After I had done a handful of cartoons I was satisfied with, I started submitting them to the magazines.
After Tom and Jerry earned seven Oscars, it felt damn good to win again and be allowed to walk up on a stage to receive the statuette.
Among the great glories of the MGM lot were the vast outdoor sets that had been constructed over the years.
Bill Hanna and I owe an awful lot to television, but we both got our start and built the first phase of our partnership in the movies.
Block booking required an exhibitor to buy, sight unseen, a certain number of films in order to secure the one or two major features that really interested him.
Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally.
Despite the rejection, and in violation of all the rules, I came back year after year.
Everyone we saw agreed: Cartoons were just too expensive. We were out. And at 46, I was not eager to learn a new trade.
Except for me, no one in my family could draw.
Executives had no interest in doing a deal with Michael Jackson, but my meetings with him were delightful, and I found him to be laid back, courteous, and a gentleman.
Faced with the choice of enduring a bad toothache or going to the dentist, we generally tried to ride out the bad tooth.
Fred Silverman was not the only victim of his demise at NBC. When a giant like Fred Silverman stumbles, a lot of people and projects fall.
Friends don't necessarily made good business or creative partners.
Getting into the virgin territory of adult prime time meant a chance to keep our balance for one more season or one more year or, if we were unbelievably lucky, even longer.
High-level, big-deal publicity has a way of getting old for me, but what never fails to thrill me is when I make personal appearances.
I am plenty sore that Tom Quimby didn't share the seven Tom and Jerry Oscars.
I cannot say who, precisely, came up with the idea of a Stone Age family.
I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals.
I don't know that I spent any more time alone than any other kid, but being by myself never bothered me.
I first pitched the idea of doing a series of cartoons based on Bible stories. They didn't much like it.
I hate fishing, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to hike when you can get in the car and drive.
I have spent a lot of years on the outside looking in.
I hope we don't get to the point where we have to have the cat stop chasing the mouse to teach him glassblowing and basket weaving.
I learned long ago to accept the fact that not everything I create will see the light of day.
I like to stretch out in the sun on a sandy beach, close to a great hotel, and in reasonable proximity to liquor and a really good meal.
I never got tired of Tom and Jerry, but I did have a dream of doing more with my life than making cartoons.
I once kept score on an agency man I entertained from 6 p.m. until 1 in the morning. During that period he consumed 16 scotch and sodas.
I suppose what I did have was a slim idea. It was nothing more than an idea for a cartoon series based on a dog and a cat.
I used to visit a masseur regularly, and once convinced Bill to try a massage. That was a lot of years ago. He's not been back since.
I was 82 years old before Who's Who thought I was enough of a big shot to do a piece on me.
I was convinced there as only one actor to play Templeton the Rat, and that was Tony Randall.
I was one of those kids who read voraciously anything having to do with action and adventure.
I would be lying if I did not admit that, for me, injustices were bitter pills that went down very, very hard.
I've often cursed my insomnia, angry that this or that business problem keeps me awake.
If my livelihood, cartoons, put me in a unique position to reach out to the community, and to children in particular, my secret passion, the stage, motivated another kind of involvement.
In 1943, we won our first Oscar, for Yankee Doodle Mouse.
In the first grade, I was enrolled at a Catholic school called Holy Innocents. It did not take long for the nuns there to discover that I could draw.
In those days of black and white cartoons, you worked while wearing a white glove to keep your hand from sticking to the celluloid.
In those days, boxing was very glamorous and romantic. You listened to fights on the radio, and a good announcer made it seem like a contest between gladiators.
Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.
Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest work of all.
Most of the Hollywood studios directed all the hatred and contempt they could muster at TV.
My biggest kick comes from the individual fans I run into. Middle-aged men ask me when we're going to do more Johnny Quest cartoons.
My last days at MGM were like the fall of the Roman Empire in fast motion.
My marriage had been impulsive. That marriage should have been short-lived instead of the 23 years it spanned.
Not once in six years did I make it to the office by 9 on the dot.
One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.
Parents look at me like I'm somebody pretty important, and say, We were raised on your characters, and now we're enjoying them all over again with our children.
Publicity gets more than a little tiring. You want it, you need it, you crave it, and you're scared as hell when it stops.
Spend even a little time in this industry, and you get used to the ups and downs, the blanket accusations and mortal curses that mean nothing at all.
Ted Turner sailed into the meeting, and I mean sailed. He holds himself as if he were at the helm of his sailboat, in the process of winning the race.
That's what keeps me going: dreaming, inventing, then hoping and dreaming some more in order to keep dreaming.
The Christmas parties were orgies of drinking and singing and groping and pawing. Cartoon staffers invested their own money in preparatory liquor.
The Ritz is big on elaborate detail, and among the details are golden swans for turning on and off the sink and bath water.
There is no law that says a man who earned a hundred million dollars in his first half-dozen years on the job has to be a decent human being, but Mike Eisner is that and more.
Those of us on the homefront endured our share of hardships. I had no opportunity to think, let alone find, romance.
Typically, we had three to five shows going. On any particular day, one story was in development, another at the storyboard stage, and another in layout.
Utah seemed like a reasonable place. Thre were traces of green.
We achieved a state of splendid creative isolation. That was a blessing conducive to creativity.
We worked with Gene Kelly on his directorial debut, Invitation to the Dance, a feature-length movie based entirely on dance and totally without dialogue.
What about Mickey Mouse? Disney tried very hard to make him a star. But Mickey Mouse is more of a symbol than a real character.
What the real world of 1941 needed most was the release and relief provided by laughter.
When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.
While I have never been a regular churchgoer, I'm anything but immune to the power and the majesty of the religious experience.
You find yourself answering the same questions about 100 times with pretty much the same answers while trying to make the interviewer feel he's the first person who has ever had the brilliance to ask that particular question.
You keep pitching. Most of the pitches run wild. A few are caught.
Joseph Barbera has three kids named Jayne, Neal, and Lynn.
In 1937, Joseph Barbera signed a deal to be a writer for MGM. While working there, he met his future partner William Hanna.
In 1987, Joseph Barbera won the Governor's Award.
Joseph Barbera was the director of over 230 films and tv shows. He has produced of over 220 films and tv shows.
Joseph Barbera and his partner William Hanna, were the co-founders of Hanna-Barbera, an animated cartoon production company.
Joseph Barbera tried to become a magazine cartoonist, for The NY Hits Magazine, during the Great Depression, but he didn't have success.
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