I get asked a lot what Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were like. They were two fascinating men who — and I'm not saying this was good or bad because it was a little of each — were devoted to always working, always selling, always having new shows in production. This short interview done in 1990, just before the studio began to unravel somewhat, will show you a bit of the Bill and Joe I worked with, though both men had slowed down somewhat since my days in the studio — Joe, especially.
They rarely socialized and at work, they didn't have that much to do with each other. Joe was in charge of selling the shows and his part of the building took the process as far as writing the scripts and recording the voices. Bill was in charge of taking it from there and seeing that the shows got animated and painted and photographed and so on. Bill's office was about as far from Joe's as it could be and still be in the same structure. Joe usually talked to me about scripts and characters. Bill usually talked to me about schedules and budgets.
I have hundreds of opinions about them and what they did to and for the animation business and I've been known to argue with myself about many of them. I loved (and still love) their early shows. I didn't like a lot of the later ones, including some I worked on, but will at times insist that the system then in place was more to blame than the people. Then again, the people often gave in too quickly to the system. I was very glad that I worked for that studio and very glad that I got out when I did.
Here's that interview with Bill and Joe. Notice how they keep plugging what they have coming up next. That was the norm at H-B. The next show would always be the terrific one. And note their reactions when the interviewer asks them if The Flintstones was derived from The Honeymooners. This was not the first time they'd been asked that question…