Call for Papers: The Hanna-Barbera Anthology

Editor, Kevin Sandler, Arizona State University

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were the most prolific animation team in the United States during the twentieth century.  Their careers spanned the small artisanal film studios of Harman & Ising and Terrytoons in the 1930s through to the corporate halls of Cartoon Network in the 1990s. They are best known, however, for their work at MGM and for their television cartoons. At MGM, they produced and directed 114 Tom and Jerry shorts that center on the oftentimes violent interplay between the title characters, Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse.  The series was nominated for fourteen Academy Awards for Animated Short Film, winning seven and thus tying for first place with Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies for the most awards in the category.  After the MGM cartoon studio shut down in 1957, the duo co-founded their own television studio, Hanna-Barbera Productions, soon winning the first Emmy Award ever awarded for an animated series with The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1961) and launching the first animated prime-time half-hour with The Flintstones (1960-1966).  Hanna-Barbera went on to produce more than 3,000 animated half-hour television episodes as well as animated and live-action specials, theatrical features, telefilms, educational films, industrial films, and commercials featuring Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs, Yogi Bear, Josie and the Pussycats, The Jetsons, The Banana Splits, and others.  Arguably, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera usurped Walt Disney as the most successful animation studio in the world, with its characters ubiquitous across films, television series, DVDs, comic books, videogames, theme parks, and a myriad of consumer products that continue to this day.

The Hanna-Barbera Anthology will be the first edited volume on Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera and their studio, Hanna-Barbera, that features original pieces from scholars and practitioners in the field of animation, and film and media studies at large.  Given the dearth of research on these individuals and their company, The Hanna-Barbera Anthology invites contributions on a range of subjects from Hanna and Barbera’s early days at MGM to new material and programming based on their intellectual property under Warner Bros. Discovery.  These subjects include, but are by no means limited to:

•	Advertising and sponsorship
•	Aesthetics
•	Amusement parks
•	Assembly-line production
•	Branding
•	Cartoon Network
•	Comic books
•	Fandom
•	Feature filmmaking
•	Feminism
•	Franchising
•	Genre
•	HBO Max / Max
•	Industrial and recruitment films
•	Limited or Planned Animation
•	Live-action and animated telefilms and specials 
•	Localization
•	Media conglomeration
•	Merchandise licensing
•	Music and sound effects
•	Nostalgia
•	Performance
•	Race and ethnicity
•	Regulation and media reform
•	Runaway production
•	Saturday morning 
•	The Studio System
•	Syndication
•	Taft Broadcasting and Turner
•	Title sequences
•	Toys and consumer products and experiences
•	Transmedia
•	Videogames
•	Violence and media effects
•	Voice acting

Please submit proposals of 300-400 words with a short author biography via email attachment to Kevin Sandler at [log in to unmask] no later than September 15.  Notice of acceptance will be sent by September 30.  Abstracts will be submitted with a completed proposal to University of Texas Press by October 15.  Draft chapters of 7000-8000 words will be due no earlier than the end of 2024.  Please contact Kevin Sandler if you have any questions. Potential contributors are welcome to contact Kevin Sandler for more information or questions:

Dr. Kevin Sandler, Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies Program, Department of English, Arizona State University, [log in to unmask]

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