Joe Barbera, 1911-2006

December 19, 2006

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Joe Barbera was a giant among cartoonists, along with his partner Bill Hanna. You know them as Hanna-Barbera, the guys who invented the cat and mouse team of Tom and Jerry.

Barbera died Monday of natural causes at his home with his wife, Sheila, at his side, said a Warner Bros spokesman. He was 95. His longtime collaborator, Hanna, died in 2001.

''When we started, people said, 'Cat and mouse? That's old stuff,''' Barbera recalled in a 1993 AP interview. Citing characters such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, he added, ''They said it had been done by everybody. But I felt that in any country you wouldn't need dialogue to understand the plot. All you needed was a cat and mouse, and everybody knew what was going to happen.''

Simple enough. What happened was several decades of entertainment by Hanna-Barbera studios, which included animated series such as ''The Flintstones,'' ''Yogi Bear,'' ''Huckleberry Hound and Friends,'' ''Scooby-Doo,'' and ''The Jetsons.''

The ''Tom and Jerry'' cartoons won seven Academy Awards, more than any other series with the same characters. Hanna-Barbera received eight Emmy Awards, including the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Jerry's dance with Gene Kelly in ''Anchors Aweigh'' has become a screen classic and Fred Flintstone's ''yabba dabba doo'' and Yogi's ''smarter than the average bear'' became part of the language.

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