Former magazine cartoonist who joined MGM in 1937 after an application to the Disney studios was unsuccessful. With fellow MGM employee William Hanna, Barbera earned a place in animation history by creating the ever-popular, ever-violent, but everlasting "Tom and Jerry" characters in 1940 and producing more than one hundred of the often delightful cat-and-mouse shorts over the next two decades, seven of which earned Oscars for Best Animated Short....