Trivia: The son of a construction superintendent for the Sante Fe railway stations, William Hanna was obliged to move around quite a bit as a youngster. Influenced by the preponderance of professional writers on his mother's side of the family, Hanna gravitated towards the creative arts in high school. He played saxophone in a dance band, then majored in journalism and engineering at Compton (California) Junior College. While looking for work in the early stages of the Depression, he landed a backstage engineering job at Hollywood's Pantages Theatre. Hanna's brother-in-law, who worked for a Hollywood lab called Pacific Title, tipped him off to a job opening at the Harman-Ising cartoon studios. From 1931 onward, Hanna contributed story ideas to Harman-Ising's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series, produced on behalf of Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros. He also wrote the music and lyrics for several of the catchy tunes heard in these animated endeavors. When Harman-Ising moved to MGM, they took Hanna along as a story editor. And when MGM formed its own animation department in 1937, Hanna was hired by department head Fred Quimby. It was while under the MGM banner that Hanna formed a copacetic (and, as it turned out, lifelong) partnership with cartoon director Joseph Barbera. While both men did a little bit of everything in their cartoon collaborations, Hanna regarded himself as the director and story man, while Barbera preferred to work out the various gags. Hanna-Barbera's most lasting contribution to the MGM operation was their "Tom and Jerry" series, which earned seven Academy Awards over a 20-year period. In 1957, MGM disbanded its cartoon unit, whereupon Hanna and Barbera formed their own company for the purposes of turning out TV animation. No one who has been born after 1950 needs to be reminded of the vast Hanna-Barbera TV output: Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, The Banana Splits and Scooby-Doo constitute but the tip of the iceberg. Busy as they were with their TV commitments, Hanna-Barbera occasionally found time to return to theatrical-feature work, including A Man Called Flintstone (1966), Charlotte's Web (1972) and Heidi's Song (1982). Even after selling their studio, both Hanna and Barbera remained active in the cartoon field; as recently as 1993, Hanna served as co-producer for the animated feature Once Upon a Forest. Though he's received a multitude of industry honors, it is said William Hanna is proudest of his 1985 "Distinguished Eagle Scout" award from the Boys Scouts of America, an organization with which he'd been associated since 1919.

Trivia: A man who made countless invaluable contributions to the development and use of animation in film, Maurice J. Noble had a strong creative hand in some of the most important and memorable works of animation in the 20th century. From his groundbreaking work in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to his memorable creations for Warner Bros., Noble's creations have been putting smiles on the faces of children of all ages for more than 50 years.Born in Spooner, MN, Noble studied watercolors at Choiunard Art Institute in Los Angeles on a scholarship, later beginning his career as a department store designer before joining the Walt Disney Co. as a background artist for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1934. Noble's unique innovations in color design were a major part of his contributions to Disney (including the memorable pink elephant sequence in Dumbo [1941]), as well his work on more than 60 Warner Bros. cartoons, including Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, The Bugs Bunny Show, The Road Runner Show, and The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. Noble's strong eye for composition and use of shapes were prevalent in the imaginative and humorously exaggerated Road Runner backdrops that he reinterpreted from his childhood memories of the desert. Serving during World War II in the Army Photographic Signal Corp. (which he had joined at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' request), Noble forged fruitful relationships with contemporaries Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel and famed Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones. After the war, he entered into a partnership with Jones that would span nearly 50 years; the duo were responsible for some of the most memorable Warner Bros. cartoons of the era. Teaming with Geisel in the 1960s, the trio created such Dr. Seuss classics as The Cat in the Hat (1972) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966). In 1965, Noble co-directed, along with Jones, the Oscar-winning animated short The Dot and the Line.Leaving the business for the duration of the 1970s, Noble returned in the early '80s, as a layout artist on Bugs Bunny's Third Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982) and Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island (1983). Later, he contributed designs to Chuck Jones Prods. and Warner Bros., before forming Maurice Noble Prods. In May 2001, animation pioneer Maurice J. Noble died in La Crescenda, CA. He was 91.