6 See also 7 Notes

y, in 1955 William Hanna & Joseph Barbera, the writer-directors of the Tom and Jerry cartoons, became the heads of the studio. The cartoon studio was closed in mid-1957,[5] at which time Hanna and Barbera took much of the staff to form their own company, Hanna-Barbera Productions.[6]
Contents  [hide]
1 Early years
2 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer characters
3 Golden Age of American animation
3.1 Early years
3.2 Harman and Ising return
3.3 Hanna-Barbera: Tom and Jerry
3.4 Tex Avery
3.5 1950s, CinemaScope
3.6 Later years
3.7 Legacy
4 Notable crew members
5 Productions
5.1 Theatrical cartoon shorts series
5.2 One-shot theatrical shorts
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
Early years[edit]

To promote their films and attract larger theater audiences, motion picture chains in the 1930s provided many features to supplement the main feature, including travelogues, serials, short comedy subjects, newsreels and cartoons. During the late 1920s, Walt Disney Productions had achieved huge popular and critical success with their Mickey Mouse cartoons for Pat Powers' Celebrity Pictures (distributing for Columbia Pictures). Several other studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer among them, took note of Disney's success and began to look for ways to get Disney or compete.
MGM's first foray into animation was the Flip the Frog cartoon series, starring an anthropomorphic talking and singing frog. The series was produced independently for Celebrity Pictures by Ub Iwerks, formerly the head animator at the Disney studio. Celebrity Pictures' Pat Powers had hired Iwerks away from Disney with the promise of giving Iwerks his own studio, and was able to secure a distribution deal with MGM for the Flip the Frog cartoons. The first Flip the Frog cartoon, Fiddlesticks, was released in August 1930,[7] and over two-dozen other Flip cartoons followed during the next three years. In 1933, the Flip character was dropped in favor of Willie Whopper, a new series featuring a lie-telling little boy. Willie Whopper failed to catch on, and MGM terminated its distribution deal with Iwerks and Powers, who had already began distributing their Comi-Color cartoons on their own.[8]
In February 1934 MGM signed a new deal with the Harman-Ising studio, which had just broken ties with producer Leon Schlesinger and the Warner Bros. studio o