Hanna-Barbera Cartoons Wore Collars to Make Them Easier to Animate

It is not simple to create animation, and it used to be lot more difficult. Thousands and thousands of photos, each only slightly different from the one before it in the sequence, had to be combined to create a hand-drawn cartoon. Think about painting Mickey Mouse moving his legs a little bit higher in each drawing as he climbs a flight of stairs 1000 times in a row.

Animators learned to take shortcuts in order to save time and effort. Early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, where it appeared like every single character was wearing a collar and necktie, made one of these quite obvious. Yogi Bear could keep his body still and only need to move his head when he was wearing a tie. This resulted from the smaller finances that cartoonists had to work with when creating content for television. Instead of the normal 14,000 drawings, a cartoon might be produced with as few as 2,000.