For Fans of Joseph Barbera

Everyone goes to The Flintstones first because it is the flagship, and it earns that reputation. But Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is where Barbera's formula is most purely expressed. The character dynamics are tighter, the episodic structure is almost perfectly modular, and the essential Hanna-Barbera trick (a coward protagonist who somehow ends up at the centre of every dangerous situation) is more charming here than anywhere else. Start with Scooby, then go back.

Jonny Quest (1964) was genuinely trying something that the studio rarely attempted again: sustained narrative tension, real-world locations treated with some care, and a villain roster that posed actual physical threat. The action sequences hold up in a way that most Hanna-Barbera product does not, because the studio threw a bigger budget at it and hired Doug Wildey, a comic-book artist, to define the visual language. It got cancelled after one season, which is one of the legitimate injustices of American television animation.

The Venture Bros. is built entirely from Hanna-Barbera DNA, specifically Jonny Quest, and it is as much a work of criticism as affection. Creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer understood that the boy-adventure formula was built on a fantasy of competent fathers and exciting danger, and they spent sixteen years methodically asking what it would do to the people inside that fantasy if none of it were actually true. It is funny, it is sad, and it would be impossible without Barbera's original.

Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994) is where Adult Swim began. The decision to take a forgotten Hanna-Barbera space hero and drop him into a deadpan talk-show format, reusing the original 1966 animation, was so strange and so cheap that it should not have worked. It worked completely. The show invented the ironic-nostalgia mode that defined alternative animation for the next fifteen years, and it only exists because Barbera had made all that original footage available.