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William Hanna Dead at 90
shaniber writes "Animation pioneer William Hanna, co-creator of such classic cartoons as
The Jetsons and
The Flintstones, has
passed away this week. ABCNEWS is also carrying
the story." Besides giving me Tom and Jerry and The Jetsons, I think the thing that I respect most about Hanna is the fact that a show like Space Ghost Coast to Coast was allowed to take their characters and do something truly unique with them. He even lent his voice to the show in one episode. Not a lot of people would be willing to allow one of their creations to be twisted like that, but the original Space Ghost was one of my childhood staples, and C2C stands in a class all its own proving that creativity isn't dead on TV.
Back in the late 1970s I worked at the NYIT Computer Graphics laboratory on Long Island. At the time the Graphics Lab was among the world's best CG research facilities (its founding director, who I still work for, is now president of Pixar.)
The main focus of our research was a system for doing cartoon animation. In 1978 or '79 Bill Hanna, then approaching 70 years old, came out to see what we were up to, and seeing exciting possibilities for his cost-driven business, put together a team led by Mark Levoy, a Cornell graduate student (who I believe we recommended to him, and who is now a CS professor at Stanford) to build what would be the first commercially successful computer animation system, which Hanna-Barbera used to produce The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, etc. throughout the '80s and '90s.
-Tom Duff
Fred: That's right, and then Daphne and I found a wooden trapdoor in the old abandoned mine
Daphne: Yes, but there was nothing under the trapdoor, except some circles in the dust.
Fred: Circles like... spools of film.
Sheriff: But what does it all mean?
Fred: Well, officer, it means that if you pull the hood off the lizard monster here, you'll find it's...
Sheriff removes lizard monster's hood. It's the old man from the derelict motel.
Shaggy, Velma, Fred and Daphne: Old Mr Hannah!
Sheriff: But didn't he die??
Velma: Mr Hannah must have been planning to sell the film spools which were, in fact, old episodes of The Jetsons. He knew that, with the entire series being nothing more than a boring animated sitcom, they would be worthless unless they had historical value, and faked his own death to make them look valuable!
Old Mr Hannah: And I'd have got clean away with it too if it wasn't for you meddlin' kids!
Daphne: Hey, I liked The Jetsons!
Shaggy: Wait. Why did he dress up as a lizard monster?
Sheriff: Well, that about wraps this one up. Old Mr Hannah, you're going to jail.
Scooby steals Shaggy's giant sandwich. Everyone laughs. The End
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