PUBLIC MARKS with tag "joe barbera dead"

Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna were hired within a month of each other in 1937 by the MGM cartoon factory. They soon hit on the idea of a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. "When we started, people said, 'Cat and mouse? That's old stuff,'" Barbera recalled in a 1993 interview with The Associated Press. "They said it had been done by everybody _ Felix the Cat, Ignatz the Cat, not to mention Mickey Mouse.