Peace and Harmony

Happy Harmonies is a series of animated short films produced by Harman-Ising Productions and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Produced in Technicolor, these cartoons were similar in tone to Walt Disney Productions' Silly Symphonies and Leon Schlesinger Productions' Merrie Melodies musical series, which Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising created. They occasionally featured Bosko, a character who starred in the first Looney Tunes shorts that the duo produced for Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros. Pictures. After the first two cartoons, the design of Bosko changed from an "inkblot" to a more realistic African-American boy. The two final titles in the series were originally produced by Harman and Ising as Silly Symphonies cartoons. Disney originally planned to outsource the production of three shorts to Harman-Ising, including a short planned at the studio (Merbabies). Two shorts planned at Harman-Ising, Pipe Dreams and The Little Bantamweight, were rejected due to Roy O. Disney's interference and sold to MGM, who released them as Happy Harmonies. Harman and Ising lost the contract to MGM's newly formed animation division under Fred Quimby the same year. After the failure of comic strip-based cartoons, Quimby was forced to hire Harman and Ising, causing the studio's output to be similar in tone to the Happy Harmonies series until both left in 1941 and 1942. Unlike other MGM cartoons, the original negatives to the Happy Harmonies series were not stored by MGM, instead remaining at Hugh Harman's possession while MGM was given a master positive. As a result, they were not destroyed in the 1978 George Eastman House fire. Harman sold prints of individual cartoons to external companies for home and non-theatrical distribution and was sued by MGM in 1946.