Vintage Hanna Barbera Art Collection on Flickr

There are some amazingly gorgeous cartoon images on display on slappy427's Flickr page. Classic painted comic book covers, model sheets, ViewMaster 3-D images (see above), production drawings and promotional art from Hanna Barbera.

There's a lot of oddball H-B stuff that you may not have seen before...

This is only a tiny fraction of the cartoony delights

waiting for you over on slappy427's Flickr page.

Go check it out HERE:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29235310@N07/

UPDATE: Here are a bunch of Hanna-Barbera Flickr
pages all in one group: http://flickr.com/groups/hanna-barbera/

Storyboards: Huckleberry Hound in Caveman Huck – August 18th 1961

Storyboard artist Chong Lee has been teaching Story Development at CalArts for the past four years. This year, he decided to put all of his handouts on a blog for his students, but the blog is open for anybody who want to click over to the ChongToons Blog.

He has a lot of hard-to-find animation ephemera in easy-to-download PDF files. Some of my favorite downloads on his site are the vintage Hanna Barbera storyboards.

If you click on any of these images, you’ll jump over to the page that features FIVE (count ‘em) 5 different storyboards from the classic era of Hanna Barbera Cartoons.

The samples on this page are all from Caveman Huck, a Huckleberry Hound episode from way back in 1961. He also has storyboards from Pixie & Dixie, Yogi Bear, Quick-Draw Mc Graw and the Flintstones.
There’s a lot to learn about storyboarding in these boards…especially when it comes to economy and simplicity. If you like them, why don’t you leave some comments on Chong’s blog and ask him to keep posting this kind of rare cartoon art!

"How a TV Cartoon is Created" by Alex Toth and Bob Foster (Part 1 of 2)

"How a TV Cartoon is Created" by Alex Toth and Bob Foster is a great oversized 10-page illustrated essay that first appeared as a bonus in the 1976 treasury-sized Super-Friends Limited Collectors Edition comic book.

This is a classic guide to how Saturday morning cartoons were produced in the seventies by Hanna-Barbera studios. Most of what is talked about in this manifesto is still true to one degree or another...depends on the studio and how much outsourcing is being done. The biggest difference is in the camera work, as that is almost entirely being done digitally now.

If you've ever read any of Alex Toth's writing, it makes a lot of sense that he had help with the text. Toth was an amazing artist, but he rambles like crazy in his writings and letters. You gotta love that Alex Toth hand-lettering, though!

Bob Foster is listed as the co-creator along with Alex Toth -- and Bob Foster knows what he's talking about when it comes to cartoons. Bob Foster is the creator of Myron Moose, he was a layout artist at Hanna Barbera and Depatie-Freling throughout the 1970's, wrote the Donald Duck comic strip during the 1980's, he was a writer-artist and editor for Disney comics in the U.S. and overseas at Egmont, and he's been a storyboard artist on dozens of shows since then. Whew!

As far as I know, "TV Cartoons" has only been reprinted once in recent years, so for all those animation fans and Alex Toth fans who have never had the pleasure, "here is the how and why of animated TV Cartoons...the comic strips that move."

The high-resolution scans are below.
Just click on any of the pages below to open up
a HUGE hi-res page of Alex Toth's TV Cartoons.

Stay tuned for Part Two of "How a TV Cartoon is Created"
...the rest of this 10-pager is coming in a few days!

UPDATE: Part TWO of Alex Toth on TV Cartoons is HERE

Hanna Barbera Treasury Book -- This Time They Got it RIGHT!

I just came across this new art book about Hanna Barbera's golden years called, "Hanna Barbera Treasury." There is so much wonderfulness to this giant-sized love-letter that I had to share it with all of you.

The Hanna Barbera Treasury is written by Jerry Beck, with photography by Tim Mantoani published by Insight Editions. It measures a big 11 1/2" tall by 11 inches wide, and it's about 3/4 inch thick with 157 memorabilia-stuffed pages. If you're impatient like me, it costs $45 in bookstores, but Amazon has it for $29.70 (as of Nov 29th).

Now, 157 pages may not sound that substantial, but what you can't tell from that number is that every oversized page is PACKED with photos of REAL production artwork (not those awful fakey-fake publicity "cels.") -- most of which was apparently photographed from original archival artwork! There are pictures of storyboards, layouts, animation drawings, model sheets, development sketches, character designs, etc...stuff that has never seen the light of day until now. I've been waiting for someone to put together this kind of book for ages.

There are also tons of beautiful photos of vintage H-B collectible and toys, like plastic dolls and View-Master reels. If you remember the groundbreaking art direction in Chip Kidd's Batman Animated art book from the nineties, you can imagine what this looks like.

The other feature that really expands the page-count is that there are tons of little envelopes and pockets and pamphlets bound into this book that contain beautiful facsimiles of trading cards, full-color 12-page mini-comic book reprints, Model sheets, storyboard sequences and vintage activity-book pages.

There are separate chapters for all of the early Hanna-Barbera stars (in chronological order), including a chapter EACH devoted to:

• Tom and Jerry
• Ruff and Reddy
• Huckleberry Hound
• Pixie and Dixie
• Yogi Bear
• Quick-Draw McGraw
• Augie Doggie
• Snagglepuss
• The Flintstones
• Top Cat
• The Jetsons
• Magilla Gorilla
• Peter Potamus
• Sqiddly Diddly
• Touche Turtle
• Lippy The Lion
• Jonny Quest
• Space Ghost
• Atom Ant
• Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole
• Frankenstein, Jr and the Impossibles
• Birdman
• Wacky Races
• Space Ghost
• Scooby-Doo

...and THEY STOP RIGHT THERE! Oh, happy day!

There's no need to pretend that the entire history of Hanna Barbera is totally golden...most of their output after the late sixties was totally forgettable. But they wisely chose to focus on the best of the best!

If you felt horribly cheated by that awful Hanna Barbera Cartoons coffee-table book from 1999, this new book should make you forget all about that publishing nightmare. This new book a winner through and through! Caveat: I haven't READ the text yet, so I'm looking at this purely from a visual standpoint. I'm guessing that based on the love and devotion that obviously went into the art direction of this book, they probably didn't skimp on the textual accuracy either.

The text is written by animation historian and Cartoon Brew-meister Jerry Beck, so I'm looking forward to reading it and posting another review later to complete the picture.

Now go out and buy it! We want to encourage this kind of thing! ^_^

PS...if you're in LA on Dec.1st, say Hi to Jerry and get your book signed! More info at the Animation Archive