No other studio, not Disney, not Warner's, has created more familiar and beloved - or just plain more - cartoon characters than Hanna-Barbera, and just about all of them started life in the mind of Joe Barbera. He was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side and was raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn, by a doting mother and a father who made a bundle as a popular barber, only to gamble most of it away before finally bowing out on his family altogether. Fresh out of high school, young Joe spent six years chained to a desk in a Wall Street bank filling out income tax forms. There he discovered he couldn't add, but he knew he could draw, and after he saw Walt Disney's pioneering "Skeleton Dance" at a Roxy Theatre Matinee, he knew he wanted to draw animated cartoons.
This is Joe Barbera's story. Of coming up through New York's sweatshop studios during the early days of animation. Of trekking to Hollywood, where, with Bill Hanna, he created America's favorite cat and mouse, Tom and Jerry, and transformed MGM's struggling new cartoons studio into the envy of the industry and the winner of seven Academy Awards. This is the story of a Brooklyn boy let loose on Hollywood. Of making it big in that glittering town, only to have it all come crashing down when MGM closed its animation studio in 1957. Of picking up the pieces and using them to build a wondrous and wildly profitable cartoon kingdom in the brand-new world of television.
Up-front and personal, My Life in 'toons is not only compelling autobiography, it is the fascinating inside story of the art and industry of animation by one of its creators, who populated the world of children and adults alike with Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, The Jetsons, The Flintstones - television's first epoch-making prime-time animated sitcom - and many more. It is a warm, candid, harrowing, and hilarious tale of survival and success riding the juggernaut of Hollywood movie making and navigating the jungles of network television, wheeling, dealing, working - and coping - with the likes of Friz Freling, Tex Avery, Mel Blanc, Harry Cohn, Howard Hughes, Fred Silverman, Michael Eisner, Brandon Tartikoff, Ted Turner, Gene Kelly, Jose Ferrer, Harry Belafonte, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Michael Jackson.