flintstone Comedy Show, Space Stars, The Kwicky Koala Show, Trollkins and Laverne and Shirley in the Army debuted in 1980 and 1981, while Taft purchased Ruby-Spears from Filmways (which was eventually absorbed into Orion Pictures the following year), making it a sister company to Hanna-Barbera and as a result, several early-1980s series were shared between both companies.

The Smurfs, adapted from the Belgian comic by Peyo and centering on a group of tiny blue creatures led by Papa Smurf, debuted on NBC on September 12, 1981, and ran for nine seasons until December 2, 1989, becoming so the longest-running Saturday-morning cartoon series in broadcast history, a significant ratings success, the top-rated program in eight years and the highest for an NBC show since 1970.

Pound Puppies, The Flintstone Kids, Foofur, Wildfire, new episodes of Jonny Quest, Sky Commanders and Popeye and Son arrived in 1986 and 1987.

[37] A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, Fantastic Max, The Further Adventures of SuperTed and Paddington Bear followed in 1988 and 1989.

[38] In January 1989, while working on A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Tom Ruegger got a call from Warner Bros. to resurrect its animation department.

[39] Ruegger, along with several of his colleagues, left Hanna-Barbera at that time to develop Tiny Toon Adventures at Warner Bros.[39] David Kirschner, known for An American Tail and Child's Play, was later appointed as the studio's new CEO.

[citation needed] The two companies were acquired in a 50-50 joint venture between Turner Broadcasting System and Apollo Investment Fund for $320 million.

Scott Sassa hired Fred Seibert to head Hanna-Barbera, who filled the gap left by Great American's crew with new animators, directors, producers and writers, including Craig McCracken, Donovan Cook, Genndy Tartakovsky, David Feiss, Seth MacFarlane, Van Partible and Butch Hartman.

While Johnny Bravo and Cow and Chicken aired, the Hanna-Barbera studio faced demolition after many of its staff vacated the facilities in 1997, despite the efforts of preserving it.

While Cartoon Network Studios took over production of programming,[51] the Los Angeles City Council approved a plan to preserve the Cahuenga Blvd.

While the budget for MGM's seven-minute Tom and Jerry shorts was about $35,000, the Hanna-Barbera studios were required to produce five-minute Ruff and Reddy episodes for no more than $3,000 apiece.

Characters were often broken up into a handful of levels so that only the parts of the body that needed to be moved at a given time (i.e. a mouth, an arm, a head) were animated.

[66] In a story published by The Saturday Evening Post in 1961, critics stated that Hanna-Barbera was taking on more work than it could handle and was resorting to shortcuts only a television audience would tolerate.

[67] Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman argues that Hanna-Barbera attempted to maximize their bottom line by recycling story formulas and characterization instead of introducing new ones.

A clip of artists using the machine to manipulate scanned images of Scooby-Doo characters, scaling and warping the artwork to simulate animation, is available at the Internet Archive.

[73] Likewise, Hanna-Barbera was perhaps the first proponent of digital ink and paint, a process wherein animators' drawings were scanned into computers and colored using software.