Wayne Rooney and his girlfriend became a Flintstones-style couple Enlarge Image

The generation of kids who grew up on a diet of Hanna-Barbera have been massively influenced by their work.

If you look at any of the hit TV animation shows, they all draw heavily on influences from the Hanna-Barbera era.

Certainly 2DTV had an homage to them in some of its sketches.

We had the Roonstones - Wayne Rooney and Coleen McLoughlin as, effectively, Flintstones-style characters.

Instantly we had something that was very visual, very funny, and which everybody could relate to.

I think that approach has been seen the world over.

I'm sure Matt Groening would agree that Itchy and Scratchy wouldn't exist without Tom and Jerry.

I can only imagine what children's faces must have looked like when they first saw Tom and Jerry in the cinema Giles Pilbrow, 2DTV producer

It's a modern-day, very twisted, Reservoir Dogs version of what happened in the original Tom and Jerry cartoons.

I think their influence is so massive, it's incalculable.

It's very difficult to imagine just how influential their material was when it came out.

The Tom and Jerry cartoons are Oscar-winning works of arts that you could watch again and again, and spot different things and forget some of the details within them.

I can only imagine what children's faces must have looked like when they first saw Tom and Jerry in the cinema.

Joseph Barbera will be remembered for a body of work rather than one character.

Lots of people aren't aware of the scale of the characters that are part of the Hanna-Barbera stable.