7 ms·

What Ruined Hanna-Barbera? [video]

101 points by snake117 8y ago

zapzupnz 8y ago
Would anybody be able to provide a summary? I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural, such that I don'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.
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
  In my mind, "long-form video essay" is pretty much a big red flag... I just don't have time. Text is much more efficient.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Cranking up playback speed to 2.5-3x makes it a bit more bearable.
    - jerf 8y ago
      I wouldn't be on YouTube at all if that feature didn't exist. I only which I had more than 2x in the mobile app, since I can't use JS to change it there. (Since odds are high someone will ask, this is the bookmarklet I ended up settling on: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = prompt()) This prompts you for the speed you want. It should be obvious how to specialize this to a specific speed if you want.)
- veryworried 8y ago
  tl;dr: They got absorbed by Warner Bros and killed.
- johnnyg 8y ago
  Quora touches on this subject: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Hanna-Barbera-dissolved https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Hanna-Barbera-dissolved
- egypturnash 8y ago
  god I set it to run at 2x with subs and it was still very tl;dw.
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  The video doesn't actually live to its title, as there's an important link missing, but here's what I got: They did very well for a long time, but then the 80s arrived. Suddenly there were better shows (Transformers, GI Joe) during the entire week rather than just weekends, and they lost a lot of market. They later went to Cartoon Network and created some new classics (Powerpuff Girls and co), but for some reason (not explained) that wasn't enough.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Mostly they no longer were the near monopoly and CN was not aired as widely. It is harder to sell a whole station then a few shows. WB tended to sell separately their own only. (E.g. Bugs, Daffy, Looney Tunes) HB ones were exclusives.
- ghayes 8y ago
  The current top comment seems to sum it up very well with a bit of personal experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539948
- anthonybsd 8y ago
  Video is pure distilled clickbait. Nothing ruined them. They slowly became less relevant and got absorbed into Time Warner. That's it.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  > I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural I'm glad I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of misplaced upward inflection which I assume is the narrator's normal speaking voice that they're desperately trying to fight against to sound more "professional". In fact the phrases that don't do this sound like they've been pitch-corrected downwards (maybe they have, maybe it's some weird auditory illusion). > to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino I couldn't have put it better myself.
egypturnash 8y ago
tl;dw but I'm gonna guess it comes down to "they sure did shit out a lot of cheap, terrible cartoons for a decade". I mean seriously Joe and Bill won an Oscar or two for their lovingly-animated Tom & 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. "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output. 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. Or at least that's what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties/00s. 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.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  I have fond memories of those characters from my childhood and my adult hood when [adult swim] came along and gave us fresh and absurdist/adult-oriented versions of some of our favorite characters. Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Brak Show, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, many others.
  - zazen 8y ago
    I hope you've discovered Venture Bros? Best of them all!
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      Yes. It's covered in the "many others". There's a Brock Sampson shirt somewhere in my closet.
- msla 8y ago
  > "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output. And they even cheaped out on the "radio" part, in that their jokes and plots were stale, unimaginative, and just as recycled as their backgrounds. Rocky & Bullwinkle did "Illustrated Radio" well because it had a good writing staff. The cardinal sin of making media is condescension. Don't talk down to your audience, and don't make media you yourself wouldn't consume. (There might even be a broader lesson there.)
pfdietz 8y ago
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.
- tclancy 8y ago
  You could tell which grave they were planning to use because it was the one that was drawn, not part of the painted background.
aaron695 8y ago
> What RUINED Hanna-Barbera? Not really answered. They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.
- pm90 8y ago
  They did. It was that animated franchises came to dominate the scene. Then WB bought them, used them for a while and finally shuttered them. But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.
- lightedman 8y ago
  Ted Turner trying to make the cartoons more family-oriented is what ruined HB. In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.
- sirmarksalot 8y ago
  It's really just a clickbait title. If you look at his channel, he has an entire series called "What's RUINING/RUINED," all of which is basically him reading Wikipedia while playing cartoon footage.
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    This is a very popular YouTube format and I hate it
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      I finally noticed that "Not Interested" is an option in the YouTube recommendations' qebab menus (vertical ellipsis ⋮) to immediately hide the suggestion, and since discovering that have been very happy to use that on all clickbait titles, including just about every usage of the word RUINED. It might mean that I'm slowly getting better recommendations, but it mostly means that at least for the periods of time that the recommendations are on screen I'm not staring at a bunch of dumb negative words and things that don't interest me. I'm still close to using a browser extension to disable the recommendations system entirely as useless garbage to me, but at least this one tool helps some.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JackFr 8y ago
A someone who was heavily consuming cartoons over the relevant period, I find it remarkable that there was no mention of either WB/Looney Toons or the growth of Japanese animation. Makes me suspicious of his conclusions.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  I'm generally suspicious of anybody making long-form video essays on YouTube about such subjects. Unless they were in the industry, I tend to believe I'm merely having a Wikipedia article and perhaps a few interviews, taken from blogs or perhaps online magazines, regurgitated to me. That's what Did You Know Gaming seems to be, for instance.
vkaku 8y ago
Also to see: plenty of reasons why 'Saturday Morning Cartoons' was killed. Hanna-Barbera were my favorite animators, hands down. I could watch their toons any day and I would not get bored.
wodenokoto 8y ago
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. What the video doesn’t touch on is: 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? 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? Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?
- benj111 8y ago
  "high(er) quality animation" Are you talking about the merchandise tie ins? They weren't higher quality, certainly not on the 80s. Most of them seem to be Japanese and have that Anime thing of getting away with animating as little as humanly possible.
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    Yes, I am talking about the merchandise tie-ins and I am claiming they are of higher animation quality than yogi bear, judging mostly from the clips used in the documentary, as I try not to use my warped childhood memory as a reference.
    - benj111 8y ago
      Thundercats or He Man made extensive use of slow pans, and still inner monologues and still face offs etc. And transformers was even worse. The only thing that sticks out in HB cartoons is every character does the moonwalk everywhere. But they actually added to detail so you had a frame of reference to tell they were doing that.
rawmodz 8y ago
Their first mistake was making a live-action remake of the Flinstones
- gonzus 8y ago
  100% agreed.
ListeningPie 8y ago
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. Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?
- majewsky 8y ago
  When something interesting is trending on [insert popular platform] that this audience finds interesting, of course people are going to submit it here. This site is 100% submissions based.
  - ListeningPie 8y ago
    I did not realize or expect a Hanna Barbera video to be tending globally, I had assumed it was a algorithm driven recommendation That lead me to watching it.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I've had this pop up a few times in my recommendations over the past few days, too.
ccnafr 8y ago
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't keep up with the demand, so also lost additional market share.
ourmandave 8y ago
Wasn't Hanna-Barbera the guys who made the Brady Bunch Kids and other sit-com spin-offs? =[ As a kid I never noticed how commercial it all really was. After reading some of the history you can see they've all been doing the exact same tried and true things since forever. Merchandising, spin-offs, episodes written around new album releases, copy-cats of successful shows (e.g. Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), etc. So you end up with minimal janky animation, Disney child actors, and 1/2 hour toy commercials.
- jerf 8y ago
  Sturgeon's Law isn't a new thing. The key has always been to find the best stuff. I think that's easier than ever. I have to agree that virtually nothing Hanna Barbara has done has stood the test of time. Despite being so politically incorrect a lot of it has been buried, I can think of a few Looney Tunes that are still pretty good (Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra is quite popular, I'm also a fan of a particular Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he stays overnight in Dracula's castle), and Disney's stuff is still generally watchable and enjoyable, but I'm sitting here racking my brains and despite having seen some of those shows as a kid, I literally can not relate to you a single episode of any of them.

101 points by snake117 8y ago

Would anybody be able to provide a summary? I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural, such that I don'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.

Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
In my mind, "long-form video essay" is pretty much a big red flag... I just don't have time. Text is much more efficient.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Cranking up playback speed to 2.5-3x makes it a bit more bearable.
  - jerf 8y ago
    I wouldn't be on YouTube at all if that feature didn't exist. I only which I had more than 2x in the mobile app, since I can't use JS to change it there. (Since odds are high someone will ask, this is the bookmarklet I ended up settling on: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = prompt()) This prompts you for the speed you want. It should be obvious how to specialize this to a specific speed if you want.)
veryworried 8y ago
tl;dr: They got absorbed by Warner Bros and killed.
johnnyg 8y ago
Quora touches on this subject: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Hanna-Barbera-dissolved https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Hanna-Barbera-dissolved
egypturnash 8y ago
god I set it to run at 2x with subs and it was still very tl;dw.
probably_wrong 8y ago
The video doesn't actually live to its title, as there's an important link missing, but here's what I got: They did very well for a long time, but then the 80s arrived. Suddenly there were better shows (Transformers, GI Joe) during the entire week rather than just weekends, and they lost a lot of market. They later went to Cartoon Network and created some new classics (Powerpuff Girls and co), but for some reason (not explained) that wasn't enough.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Mostly they no longer were the near monopoly and CN was not aired as widely. It is harder to sell a whole station then a few shows. WB tended to sell separately their own only. (E.g. Bugs, Daffy, Looney Tunes) HB ones were exclusives.
ghayes 8y ago
The current top comment seems to sum it up very well with a bit of personal experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539948
anthonybsd 8y ago
Video is pure distilled clickbait. Nothing ruined them. They slowly became less relevant and got absorbed into Time Warner. That's it.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
> I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural I'm glad I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of misplaced upward inflection which I assume is the narrator's normal speaking voice that they're desperately trying to fight against to sound more "professional". In fact the phrases that don't do this sound like they've been pitch-corrected downwards (maybe they have, maybe it's some weird auditory illusion). > to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino I couldn't have put it better myself.

egypturnash 8y ago

tl;dw but I'm gonna guess it comes down to "they sure did shit out a lot of cheap, terrible cartoons for a decade". I mean seriously Joe and Bill won an Oscar or two for their lovingly-animated Tom & 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. "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output. 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. Or at least that's what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties/00s. 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.

dvtrn 8y ago
I have fond memories of those characters from my childhood and my adult hood when [adult swim] came along and gave us fresh and absurdist/adult-oriented versions of some of our favorite characters. Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Brak Show, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, many others.
- zazen 8y ago
  I hope you've discovered Venture Bros? Best of them all!
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Yes. It's covered in the "many others". There's a Brock Sampson shirt somewhere in my closet.
msla 8y ago
> "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output. And they even cheaped out on the "radio" part, in that their jokes and plots were stale, unimaginative, and just as recycled as their backgrounds. Rocky & Bullwinkle did "Illustrated Radio" well because it had a good writing staff. The cardinal sin of making media is condescension. Don't talk down to your audience, and don't make media you yourself wouldn't consume. (There might even be a broader lesson there.)

pfdietz 8y ago

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.

tclancy 8y ago
You could tell which grave they were planning to use because it was the one that was drawn, not part of the painted background.

aaron695 8y ago

> What RUINED Hanna-Barbera? Not really answered. They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.

pm90 8y ago
They did. It was that animated franchises came to dominate the scene. Then WB bought them, used them for a while and finally shuttered them. But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.
lightedman 8y ago
Ted Turner trying to make the cartoons more family-oriented is what ruined HB. In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.
sirmarksalot 8y ago
It's really just a clickbait title. If you look at his channel, he has an entire series called "What's RUINING/RUINED," all of which is basically him reading Wikipedia while playing cartoon footage.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  This is a very popular YouTube format and I hate it
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    I finally noticed that "Not Interested" is an option in the YouTube recommendations' qebab menus (vertical ellipsis ⋮) to immediately hide the suggestion, and since discovering that have been very happy to use that on all clickbait titles, including just about every usage of the word RUINED. It might mean that I'm slowly getting better recommendations, but it mostly means that at least for the periods of time that the recommendations are on screen I'm not staring at a bunch of dumb negative words and things that don't interest me. I'm still close to using a browser extension to disable the recommendations system entirely as useless garbage to me, but at least this one tool helps some.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

JackFr 8y ago

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

zapzupnz 8y ago
I'm generally suspicious of anybody making long-form video essays on YouTube about such subjects. Unless they were in the industry, I tend to believe I'm merely having a Wikipedia article and perhaps a few interviews, taken from blogs or perhaps online magazines, regurgitated to me. That's what Did You Know Gaming seems to be, for instance.

vkaku 8y ago

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

wodenokoto 8y ago

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. What the video doesn’t touch on is: 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? 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? Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?

benj111 8y ago
"high(er) quality animation" Are you talking about the merchandise tie ins? They weren't higher quality, certainly not on the 80s. Most of them seem to be Japanese and have that Anime thing of getting away with animating as little as humanly possible.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  Yes, I am talking about the merchandise tie-ins and I am claiming they are of higher animation quality than yogi bear, judging mostly from the clips used in the documentary, as I try not to use my warped childhood memory as a reference.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Thundercats or He Man made extensive use of slow pans, and still inner monologues and still face offs etc. And transformers was even worse. The only thing that sticks out in HB cartoons is every character does the moonwalk everywhere. But they actually added to detail so you had a frame of reference to tell they were doing that.

rawmodz 8y ago

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

gonzus 8y ago
100% agreed.

ListeningPie 8y ago

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. Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?

majewsky 8y ago
When something interesting is trending on [insert popular platform] that this audience finds interesting, of course people are going to submit it here. This site is 100% submissions based.
- ListeningPie 8y ago
  I did not realize or expect a Hanna Barbera video to be tending globally, I had assumed it was a algorithm driven recommendation That lead me to watching it.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I've had this pop up a few times in my recommendations over the past few days, too.

ccnafr 8y ago

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't keep up with the demand, so also lost additional market share.

ourmandave 8y ago

Wasn't Hanna-Barbera the guys who made the Brady Bunch Kids and other sit-com spin-offs? =[ As a kid I never noticed how commercial it all really was. After reading some of the history you can see they've all been doing the exact same tried and true things since forever. Merchandising, spin-offs, episodes written around new album releases, copy-cats of successful shows (e.g. Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), etc. So you end up with minimal janky animation, Disney child actors, and 1/2 hour toy commercials.

jerf 8y ago
Sturgeon's Law isn't a new thing. The key has always been to find the best stuff. I think that's easier than ever. I have to agree that virtually nothing Hanna Barbara has done has stood the test of time. Despite being so politically incorrect a lot of it has been buried, I can think of a few Looney Tunes that are still pretty good (Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra is quite popular, I'm also a fan of a particular Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he stays overnight in Dracula's castle), and Disney's stuff is still generally watchable and enjoyable, but I'm sitting here racking my brains and despite having seen some of those shows as a kid, I literally can not relate to you a single episode of any of them.