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Storyboards & Puns. When Hanna and Barbera first thought of quickie cartoons for TV, they tried to give the idea to MGM. The studio was not interested. And during one of Hollywood's periodic panic waves it decided to stop all new production on Tom and Jerry. Hanna and Barbera were ordered to lay off their staff, and they soon voluntarily followed their co-workers out of the studio, rounded them up again to launch their own business; 70% of their present employees were with them at MGM.
The Hanna-Barbera shop is efficient but unconventional. Hanna and Barbera work harder and longer than anyone else. Hanna is the timer, who computes the mathematical intricacies of matching dialogue to action and budgeting the exact number of frames necessary to build each joke and each dissolve. Barbera, who can draw almost as fast as he can talk, does the planning-stage sketch work, can create a fully plotted storyboard (a sort of cartoon outline with dialogue) in five hours.
Now, with the half-hour weekly Flintstones to keep going, the whole company is going off its rocker trying to think up Stone Age puns. Sooner or later they may have to introduce a new character called Spelunk-head, the village idiot. Mrs. Flintstone could ask her husband to please pass the basalt and pepper, and in redoing the kitchen, she could be for marble table tops, while he is for mica. In the next few weeks the Flintstones and their neighbors will be in and out of a jazz palace called Rockland and a movie set where The Monster from the Tar Pits is being made with Gary Granite and Rock Pile. They even get a mysterious visit from Perry Gunnite, private eye—a petrified, would-be mason who covers up his insecurities by asking toughly for "rocks on the rocks."