Happy Harmonies is a series of twenty-six animated cartoons distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising between 1934 and 1938.
Produced in Technicolor, these cartoons were very similar to Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies and Warner Brothersâ Merrie Melodies musical series. They occasionally featured Bosko, a character who starred in the first Looney Tunes shorts that the duo produced for Leon Schlesinger. 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 had Harman and Ising create three shorts for Disney, but when they only kept one of their three shorts (Merbabies), the copyrights to the other two (Pipe Dreams and The Little Bantamweight) were sold to MGM who released them as Happy Harmonies.
In addition, the following list includes additional short films that are not officially part of the Happy Harmonies series but are considered part of it and are therefore included in this list. The first of these shorts, The Discontented Canary, was labeled as A Metro Color Cartoon and the rest were released as one-shot cartoons. The last two shorts on the list were produced for Disney as part of the Silly Symphony series but were eventually rejected by Disney and later sold to MGM and released as one-shot cartoons.
The only official home release to date containing a significant number of the Happy Harmonies shorts is the Happy Harmonies Cartoon Classics LaserDisc box set. The LaserDisc set was released in 1994 by MGM/UA Home Video, which predated the merger of Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner in 1996. The four-disc set contains 17 of the 37 Happy Harmonies shorts while the remaining 25 shorts include one side of six Barney Bear cartoons, the 1939 short Peace on Earth and the 1940 animated short The Milky Way. In 1999, MGM paid Time Warner $225 million to end its lease of distributing content owned by Turner Entertainment Co. prior to 1996 (the cartoons are part of MGM's pre-May 1986 library which Turner had purchased). While the copyrights remain with Turner, distribution rights are now with Warner Bros. Pictures, Turner's current parent company.