Some of you may have already heard, but for those of you who havent, on December 18, 2006, Joseph Barbera died at the age of 95 from natural causes. The man who was one half of the production team which brought animated violence into the homes of America daily without generating the moral uproar you see with modern cartoons. He brought the world cartoons like "Tom & Jerry", "Top Cat", "The Flintstones", and "Scooby Doo". These are cartoons fueled by subjects avoided by some modern cartoons on television (violence and animal abuse, police incompotence and shady business, marital troubles and spousal abuse, and a van of hippies with a dog who could talk and a chickan who always had the munchies ^_^). But some how Joseph Barbera saw the line between appropriate and inappropriate that is commonly trampled on today by some of today's cartoonists.
The man was a genius in his own right (although I'm still dissapointed with Hanna-Barbera for cutting production costs at the expence of quality during the late 60's, but cartooning never was a very profitable business). He will be remembered (hopefully not for the cheap junk he produced in his later years... I mean in several of the Tom & Jerry cartoons you can clearly see where they just clipped and edited together several older cartoons just to make a new one-_-).
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