Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. ( HAN-ə bar-BAIR-ə, - BAR-bər-ə), also variously known as H-B Enterprises, H-B Production Co., and Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc., is a former American animation studio and production company that was founded in 1957 by Tom and Jerry creators and former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and remained active until 2001.
Hanna and Barbera dominated television with a wide variety of animated series, including The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, The Yogi Bear Show, The Jetsons, Wacky Races, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and The Smurfs. Winner of eight Emmy Awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, their studio was a prominent presence in American television animation for five decades.
Taft Broadcasting bought the studio in 1966 and retained ownership until 1987. By the 1980s, as the profitability of Saturday-morning cartoons was eclipsed by weekday afternoon syndication, Hanna-Barbera's fortunes had declined. In 1991, Turner Broadcasting System purchased it from Taft (which had been renamed Great American Broadcasting in 1988) and used much of its back catalog as programming for Cartoon Network and later Boomerang.
Hanna and Barbera continued to serve as creative consultants and mentors at their studio, which would become a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Animation after Turner's merger with Time Warner in 1996, before being absorbed into that studio and former division Cartoon Network Studios after Hanna's death in 2001. Barbera died in 2006. Time Warner (renamed to WarnerMedia) was in turn acquired by AT&T in 2018.
Since the studio's closure, Warner Bros. has continued to produce new programming based on Hanna-Barbera's legacy properties, including Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo.
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