Academy Awards than any other character-based theatrical animated series. Barbera estimated the typical budget of $50,000 for each Tom and Jerry cartoon which made the duo take "time to get it right". A typical cartoon took around six weeks to make. As per standard practice for American animation production at the time, Barbera and Hanna did not work with a script beforehand. After coming up with a cartoon idea together, Barbera would flesh out the story by drawing a storyboard and provide character designs and animation layouts. Hanna did the animation timing - planning the music and temporal beats and accents the animation action would occur on - and subsequently assigned the animators their scenes and supervised their work. In addition, Hanna provided incidental voice work, in particular Tom's numerous screams of pain. Despite minimal creative input, as head of the MGM cartoon studio, Quimby was credited as the producer of all cartoons until 1955. The rise in television in the 1950s caused problems for the MGM animation studio, leading to budget cuts on Tom and Jerry cartoons due to decreased revenue from theatrical screenings. In an attempt to combat this, MGM ordered that all subsequent shorts be produced in the widescreen CinemaScope format; the first, Pet Peeve, was released in November 1954. However, the studio found that re-releases of older cartoons were earning as much as new ones, resulting in the executive decision to cease production on Tom and Jerry and later the animation studio on May 15, 1957. The final cartoon produced by Hanna and Barbera, Tot Watchers, was released on August 1, 1958. The pair decided to leave and went on to focus on their own production company Hanna-Barbera Productions, which went on to produce such popular animated television series including The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons and Scooby-Doo. Production formats Before 1954, all Tom and Jerry cartoons were produced in the standard Academy ratio and format; in 1954 and 1955, some of the output was dually produced in dual versions: one Academy-ratio negative composed for a flat widescreen (1.75:1) format and one shot in the CinemaScope process. From 1955 until the close of the MGM cartoon studio a year later, all Tom and Jerry cartoons were produced in CinemaScope; some even had their soundtracks recorded in Perspecta directional audio. All of the Hanna and Barbera cartoons were shot as successive color exposure negatives in Technicolor. Gene