Are Hanna-Barbera cartoons really essential viewing to the Western side of animation...

Are Hanna-Barbera cartoons really essential viewing to the Western side of animation? People always say how amazing their stuff is but I really think a lot of them just fucking suck.

Original Tom & Jerry is great. Everything HB afterward is utter garbage with laughable animation.

At the very least, it's worth watching some of them to get an idea of what TV animation was usually like at the time.

Maybe in a historical context. They were the first half-hour made-for-television pieces of animation, the first prime time animated series, and for a while they dabbled in several different genres that targeted numerous demographics (before ultimately settling into mindless tedium).

They're important in regards to the development of animation for television, and some of them are admirable in their own way (the original Jonny Quest has some very mature material and excellent technical art if not so much actual animation).

But as pieces of legitimate entertainment to be watched in a vacuum without any historical context? Yeah, they're pretty bad.

It's all shit except Tom and Jerry and dick dastardly.

Well, yeah what can I say. Of all of what I've sampled or seen, I only really like Tom & Jerry. In particular I find Flinstones horribly tedious to marathon or watch over a long sitting.

Outside of select classic episodes of Where Are You, Flintstones, Jetsons, The Smurfs, and Tom & Jerry heir cartoons were ass. Possibly some Huckleberry Hound Show to get an idea of their really early stuff.

The grand majority of their many recycled works were so terrible they aren't even worth mentioning. Some of their most interesting stuff came from the Cartoon Network partnership with What a Cartoon! and obviously Cartoon Cartoons.

I am not the biggest Hanna Barbera fan, but I do love a couple of shows. They are The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Smurfs, Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, and Tom and Jerry

You forgot Yogi Bear

>not watching all of Hanna-Barbera
Unless you're some pleb, you might as well. Cartoons today are shit.

Scooby doo, the Flintstones, jetsons and yogi bear were entertaining.

Cartoons today are shit and yet most of them are better than the average HB cartoon. That's how fucking bad they were.

Out of all the cartoons in that image, Tom and Jerry is the only that is actually good. Maybe Flintstones as well but to a lesser degree. Scooby Doo is overrated and the rest of them are things you only watch once every few years or so just to see how stupid they actually were. And there's dozens of other Hanna Barbera shows that are just complete shit and have been forgotten to time because of it.

HB's ideas aren't bad, it's just he cuts to many corners that make japanese animators look like they are animating at 24fps for the entire tv shows

Tom and Jerry are pretty good.

School For is an icon, but if you've seen one episode of the original series you've seen them all.

The rest probably aren't worth your time unless you're just watching in order to analyze and dissect animation from that timeframe for some reason.

For historical reasons?

Yeah sure, they made some of the few cartoons from that era that didn't die from obscurity Filmation and really didn't have anyone competing with them so they had free reign over the cartoon side of television

Are they genuinely good?

No, like said before only Tom and Jerry was genuinely fun to watch, everything else you would need to watch a few selective episodes to enjoy

Jonny Quest, Herculoids and Hillbilly Bears are worth checking out as well.

I have watched a startling amount of Hanna-Barbera content. Much of it is mediocre or outright bad. Figured I'd take a crack at putting this list together.

ESSENTIAL HANNA-BARBERA VIEWING LIST

Tom and Jerry (theatrical shorts only)
The Flintstones (Peak is seasons 1 and 2. Past that you can just watch key episodes like birth of Pebbles or introduction of Great Gazoo, but you'll be watching it more for significance than quality)
The Jetsons (season one only)
Top Cat
Jonny Quest (original series only)
Yogi Bear (segments from both Huckleberry Hound Show and Yogi Bear Show)
Huckleberry Hound
Snagglepuss
QuickDraw McGraw
Touché Turtle (HB's most overlooked series, much better than it's given credit for)
Space Ghost
Birdman
Herculoids
Wacky Races (Just watch a few of these, it's very repetitive)
Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (The only essential Scooby show aside from Mystery Inc)

The studio sadly doesn't produce a single thing considered "essential" for the entire 70s and 80s. There's some iconic stuff like Smurfs or Superfriends, but it's hardly good. I like Dynomutt a lot personally but it's hardly essential. They produce plenty of essential stuff in the 90s like Dexter's Lab, Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, and Powerpuff Girls, but it's really only HB in-name-only.

This fuckin guy knows what's up.

I disagree on the subject matter of the Smurfs (but I'm not sure if it should count since that was HB adapting the work of Peyo. They sure as hell came up with *alot* of original story material, to be fair, but all the Smurf Clones they made ain't worth beans.

Thundarr the Barbarian should be watched just as the last Hurrah of Alex Toth's animation designs, though.

HB is the flash-animation of its time. Most of it was lazy and done for quick money

Your feeling is pretty much right

From what I've seen, HB had more movement and more consistently than anime at the time. But it still looked like shit, because just having stuff moving on the screen doesn't mean anything.

>Smurfs
>hardly good
The man with no taste.jpg