March 16, 2014

Hanna-Barbera Mystery

Would you help me out today? Friends of ours own this mystery book from Hanna-Barbera. Her father was in accounting with HB in the 60s, and this book was given to her as a gift a few years before he passed away. The cover is shown above, the introduction page is inside. No table of contents. It has no year or publishing information.


The text and gazillions of character images cover television productions into the early 1970's. Our guess is it was an employee only issue, a thank you celebrating a major anniversary of the studio. Anyone have any ideas? You can be a hero... Thanks!

4 comments:

Matt said...

http://teamhellions.com/tag/hanna-barbera/

http://www.hakes.com/item.asp?Auction=209&ItemNo=124759

Jon Gutierrez said...

That appears to be a licensing catalog: the type of thing they'd send out to companies looking to make licensed products of animated characters (puzzles, toys, etc.) to decide if they want to use the Hanna Barbara characters from those shows on their products. (Note the mentions of "merchandising success" and "sales familiarity" in the intro page.)

It should be from around 1966 - the "Space Kidettes" and "Impossibles" on the tag ran in the 1966-1967 season and they'd probably want to put this out a little before the series hit to have stuff on the shelves when the shows hit.

Jon Gutierrez said...

Oops, I think I got the year wrong (and forgot that they'd probably still be trying to push the space Kidettes and Impossibles later on because of syndication.) The animated Globetrotters are on the cover and they didn't come out until the early 70s, so the book probably came out closer to 1972 or so. (Especially since they mention the Wacky Races, which came out in 1969.)

Mark said...

Thank you Matt and Jon for some very useful information! I'll pass it on to my friends.