[3] In 1957, the animation/director team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were terminated from an eighteen-year-long tenure at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producing the animated Tom and Jerry and Droopy theatrical short subjects.

[6] They forged a deal with former MGM colleague George Sidney in which he received a small percentage of the new company in return for acting as a business representative.

Feeling confidence in the Ruff and Reddy characters, the duo presented their proposal, along with a streamlined production budget, employing limited animation.

[9] Hanna, in a six-page memo, had attempted to convince his superiors at MGM to employ economized techniques in order to reduce the cost of their short films, but received no response.

[7] At that time, he had estimated a six-minute cartoon to cost $17,500 if it employed the limited animation technique (down from the $35,000 budget the duo received at MGM).

When pitching to Screen Gems, Hanna had worked down the numbers to a much smaller $3,000, and the duo were very confident the company would respond with great excitement.

[10] Hanna described the process in his 1996 memoir, A Cast of Friends: "It was essential that we select only the key poses necessary to convincingly impart the illusion of movement in our cartoons.

[8] In addition to the quicker, cheaper production process, Hanna and Barbera made the decision to produce the segments in full color.

[11] Hanna and Barbera were fond of the "ongoing comedic rapport" of cartoon duos, among them the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner and Sylvester the Cat/Tweety rivalries of Warner Bros.

Mainly selecting those they worked with at MGM, Hanna and Barbera decided to cast Don Messick as Ruff and Daws Butler as Reddy.

[14] NBC paired the opening and closing episodes of the show (usually with a cliffhanger) with live segments and classic cartoons from the prior incarnation of Screen Gems, including The Fox and the Crow and Li'l Abner.

A video game, Ruff and Reddy in the Space Adventure, was released in 1990 for the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit computers, and Atari ST. Episodes of the series appeared on the Animal Follies volume released on October 20, 1988 on VHS[16] and 1989 on LaserDisc (as part of the Hanna-Barbera Personal Favorites home video series) along with Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey, Touche Turtle and Dum Dum, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy and Snagglepuss.