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In 1995, I launched Hanna-Barbera Cartoons into the animation industry’s largest cartoon shorts program since the 1950s. Our sister company, Cartoon Network, would play each of the 48 shorts before their Sunday night movie. These shorts represented maybe the largest commitment to new talent the company had ever launched, and was certainly the largest talent outreach in the animation industry of the 90s and 00s.
Here are 147 video frames from these 48 shorts*, including Craig McCraken’s The Powerpuff Girls, David Feiss’ Cow and Chicken, Van Partible’s Johnny Bravo, Seth MacFarlane’s Larry & Steve, Butch Hartman’s Gramps, and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory.
*To straighten some misinformation that’s flying around the internet, the What A Cartoon! program (originally promoted on Cartoon Network as World Premiere Toons and then as Cartoon Cartoon) was 48 cartoon shorts (not 82 as been erroneously reported). For the first 20 or so, the production tag at the end of each short was from “Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.” Then, there was a bunch of whining around Turner Broadcasting HQ in Atlanta that, because Cartoon Network was the sole exhibitor of the shorts, that the company should rename the company “Cartoon Network Studios.” No decision was made at the time, but to placate the complainers, a “Cartoon Network Studios” tag was added to the final 18 shorts. Finally, when Turner was sold to Time Warner, for a short time Hanna-Barbera was subsumed by Warner Bros. Animation, and then more grumbling caused another split about 18 months later, they split again and the former Hanna-Barbera crews were relocated in Burbank and Cartoon Network Studios was official.
But, make no mistake, all the What A Cartoon! shorts were produced by Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. All of them.