Active from 1937 until 1957, the studio was responsible for producing animated shorts to accompany MGM feature films in Loew's Theaters, which included popular cartoon characters Tom, Jerry, Droopy, Butch, Spike, Tyke, and Barney Bear.
Prior to forming its own cartoon studio, MGM released the work of independent animation producer Ub Iwerks, and later the Happy Harmonies series from Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising.
The cartoon studio was closed on May 15, 1957,[7] at which time Hanna and Barbera took much of the staff to form their own company, Hanna-Barbera Productions, then named H-B Enterprises.
In the 1930s, to promote their films and attract larger theater audiences, the studios produced many short subjects to supplement the main feature, including travelogues, serials, comedies, newsreels, and cartoons.
[4] The director team brought with them much of their staff from their time with Schlesinger, including animators and storymen such as Carmen "Max" Maxwell, William Hanna, and brothers Robert and Tom McKimson.
The Happy Harmonies canon included a handful of entries starring Bosko, who, by 1936, was redesigned from an ambiguous "inkblot" character to a discernible little African-American boy.
[5][15] The final Happy Harmonies short, The Little Bantamweight, was released in March 1938, and Harman and Ising went on to establish a new studio to do freelance animation work for Walt Disney.
Among the holdovers from the Harman-Ising regime, William Hanna and Bob Allen were appointed directors, and Carmen Maxwell became production manager.
Quimby raided every major American animation studio for talent, extracting artists, directors, and writers such as Friz Freleng from Leon Schlesinger Productions, Emery Hawkins from Screen Gems and much of the top staff at Terrytoons (Joseph Barbera, Jack Zander, Ray Kelly, Dan Gordon, George Gordon and others).
[15] After spending some time headquartered in a nearby house, the new MGM cartoon studio at Overland Ave. and Montana Ave. opened its doors on August 23, 1937.
[17] Freleng, Hanna, and Allen, assigned to direct the Captain and the Kids cartoons, were unable to translate the Katzenjammer humor into animation, and the series folded after fifteen episodes.
The duo's first cartoon together was 1940's Puss Gets the Boot, featuring a mouse's attempts to outwit a house cat named Jasper.
On the strength of the Oscar nomination and public demand, Hanna and Barbera were assigned to direct more cat-and-mouse cartoons, soon christening the characters Tom and Jerry.
Originally barred by Quimby from making a second cat-and-mouse short until the overwhelming success of Puss Gets the Boot demanded it, Hanna and Barbera and their team of animators, who included George Gordon, Jack Zander, Kenneth Muse, Irven Spence, Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, and Pete Burness, worked on Tom and Jerry cartoons almost exclusively from 1941 until 1955.
In Harman's place, Quimby hired Tex Avery, an animation director known for his wild comedic style at the Schlesinger studio.
He appeared in several more Avery cartoons (including Northwest Hounded Police) before being officially given his own series in 1949 with Señor Droopy.
[28][29] Tex Avery was a perfectionist: he worked extensively on his films' stories and gags, revised his animators' drawings, and was even known to cut frames out of the final Technicolor answer print to sharpen the comedy timing.
Avery directed eleven more cartoons for MGM, many of them showing the heavy influence of the newly popular UPA studio and its simplified designs.
[32] That year, Hanna and Barbera directed Pet Peeve, the first MGM cartoon in the new widescreen CinemaScope process, which had been was devised as a means to keep audiences attending movie theatres in the wake of the popularity of television.
However, for the most part, both the 1955–1957 CinemaScope Droopy and Tom and Jerry cartoons had lost their appeal in the eyes of critics due to weaker stories and simplistic animation, which were the result of the budget cuts.
[8] Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems picked up Hanna-Barbera's product, and the studio soon became the most successful producers of television animation in the world.
Individual shorts such as To Spring (1936) and The Dot and the Line (1965) have been acclaimed for their artistic designs while others such as Screwball Squirrel (1944) and King-Size Canary (1947) are celebrated for their sheer lunacy.
Warner Home Video would later release the Tom and Jerry shorts as part of the Tom and Jerry Golden Collection series of DVD and Blu-ray boxsets, which started with the first volume being released October 25, 2011, with the shorts being presented uncut, restored, remastered, in chronological order, and for the Blu-ray version, in 1080p high definition.
Rumors have floated around for years of a box set consisting of Tex Avery's MGM work, but nothing has been released besides the Spotlight and Golden box sets for Tom and Jerry and the Droopy collection in the United States, although all of Tex Avery's cartoons were released on DVD in France through Warner Home Video.