What Ruined Hanna-Barbera? [video]

tl;dw but I&#x27;m gonna guess it comes down to &quot;they sure did shit out a lot of cheap, terrible cartoons for a decade&quot;. I mean seriously Joe and Bill won an Oscar or two for their lovingly-animated Tom &amp; Jerry shorts at MGM but once the theatrical shorts market dried up they started making stuff with the fewest drawings humanly possible, that rested largely on voice work. &quot;Illustrated radio&quot; is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output.<p>Then Turner bought them I think, then WB bought Turner, and IIRC just kinda merged them into Cartoon Network because having two studios in the same city is kind of a waste or resources. Also the whole rise of sending work overseas to Asia where your dollar buys an order of more magnitude more pencil mileage; animation was at the forefront of hollowing out the American industry by substituting cheaper labor across the globe.<p>Or at least that&#x27;s what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties&#x2F;00s.<p>People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill during the time they dominated Saturday Morning have fond memories of their characters but that stuff really does not age well. It maybe ages slightly better than most Filmation work. Slightly.

Would anybody be able to provide a summary? I find the narrator&#x27;s intonation unbearably forced and unnatural, such that I don&#x27;t feel like listening to it non-stop for 21 minutes. Scorn me, berate me, and downvote me if you will; but to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino.

When the coffin containing the remains of the studio was being taken to its grave, it was carried by the same rocks and trees, over and over and over.

The what, as far as I understand the video was 80s toy tie-in cartoons such as Heman, GI Joe and transformers that ushered in a new style of animation and a new way of financing them, ultimately leading to HB dropping in value and getting purchased.<p>What the video doesn’t touch on is:<p>Who are these studios animating them? According to the video, the entire tv animation market was more or less HB. How could these studio rise out of seemingly nowhere and produce high(er) quality animation?<p>Why wasn’t HB part of these tie-ins? According to the video, they owned the market. Aren’t they the obvious choice to ask to produce, when you want a cartoon about your new toy?<p>Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?

A someone who was heavily consuming cartoons over the relevant period, I find it remarkable that there was no mention of either WB&#x2F;Looney Toons or the growth of Japanese animation. Makes me suspicious of his conclusions.

tl;dw: they got lazy at the end of the 70s and started copying their own hits over and over, putting out the same type of shows. Toy companies got involved and created their own toons, with a superior quality, and they were done after that. Cable also hit, and they couldn&#x27;t keep up with the demand, so also lost additional market share.

Also to see: plenty of reasons why &#x27;Saturday Morning Cartoons&#x27; was killed.<p>Hanna-Barbera were my favorite animators, hands down. I could watch their toons any day and I would not get bored.

Wasn&#x27;t Hanna-Barbera the guys who made the <i>Brady Bunch Kids</i> and other sit-com spin-offs? =[<p>As a kid I never noticed how commercial it all really was.<p>After reading some of the history you can see they&#x27;ve all been doing the exact same tried and true things since forever.<p>Merchandising, spin-offs, episodes written around new album releases, copy-cats of successful shows (e.g. <i>Bewitched</i> and <i>I Dream of Jeannie</i>), etc.<p>So you end up with minimal janky animation, Disney child actors, and 1&#x2F;2 hour toy commercials.

I watched this video yesterday evening and this morning this post is at the top of my feed. It is not the first time a specific topic ends up on both pages.<p>Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?

Their first mistake was making a live-action remake of the Flinstones

&gt; What RUINED Hanna-Barbera?<p>Not really answered.<p>They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don&#x27;t say why Hanna-Barbera couldn&#x27;t&#x2F;didn&#x27;t compete.