I grew up on cartoons.

It wasn't in the same way anyone else did, though. My dad, perenially entrenched in the 50s and 60s, raised me on his childhood TV shows, which, of course, included a vast number of cartoons. Not just the Flintstones reruns they showed on TV, either. I grew up educated with an extensive esoteric knowledge of obscure cartoon characters and the stories behind the cartoons. I knew, for instance, that The Flintstones was based loosely on The Honeymooners before anyone my age had ever heard of The Honeymooners (and well before Cedric the Entertainer did a remake. God, what were they thinking?).

Because of this "education" I grew up with a real appreciation for those in the animation business - Tex Avery quickly became my favorite Warner Brothers artist, but I always had a soft spot for William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.

The pair may have been two of the most influential people in television history, let alone cartoon history. Hanna-Barbera cartoons were the first cartoons actually made for TV, not for a movie theatre. Immediately, starting with Ruff and Reddy, Hanna and Barbera had changed television as we know it forever.

I have a particularly fond spot for The Flintstones. Most of our generation doesn't realize that The Flintstones was a primetime cartoon that was geared toward adults (more firsts in television history, which influenced all the primetime cartoons we so dearly love - The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, et cetera).

The duo also began incorporating product placement into their cartoons (which now isn't allowed in cartoons, but Hanna-Barbera's marriage of products and production was a precursor to all of the product placement we now see all the time on television and in movies). Huckleberry Hound, for instance, was introduced by Cornelius Rooster, the rooster on the front of the Corn Flakes boxes:



Things like this led to outright commercials starring cartoon characters, such as Yogi Bear for Kellogg's OK cereal (a blatant knockoff of Cheerios).

With The Flintstones being marketed toward adults and aired in primetime, product placement other than cereal was introduced, allowing for a full incorporation into the . You'll probably recognize the first sequence as an early opening sequence to The Flintstones (before the theme song). Watch the end of it:



Towards the end of the Flinstones, one would find this:



And the famous closing sequence was affected too:



Hanna and Barbera's influence didn't end in the 60s, despite the rapid decline of television cartoons in the 70s. In the early 90s, Turner bought Hanna-Barbera studios and added artists like Craig McCracken (PowerPuff Girls, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends), Seth McFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad), Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars), and Butch Hartman (Fairly Oddparents), Van Partible (Johnny Bravo), and David Feiss (Cow and Chicken). Cow and Chicken, Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, and Dexter's Laboratory were all official Hanna-Barbera productions. The others were influenced by the two legends.

William Hanna died in 2001. Joseph Barbera died two days ago, on the 18th. Their work literally spanned nearly three quarters of a century, but their influence will perpetually live on, as long as there are cartoons on TV.