Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Barbera

Nostalgia can be a sales pitch, and Barbera knows it. By calling MGM's outdoor sets "great glories", he frames the studio lot not as a workplace but as a kind of national park of make-believe: sprawling, weathered, accumulated, and therefore legitimate. The phrase "over the years" does quiet but crucial work. It signals that the magic wasn't just bought; it was layered, engineered through repetition, reuse, and the slow build of institutional muscle. Hollywood grandeur, in this telling, is less about individual genius than about infrastructure.

Coming from a cartoonist, the admiration lands with extra irony. Animation is the art of conjuring worlds without real-world acreage. Barbera is praising the opposite: the heavy, physical commitment to illusion, the way a studio could store a fake city in sunlight and call it permanent. The subtext is envy mixed with respect. Those outdoor sets are monuments to a system that could make fantasy tangible at industrial scale.

There's also a whiff of corporate mythology here. MGM's backlot becomes proof of greatness, a visible ledger of past hits and sunk costs. The sets are "constructed" rather than "built", a slightly formal verb that emphasizes planning and craft, but also hints at the essential falseness: these were realities assembled for the camera and meant to be dismantled or repurposed. Barbera's line captures the old studio era's central trick: permanence as performance, history as a prop, and spectacle as a form of memory management.