Hanna-Barbera’s Cacophony: Sound Effects and the Production of Movement

Building a library

While Hanna-Barbera Productions drastically broke from the visual and animation styles that dominated classical animation, best represented by Disney and defined by its fluid rendering of movement, the studio did use the sonic techniques of its progenitors. Generally, adding sound effects to animation can be divided into two methods – performance-based synchronization or the use of a library of sound effects. For the performance method, Foley artists would play along with musicians and would be cued by a conductor. Disney favored this method. This process is on display in their 1941 film The Reluctant Dragon.

The performance-based synchronization of sound effects echoes silent-era cinema tradition, where musicians (often percussionists) would add sound effects to the screening of the picture. ⁵ A main characteristic of this method is the tight synchronization between visual movement, music, and sound effects. As Taberham (2018: 132) explains, the use of this performance-based method was in part influenced by the limitations of sound recording technology at the beginning of synchronized sound cartoons.

With developments in sound recording technology – better signal-to-noise ratio that enabled overdubbing and unidirectional microphones that allowed for greater isolation of sounds in the recording process – a new mode developed for pairing sound effects to the image. Sound effects could be recorded individually, either in a studio or in the field, and then be cut into the soundtrack. Thus, the creation of a sound effect becomes disarticulated from the recording of music and the pairing with an image. This disarticulation affords the creation of a library of sound effects. After a sound effect is created and captured, studios duplicate the sound over and over again onto 1,000-foot reels of optical film or, later, quarter-inch magnetic tape (Collins, 2019). ⁶ Hanna-Barbera Productions would originally work with optical film and then make the transfer to magnetic tape in the 1960s. From these rolls, film editors – what we might call sound editors or sound designers today – would cut footage to pair with the animation. Indeed, the process of creating, selecting, and cutting in sound effects fell to these film editors, who also linked up animation footage and cut in dialogue and music. Treg Brown and his work at Warner Bros. Cartoons might best emblematize this method of creating sound effects, and would influence the future of animation sound, Hanna-Barbera included. Brown’s work can be heard in Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. His work has created a collection of iconic sound effects.

While this process separated the process of recording sound effects and music, Brown worked closely with the composer/musical director of cartoons to integrate sound effects and music, creating the sound of Warner Bros. cartoons. Indeed, many of the orchestration scores from Carl Stalling – who scored many of Warner Bros. cartoons – contain marks that reveal he intended to leave space for sound effects. For instance, in the conducting score for the 1955 Looney Tunes short ‘Guided Muscle’, a note states, ‘(sound effect not with orch)’ (Stalling, 1955). Stalling’s score would provide musical-based sound effects with Brown cutting in effects and expanding the sonic palette of the cartoons. Together, Brown and Stalling tightly integrated the music and sound effects. Warner Bros. cartoons look like Warner Bros. cartoons, the music sounds like Warner Bros. and, indeed, even the sound effects sound like Warner Bros. cartoons.

Hanna-Barbera Productions adopted a similar practice and developed a library of sound effects. Initially, the TV animation studio drew on sound effects that Hanna and Barbera brought with them from MGM’s library. Hanna and Barbera had worked as producers in MGM’s animation division, largely associated with the popular and critically acclaimed Tom and Jerry shorts. But, in 1957, MGM closed its animation division and laid off Hanna and Barbera. MGM’s closure was part of an overall industry-wide crisis, which was largely a result of the Paramount Decision, the rising cost of animation, and an ample stock of animated shorts to recycle for theatrical releases. Throughout the 1950s, numerous animation studios or divisions closed or drastically downsized. This industrial reorganization is registered by animation’s shift from a predominantly cinema-based form to a television-based one, as well as a shift from full animation defining US animation output to limited animation.

When Hanna and Barbera left MGM, they brought with them film editor Greg Watson, who had worked on Tom and Jerry shorts. Before leaving MGM, Watson went through the studio’s sound effects library, which dated back to 1937, taking ones he thought would be difficult and expensive to re-create, such as ricochets, jets, and trains (Sound Ideas, 1995: np). As Hanna-Barbera Productions’ first film editor – indeed, one of the studio’s first employees – Watson began expanding this original collection of MGM sounds into Hanna-Barbera’s library of sound effects. These MGM sound effects can be heard in the earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as The Ruff and Reddy Show (1957–1960), The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958–1961), and Quick Draw McGraw (1959–1961). Over roughly the first decade of the studio, Watson, Ken Spears, Don Douglas, and Pat Foley, through astonishing Foley work – padding hands against leather sofas, blowing up balloons, rubbing hands against glass for squeaks – and drawing on the musical department for a steady supply of percussive sounds, created Hanna-Barbera’s library of sound effects (Spears and Ruby, 2012). ⁷ Indeed, in 1965, the studio released a selection of its sound effects on vinyl for use on radio, titled Drop-Ins Volume One, and in 1973, the studio began to sell its ‘The Hanna-Barbera Library of Sounds’, which contained over 400 hours of material (Hanna Barbera Sound-Effects Series Begun, 1973: 71). ⁸ The studio’s sound effects began to circulate beyond their animated programs. Speaking further to the circulation of sound effects, editors typically would bring their library with them when they were hired and take it with them when they left for a new job (Collins, 2019). As a result, sound effects circulated throughout postproduction.

While Hanna-Barbera adopted the process of creating a library of sound effects from theatrical animation, sounds that circulate on television create a different experiential effect than cinema. Typically, theatrical animation shorts would be experienced as part of a larger bill, so the spectator would get six to eight minutes of animation and its sounds before a full-length feature and would only experience animation’s sounds with the next trip to the cinema. But network-era television afforded a different sonic experience. A cascade of zips, zaps, whizzes, and bonks flooded the audience’s ears on a regular basis. Weekly episodes, multiple concurrent series, and reruns – staples of the cultural form of US television – brought viewers into contact with Hanna-Barbera Productions’ sound effects during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s far more regularly – not to mention more intimately, since those sounds were heard in the home – than cinema.

While sound effects in cinema recur with frequency in theatrical animation, network-era TV’s weekly, repetitious schedule allowed for a greater frequency of this recycling of sound effects. Animation critic Leonard Maltin, backed by an unnamed child, critiques the repetition inherent in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons: ‘even a ten-year-old began to recognize (and tire of) the repetition in each show; the same canned music, the same gags, the same sound effects, and gimmicks, and the same characters, only in different guises’ (Maltin, 1975: 77). Yet, it is this repetition that engraved these sound effects into a generation of TV viewers, made Hanna-Barbera’s library of sound effects iconic, and helped define what television cartoons would sound like. ⁹ For instance, Nickelodeon’s Rocko’s Modern Life (1993–1996) and The Ren and Stimpy Show (1991–1995) frequently drew on the studio’s library of sound effects, and the effects still continue to appear in cartoons such as PBS’s Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood (2012–) and Disney’s Muppet Babies (2018–).

Hanna-Barbera used singular instances of sound effects repetitiously in individual episodes; that is, Hanna-Barbera would allow a skid, zip whistle, crash, or thud of a tom drum to occur multiple times in a single episode of a series. While these sound effects would often be brief sonic punctuations – an individual sonic effect standing on its own – the studio would sometimes produce chains of sound effects like zips, crashes, or thuds in particular arrangements. Like individual sound effects, these arrangements would be used multiple times in a single episode. For instance, in The Flintstones episode ‘Dino Goes Hollyrock’ (originally aired 14 September 1962), we are given a chain of sound effects to sonically underscore Barney acting like a pet dog in order to teach Dino tricks, particularly to play dead. In the following sequence, when Dino himself plays dead, the audience hears the same chain of sound effects (though slightly extended). Both chains occur with the act of playing dead, both in the center of the episode. It is hard not to pick up on the sonic duplication at the heart of this episode. By reproducing a chain of sound effects, Hanna-Barbera extends the sonic event of duplication. Through this increased duration, the sound effects become more conspicuous; they stand out in the episode’s soundscape.

The repetition of sound effects was not restricted to specific episodes or series. The studio would reuse a single sound effect within the same show, the same series, and across different productions. For instance, in ‘Yogi Bear’s Big Break’ – a segment of The Huckleberry Hound Show – Yogi, with the help of Boo-Boo, makes numerous attempts to escape Jellystone Park. During a failed escape attempt, Yogi is almost run over by a camper’s car. Visually, the car is rendered as a sliding cel against the painted background. Over this sliding cel plays the sound of screeching rubber. Hanna-Barbera would repeat this sound throughout its works. A decade later, this screech of rubber would become a persistent sonic element in Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Escaping from monsters, Shaggy and Scooby recklessly run through their haunted environs and often unsuccessfully attempt to quickly stop. Like the car in Yogi’s cartoon, Shaggy and Scooby slide across the frame accompanied by a screech of rubber. Super Friends would revisit this sound in its pilot episode ‘The Power Pirate’ (originally aired 8 September 1973). Marvin and Wendy chase the titular pirate through an electric power plant. Like the Jellystone camper’s car and Shaggy and Scooby, Marvin and Wendy’s cels slide against the background, aberrantly animating their bodies. Again with Marvin and Wendy of the Super Friends, the screech of rubber accompanies the characters’ stop. This coupling of characters braking with their feet to the screech of rubber repeats throughout Hanna-Barbera’s catalog of cartoons. Indeed, this skid, one of the most innocuous sounds in Hanna-Barbera’s library, could and would be reproduced for any number of sound effects.

While a skid sound might be thought to lack sonic specificity, Hanna-Barbera would continually reproduce some of its more creative and expressive sound effects across its range of shows. For instance, in the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode ‘Foul Play in Funland’ (originally aired 1 November 1969), when the automaton appears on-screen, a space-age electronic warble plays. This warbling electronic sound is from Hanna-Barbera’s The Jetsons (ABC, 1962–1963). In ‘Foul Play in Funland’, the electronic sound acts as a motif for the robot. As a motif, it is longer in duration than most sound effects and more noticeable. Moreover, its specificity – you can only have so many shows in space or with robots – limits its aural recycling. Its electronic quality seems to signal a particular time.

While a skid may go unnoticed and the ethereal warbles of robots play only once in a while, Hanna-Barbera was not beyond recycling distinct and expressive sounds. The sound effect that the studio might be best known for is the one paired with the repetitious revolutions of legs: a frantic burst of what sounds like bongos. Hanna-Barbera would continually map this sound effect to characters’ dashes, consequently making this block roll one of Hanna-Barbera’s most memorable sound effects which, in the studio’s sound effect library, is titled ‘Run, Cartoon Temple Block Riot, Short’.

It is unsurprising that Hanna-Barbera would develop and then heavily use a library of sound effects given the budgetary and scheduling demands of television. Performing new sound effects for every show was costly. While creating a sound effect for a library might have costs up front during the initial recording, the production cost afterward was effectually nothing. Film editors could quickly draw from this library and pair sound effects with the image. And this workflow was of the upmost importance for Hanna-Barbera’s schedule. For, while Treg Brown would take at least a week to create, design, and pair sound effects of a Warner Bros. cartoon, editors at Hanna-Barbera would have about two to three days to complete this process (Collins, 2019; Freleng, 1969: 89–90). Given this accelerated scheduling, it is no wonder that sound effects were put to use over and over again to serve the same purpose in Hanna-Barbera’s animated worlds. Driven by a demanding schedule and restrictive budget, Hanna-Barbera Productions created, grew, and extensively used its sound effects library. The studio’s sound effects repetitiously played throughout television’s airwaves.

Woven into individual episodes, across entire series, and throughout the studio’s different productions, Hanna-Barbera’s technique of drawing on a library of sound effects repetitiously engraves these effects into its animated worlds. From its initial cartoons of the late 1950s through the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera’s library of sound effects floated across the airwaves into American homes. Indeed, by having an almost identical chain of sound effects occur within a single episode, Hanna-Barbera seemed to care little about the audience noticing these sound effects. Rather, what they cared about was maintaining a ‘convincing illusion of movement’ (Hanna and Ito, 1996: 84). In the worlds of the cartoons, these sound effects – the screech of rubber for the simple stop of feet, the undulating warble for a robot’s walk, and frantic burst of bongos for a run – would come to aurally express movement in the reduced-movement worlds of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons.

Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation production

Hanna and Barbera knew that their sound effects were important to creating the studio’s animated worlds, particularly in terms of movement. In an interview, Barbera (Sound Ideas, 1995: np) states, ‘We realized early on that sound effects were just as important in limited animations as they were in full animation. In fact, more important.’ Barbera’s quote not only points out the importance of sound effects, but also that sound effects stand in a different relationship to full animation than they do to limited animation. That is, they operate differently within the audiovisual totality of full animation and limited animation. It is the latter of these, limited animation, that Hanna-Barbera Productions used to create all of its television productions from the close of the 1950s (The Ruff and Reddy Show) until the 1990s (The Pirates of Dark Water). Because of how sound effects operate within a cartoon hinges on the mode of animation, this section briefly sketches the techniques of limited animation and their effect on movement.

Though Hanna-Barbera was not the first studio to produce limited animation on TV, its limited animation productions proved wildly popular for several decades and proliferated limited animation’s particular audiovisual economy across TV’s airwaves. ¹⁰ While television’s schedule and budget, in effect, precludes full animation production, the thrifty and quick techniques of limited animation enable original television cartoons. Full animation shorts by Disney, MGM, and Warner Bros. would cost tens of thousands of dollars and would take months to produce. For instance, MGM studio’s classical full animation cost $35,000 for a seven-minute short (Hanna and Ito, 1996: 82). Limited animation could be produced for a fraction of the money and time. Each five-minute episode of Crusader Rabbit cost a mere $200, and even against the lavish budgets of Hollywood’s animation studios, the budget of $2,700 for the pilot of The Ruff and Reddy Show appears infinitesimal. Through the budget-saving process of limited animation, Hanna-Barbera Productions saturated TV airwaves with its cartoons.

The differences between full and limited animation largely hinge on a distinction between how each mode of animation creates visual movement. With full animation, an animator draws 24 original draws per second of film, the same number of frames per second of film. By matching original drawings to number of frames, animators can create lifelike movement that echoes live-action cinema. Conversely, with limited animation, an animator would use a myriad of techniques to reduce the production of original drawings. While full animation can produce, and typically strives for, lifelike movement, limited animation creates a kinetic economy not defined by cinematic or lifelike movement but rather one punctuated with stillness and aberrant motion. ¹¹ With limited animation, movement is stripped back. These two different modes of animation produce different visual constructions of movement, constructions that have distinct interactions with sound and sound effects.

Limited animation employs numerous techniques that reduce the number of drawings. A key method for reducing the number of drawings is to repeat a single drawing multiple times. Full animation typically keeps the number of sequential repetitions to a minimum, animating with a combination of what is known as ‘in ones’ and ‘in twos’. For ‘in ones’, a new drawing is used for each frame, and for ‘in twos’, a new drawing is used every two frames. Limited animation intensifies this process and not only animates ‘in twos’ but also ‘in threes’, ‘in fours’, ‘in fives’, etc., repeating a drawing numerous times in a sequence of frames. Increasing the number of times one particular drawing is used in the flow of animation is not the only technique limited animation uses to save on time and money. Marc Steinberg (2006: 198–199), writing on Astro Boy (1963–1966, a Japanese proto-anime), provides a succinct outline of limited animation’s other common techniques: stop-images, pull-cels, repetition, sectioning, reusing cels, and short shot length. Hanna-Barbera Productions would engage in all of these practices. However, stop-images, pull-cels, repetition, and sectioning are key in the studio’s construction of visual movement. Each of these creates limited animation’s aberrant construction of movement as they stress animation’s production of movement often to the point of stillness. The stasis that emerges from limited animation is clearest in the stop-image technique, which is simply a ‘single, still image’ or what, in a non-animation context, would be called a freeze frame (Steinberg, 2006: 198–199). Hanna-Barbera frequently uses the stop-image for crashes and other collisions. Characters or objects fly out of frame, leaving only the background image in view, and a ‘shake’ of the camera and a burst of percussion render the off-screen crash. By lingering on a single frame, stop-images save on the production of drawings and produce stillness in the animation.

While animating ‘in threes’ and utilizing stop-images yield an overall stillness in the image, the techniques of pull-cels, repetition, and sectioning all change movement within the image. With pull-cels, movement in the image emerges via a changing relationship between the background and foreground. This relational construction of movement is a key visual form in limited animation. To diminish the number of drawings further, Hanna-Barbera makes frequent use of repetition or the looping of a sequence of drawings. While full animation uses this technique as well, Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation frequently loops backgrounds, often having the characters pass the same landscape over and over again. Moreover, Hanna-Barbera often couples this visual repetition with the technique of sectioning, where only part of a character’s body moves. In Hanna-Barbera, the most notable example of this occurs during dialogue. Characters’ mouths and heads move while the body, arms, and legs remain completely static. This has the effect of isolating movement to a section of the image, causing characters to move awkwardly.

In sum, this collection of techniques reduces the production cost and time of creating animation by saving on the amount of drawings needed to create movement. Yet, this economic imperative translates into a radically different visual construction of movement. Stillness often punctuates the flow of movement, static drawings slide, sequences endlessly repeat, and characters move awkwardly. Over the course of the network era, Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation continually brought aberrant movement, erratic motion, and stillness to the television screen.

Limited animation’s alteration of visual movement entails a shift in its aural register as well. In fact, animation scholar Maureen Furniss (2007: 135–138) positions limited animation’s use of sound to maintain the story line as a key difference from full animation. In discussions of sound and limited animation, dialogue has typically been singled out. Throughout their careers, Hanna and Barbera continually praised their voice actors for bringing the studio’s cartoons to life. Additionally, they singled out dialogue as a central sonic form in producing movement in their cartoons. In his autobiography, Hanna writes:

We reasoned that by animating only key poses and selected drawings that dramatized or emphasized the cartoon’s dialogue, we could artfully reduce the overall amount of drawings used in a television cartoon and still produce the convincing illusion of movement in the film. (Hanna and Ito, 1996: 84, emphasis added)

In what follows, I trace the ways sound effects produce a sense of movement in relationship to the visuals of Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation. As we will see, sound effects – like dialogue – carried the illusion of movement in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons.

Producing movement

Hanna-Barbera Productions turned to its sound effects to bring its cartoon worlds to life. These sounds helped to create a sensation of movement, especially when no visual, animated movement was present. In this section, I closely read a number of moments where sound effects enliven the animated image. These moments were selected throughout Hanna-Barbera’s oeuvre in order to demonstrate a consistency to the studio’s logic in pairing kinetically anemic visuals with sounds that evoke movement. The movement that Hanna-Barbera’s sound effects evoke is most often the trajectory of an object on screen. When cels slide, rotate, stand still, and otherwise awkwardly move, Hanna-Barbera persistently pairs these techniques of limited animation with sound effects that evoke trajectory.

The use of sound effects to enhance a sensation of movement and action did not begin with Hanna-Barbera or limited animation. Rather, it is strongly associated with the classical animation of Warner Bros., in particular the work of Chuck Jones and Tex Avery and the sound effects work of Treg Brown, discussed earlier. Norman Klein (1993: 172–173), in his study of the history of classical animation, labels this the ‘zip-crash school’, where shorts were driven by the chase as a series of gags and sound effects were used to accentuate the action – a zip of the character off-screen and then a crash. Hanna and Barbera’s work with Tom and Jerry at MGM falls squarely within this school of animation sound. Drawing on this history, Hanna-Barbera Productions would popularize this method of sound design in TV limited animation. In their cartoons, sound effects such as zips, skids, and boinks not only enhance the overall sensation of movement but also supplant the visual movement created through animation. Indeed, we might say the visuals enhance sound’s creation of movement; at the very least, we are unsure what enhances what.

Building on Michel Chion’s (1994: 120–122) claim that animation sound is indebted to children’s renderings of trajectory via sound, I offer the term ‘trajectory mimesis’ to encapsulate Hanna-Barbera’s persistent use of sound effects to evoke movement in its limited animation. As mentioned in the introduction, trajectory mimesis is the sonic evocation of trajectory, which is made legible by the minimal movement in the image (Chion, 1994: 121). This term accounts for this evocation and allows for a conceptual recalibration of animation sound, particularly with the rise of limited animation and the television cartoon.

Since what I am calling trajectory mimesis has long been seen under the umbrella of mickey mousing, it will be of use to first address this practice and how trajectory mimesis differs from it. The coupling of sound and image based on movement – a kinetic resonance between sound and image over a representational one – has a strong tradition in animation and has often been thought of in terms of mickey mousing (Curtis, 1992: 191–203). ¹² Mickey mousing – or what Scott Curtis, removing its studio specific connotations, calls syncretic sound, offers an aural analogy for visual movement. As the name implies, mickey mousing predates Hanna-Barbera’s TV animation and was popularized by Disney. Lea Jacobs (2015: 58), writing on the sonic complexity of Disney’s Silly Symphonies, defines it as follows:

[Micky mousing] encompasses a number of different aspects of the relationship between music and action, and music and other sounds. Most important for my purposes is the idea of a tight synchronization between movement and/or cutting and the beat. But it is also used to refer to the musical mimesis of physical movement, as in the use of a glissando when a character slides down a rope. The term is also sometimes applied more generally to any tight integration of music and sound effects, as in the use of what is supposedly a frog’s croak in the place of a bassline note.

Mickey mousing denotes a strict wedding between rhythms established in the visual and aural registers. It precisely marks – in terms of rhythm and, therefore, movement – that one of these registers does not outstrip the other. With full, smooth animation constructing the image track and sound tightly accompanying this visual movement, mickey mousing denotes a lockstep sync of sound and image. This mapping creates a strong rhythmic beat to cartoons that deploy the technique. Mickey mousing, however, does not mark an excess of kinesis between the sonic and visual registers. Conversely, Hanna-Barbera’s pairing of limited animation and sonic evocation of movement does just that. The studio’s pairing creates an excess of kinesis between sound and image. In the visual register, movement is reduced, aberrant, and, thus, continually destabilized, and Hanna-Barbera uses sound effects to infuse movement back into the image. The studio couples kinetically anemic visuals to kinetically excessive sounds. Therefore, there is a kinetic imbalance between Hanna-Barbera’s sounds and images. So, while tight audiovisual sync and the sonic mimesis of movement have been terminologically conflated, in limited animation their relationship to the movement of the visual register differentiates them.

Of course, moments of mickey mousing as an audiovisual rhythmic sync appear in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons, yet they define the sound/image relationship far less than the musical mimesis of movement that Jacobs (2015: 58) identifies as a key part of the definition of mickey mousing. Trajectory mimesis’s ascension in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons is motivated by the studio’s use of limited animation. This style of animation forestalls the fluid production of movement. Its play of stillness and motion continually produces aberrant, arrhythmic movement. The arrhythmic kinetic economy of limited animation does not produce a favorable sound/image relationship for mickey mousing. This is because mickey mousing demands rhythm in the aural and visual registers as discussed above and thus a flow and duration of movement. Trajectory mimesis operates otherwise. It needs neither extended duration nor rhythm. This sonic form emerges most often to glue or stitch limited animation’s cels and shots together. Hanna-Barbera frequently and persistently couples trajectory mimesis to moving drawings, that is, pull-cels. In limited animation, trajectory mimesis produces an abundance of sonic movement that attempts to mask aberrant motion and stasis.

Trajectory mimesis flourishes in the moving drawings and quick cuts of Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation. This sonic form does not ground its sound/image relationship in cinematic realism and representational mimesis, but rather in a relationship between sound and kinesis. It inundates the soundscapes of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons with wacky sound effects. Throughout the studio’s catalog, sounds continually imitate movement. A brilliant example happens in the sixth episode of The Flintstone’s first season, ‘The Monster From the Tar Pits’ (originally aired 4 November 1960). While initially smug and skeptical about Wilma, Betty, and Barney being starstruck and annoyed that Hollyrock is filming a movie in Bedrock, Fred finally becomes enamored by show business when he is offered the part of the titular monster. Fred dons the costume and comes home to greet an unsuspecting Wilma. Wilma screams and, overtaken with terror from the monster on her doorstep, faints. Her body stays perfectly still as she falls to the floor. Her posture remains stiff and her expression changes only mildly. While Wilma’s scream contains multiple cels of animation, her collapse is visually rendered through the slow rotation of a single cel clockwise, which then exits from the bottom of the frame. She finally slips from the bottom of the frame – her fall against the floor rendered by a crash of a cymbal and the shake of the camera.

Wilma’s rotation against the abstract background of the Flintstone’s interior home, devoid of any discernible features, is quite noticeable. A form of stillness becomes visible in the moving image. This constellation of limited animation techniques greatly reduces the movement between and in the frames. Accompanying Wilma’s descent, a slide whistle plays on the soundtrack. Music echoes Wilma’s trajectory. The downward portamento of the whistle provides a musical mimesis of Wilma’s fall. While the musical descent could have been expressed in a number of ways, the choice of a whistle and its ability to continually express a pitch change further adds fluidity to the image. What is most important is how a sonic continuous duration masks the static sequences of images. Lasting only a couple of seconds, this is most often the way trajectory mimesis is used in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons –fleeting sonic instances that help to gloss over the immobility and aberrant movement of the visuals. Continually throughout Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons, characters’ movements are broken down into a series of frames that are awkwardly wedded. The studio consistently pairs these moments to kinetic sonic effects, producing trajectory mimesis.

Occasionally, trajectory mimesis emerges beyond the instant to a euphonious chain of sounds. In ‘Dino Goes Hollyrock’, mentioned earlier, Dino plays dead for an audition. Foregoing the typical trained dog act of playing dead, Dino gives a drawn-out death performance à la Shakespearian theater. Emerging from a doorway, Dino coughs and gasps for air, shambles left across the frame, pulling a tablecloth that causes a vase to crash (again off screen). Finding his final resting place, Dino, in an exaggerated fall to the ground, arcs through the air, spins, and crashes against the floor. Dino’s arc through the air is visually rendered by the use of a single static cel rotated into six different positions, with each position given two frames. Again on the soundtrack, a slide whistle plays, matching Dino’s arc. It slides quickly up, then down as Dino lands on his head. His landing is matched with the hollow sound of a tom drum, comically implying the emptiness of Dino’s skull. Visually, the camera shakes up and down. On his head, Dino spins in a counterclockwise circle. The show animates the spin via four different cels: the back of Dino, a right profile, a straight on, and a left three-quarter shot. Adding to the overall effect of movement, circular motion lines swirl around Dino’s body as he spins. A ratchet provides the sonic accompaniment to Dino’s spin. In a refreshing break from pitch, the ratchet provides a subtle circular rhythm that emerges through its oscillation in tonal quality. Dino’s spin ends, and he comes crashing to the ground.

What is so striking here is that little change exists within the cel. With Dino’s fall, movement in the image is not produced through traditional animation. The cartoon foregoes a succession of drawings. In place of animated movement, motion emerges through the rotating of the cel. Furthermore, the sliding cel is, again, aurally coupled to a descending whistle sound, followed by a cymbal crash and a shake of the camera as Dino’s body slams to the ground. Camera movement (‘tracking shots’ and camera shakes) and the rotating of cels constitute much of the movement in this scene; Hanna-Barbera animates sparingly. While cost and time effective, these techniques forego fluid, lifelike movement and often produce aberrant, awkward motion. But the aural movement of the sound effects helps the aberrant motion of the animation flow and smooths over the awkward visuals. Arching pitch and timbral oscillation produce an abundance of sonic movement in the absence of visual motion. This aural abundance, coupled with the stilted movements of Dino’s death, produces a kinetic asynchrony between the image and sound track. The image presents a fractured arc of movement and the soundtrack plays the continuous durative sound of a slide whistle and ratchet.

The zany antics of the Flintstones and their friends create situation after situation of physical comedy that prompted moments of trajectory mimesis. As Fred and crew zip across the screen, whistles, strings, and percussion aurally underscored the image with kinetic sounds. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! would continue the comedic pairing of pull-cels with this form. In reckless runs from monsters and all manner of meanies, cowardly Shaggy and Scooby haphazardly slide, fly, and tumble across the screen, typically as moving drawings and sonically paired with trajectory mimesis. For comedic effect, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! expands the sonic form to moments of paranormal activity, where aberrant movement appears motivated by otherworldly forces. For instance, as Shaggy and Scooby travel around the haunted fairground in ‘Foul Play in Funland’, rides, games, and concession stands run on their own. An operational food stand prompts Shaggy to order a malted shake and a hot dog with all the trimmings. As a pull-cel, the food enters the frame, sliding across the countertop. On the soundtrack, strings play a descending glissando, echoing the visual slide. While Hanna-Barbera often used wacky sound effects during comedic moments, generic hybridity of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! – ‘paranormal’ mystery and comedy – affords other uses.

While the pairing of comedy and action motivates much of the trajectory mimesis in The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Super Friends would continue to expand the uses of trajectory mimesis to moments of action devoid of intentional comedy. In the cartoon, characters’ movements are often rendered, like Wilma and Dino’s falls, as a sliding cel against a background image, often accompanied by a minimally animated fluttering cape. As Superman’s static body or Wonder Woman in her invisible jet rip through the air, a rush of white noise, imitating movement, sonically supplements the aberrant movement of the image. And flight is not the only superpower to elicit trajectory mimesis. For example, in the Super Friends episode ‘The Balloon People’ (originally aired 3 November 1973), an alien race called the Balunians comes to Earth, escaping the ecological devastation of their home planet. As their name suggests, they have the physical properties of a balloon. They can float as well as deflate and expand. The Balunians’ floating is visually rendered as a pull-cel but, somewhat surprisingly, their floating is not accompanied by trajectory mimesis. However, their ability to deflate and expand continually is. They first expand when Wonder Dog (the canine member of the Justice League) accidentally frightens the Balunians, prompting them to rapidly expand. The Balunians’ expansion is visualized as a magnification of the cel. On the soundtrack, a rustling of air and a clear, synthesized note rising in pitch plays. Conversely, when they shrink to hide from the Super Friends, a continuous, descending note accompanies the sound of air. Trajectory mimesis played across genres and was not solely limited to comedic moments. Rather, it would emerge any time movement was needed.

Conclusion

Drawing on their library of sound effects, Hanna-Barbera would lean on the sonic form of trajectory mimesis in a variety of instances when limited animation’s drawings aberrantly moved and were kinetically wanting. Sound effects filled in and completed the visual movement not unlike the function Hanna saw in the studio’s use of dialogue, which was to maintain a sense of life in the cartoons. Sound effects, dialogue, and music all maintained and further created a sensation of movement in the studio’s kinetically reduced animation. While dialogue would drive narrative, and music would keep an overall rhythm to the cartoon, sound effects slipped between the verbal banter and memorable themes to stitch the very cels of animation together and, in the process, propelled the action of the cartoons forward. The sections of the soundtrack worked together to create an aural-focus to the cartoons, where narrative, comedy and, in many ways, action were provided sonically. Sound completes the image in limited animation. Through trajectory mimesis, the studio created animation that allows us to listen to as much as watch the antics of their characters moving across the screen.

The sonic focus of the cartoons, where trajectory mimesis provides an aural instantiation of movement, finds a parallel in general conceptualizations of TV sound as infusing the TV image, as completing the image. For better or worse, TV, particularly during the network years when Hanna-Barbera’s popularity boomed, is a sonically driven medium. ¹³ In many ways, Jones’s condemnation of limited animation as ‘illustrated radio’ might hold for all of TV. Speaking to this, sound studies scholar Rick Altman writes that ‘every television includes a radio. In fact, the television in one sense is just a radio with images’ (Altman, 2004: 16). While limited animation’s production techniques made animation economically viable on TV, Hanna-Barbera’s sonically driven animation, which sound effects played a large part in creating, was in sympathy with television’s own aurality. The audiovisual formation of Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation was at home on television and, indeed, the studio stayed there for many years.

In having sound effects persistently serve in the sonic register as aural instantiations of trajectory, Hanna-Barbera created not only a mode of animation that matched understandings about TV’s sound and image relations but also a design or logic that intensified the potential for recycling sound effects. The studio’s kinetically anemic visuals created a favorable environment for a sound design based on filling in movement. By having sound echo an object’s movement rather than an object and its presumed physical characteristics, Hanna-Barbera’s zips or glissando of notes could represent the trajectory of a flying superhero, a gliding bowling ball of Fred Flintstone, or a sliding Scooby snack. And, indeed, zips represented movement for variety of objects. The logic of trajectory mimesis deracinates sound from a particular object/event, allowing a specific sound effect to be used in a wide array of instances. Rather than having to create sound effects that would mimetically match the object and its movement (one sound that represents a superhero flying through the air, one a bowling ball gliding through the air, and one a snack sliding), one zip suffices. Thus, we can see how the studio’s use of trajectory mimesis facilitates the repetition of sounds. This is not to say that mimetic sound design does not allow for libraries of sound effects. Rather, Hanna-Barbera’s trajectory mimesis allows for a distillation, a reduction and concentration, of sounds around movement, which then can be played and replayed in instance after instance. The sonic form works hand in glove with the creation and extensive use of a sound effects library. While no doubt economic factors – TV’s limited budgets for animation – motivated the development of a library of sound effects, the sound effects’ extensive popularity and pervasiveness are very much connected to the formal arrangement they were put to in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons. The library of sound effects was afforded by the studio’s extensive use of trajectory mimesis. Economic restraint, the sound–image relationship of television, and aesthetic choices (Hanna and Barbera’s desire to maintain a ‘convincing illusion of movement’) provided conditions that produced the library of sound effects that contains some of the most iconic sounds of television and animation, if not media in general.

For over three decades on the small screen, the studio would drive the movement of its cartoons one zip, boink, and crash at a time and, in each moment, when the animation image needed momentum, needed something to carry it along, Hanna-Barbera’s editors would turn to its library of sound effects to enliven its animation. Hanna-Barbera’s sonically driven animation presented well on television, where the cartoon studio’s animation played endlessly, playing and replaying its sound effects library.