The Flintstones (1960-1966) was the first animated primetime series for adults, created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who had previously won seven Academy Awards for Tom and Jerry at MGM. The show adapted the successful family sitcom formula of The Honeymooners into a Stone Age setting where dinosaurs and prehistoric animals replicated modern conveniences, proving that animation could appeal to adult audiences and paving the way for future animated sitcoms like The Simpsons.
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The ENTIRE Story of The Flintstones (1960) in 33 MinutesAdded:
I said Barney, how are you doing now? Before The Simpsons, before Family Guy, before any adult animated show you can name, there was a family in a town called Bedrock.
On a Friday night in September 1960, an animated Stone Age family sat down to a rack of brontosaurus ribs and changed television forever.
This is the entire story of The Flintstones 1960 in X minutes.
The men who built Bedrock.
To understand The Flintstones, you have to start with two men who spent 15 years drawing a cat and a mouse at MGM.
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had met in the late 1930s as new hires in MGM's animation department. She's sound asleep. I did it. I DID IT. THAT'S WONDERFUL, FRED. And by 1940, they were teaming up on Tom and Jerry. The relentless, wordless chase between a hapless cat and a clever mouse that would earn them seven Academy Awards over 15 years.
They [snorts] understood comedy in their bones, timing, visual gags, the exact moment a punchline lands without a single word being spoken.
When MGM shut down its animation department in 1957, Hanna and Barbera did not spend long feeling sorry for themselves. They founded Hanna-Barbera Productions [music] and immediately started pitching to television, which was hungry for animated content in a way that theatrical studios were not. The company grew fast. The Huckleberry Hound Show launched in 1958 [music] and became the first animated series to win an Emmy Award. Oh, my darling. Oh, my darling.
Oh, my darling Clementine. Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, character after character rolled off their production line.
And something interesting happened. A survey in 1960 showed that more adults than children were regularly watching Huckleberry Hound. That single piece of data planted a seed. Screen Gems, which distributed Hanna-Barbera's output, had an executive named John H. Mitchell, who looked at those numbers and asked whether an animated primetime series for adults might be possible. Hanna and Barbera said yes [music] and started thinking about what kind of show that would be.
The most popular programs on American television in the late 1950s were family sitcoms.
Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Honeymooners, shows built around everyday domestic life. You caught me hiding your Christmas gift. Rob, I hid your present under there. You got yours under that, too?
The husband who had ideas above his station, the level-headed wife, the neighbors who got them into trouble, and the good-natured resolution that arrived before the last commercial break.
Hanna-Barbera decided their primetime animated series would follow that exact template. What they needed was the twist. Several ideas were floated and rejected. Pilgrims, ancient Romans, hillbilly families. Storyboard illustrator Dan Gordon was the one who suggested the Stone Age, and he quickly doodled two characters in animal skins with a bird playing a record on its beak.
Everyone in the room immediately understood the joke. A prehistoric world where every modern convenience was replicated using dinosaurs, mammoths, birds, and rocks.
A brontosaurus as an excavating crane, a pelican as a dishwasher.
Don't worry, that's the way I like to see a dinosaur on. A woolly mammoth as a vacuum cleaner, a stone tablet newspaper [music] thrown at the front door every morning. As Joe Barbera explained it later, you could take anything that was current and convert it to Stone Age.
The setting made everything funny before a single writer put a word on paper. The show's working title was The Flagstones.
It came within a legal argument of never changing. Copyright lawyers pointed out that a family called The Flagstones already appeared in the comic strip High and Lowis. Close enough to create confusion.
For a brief period, the show became The Gladstones before Hanna-Barbera settled, with some relief, on The Flintstones.
Pitching Bedrock. [music] Getting it made.
Joe Barbera spent eight weeks in New York City in early 1960. Hi, Wilma.
Fred, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
>> [screaming] >> WALKING into meeting after meeting with network executives and advertising agencies, carrying a 90-second pilot film and storyboards, trying to convince someone to put a prehistoric cartoon on in primetime.
The meetings were polite. The rejections were equally polite. Days [snorts] turned into weeks. Weeks became the eighth week. Barbera reportedly had almost given up. He was ready to take the concept back to the archives.
When, on what he would later describe as his final pitch day, he sat down with executives at [music] ABC.
ABC was in third place in the ratings and looking for something different.
They greenlit The Flintstones for a 28-episode first season. What do you think you're doing?
I think I'm making a cake.
>> to air on Friday nights at 8:30 Eastern Time.
The original pilot had been voiced by June Foray and Daws Butler.
For the actual series, a new cast was assembled. Jean Vander Pyl was the one holdover from the pilot, retained as Wilma, and she would voice the character for the entire run of the show and beyond.
Character actor Alan Reed was cast as Fred Flintstone, and it turned out to be one of the most perfect pieces of casting in the history of American animation.
Mel Blanc, already legendary as the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and virtually every other major Looney Tunes character, was hired to voice Barney Rubble.
It was a second recurring role for Blanc. He also voiced Dino, the Flintstones pet dinosaur, who had the personality of a large enthusiastic dog and the body of something that went extinct 66 million years ago.
Bea Benaderet, who would later star in Petticoat Junction, voiced Betty Rubble.
The character designer was Ed Benedict, who refined Dan Gordon's rough sketches into the clean, stylized silhouettes audiences would come to know. Fred was physically large, round and solid, wearing his bone collar tunic, and resembled both Alan Reed, the man voicing him, and Jackie Gleason, the man whose character had partly inspired him.
Barney was compact and cheerful next to Fred's bluster.
Wilma was refined and capable. Betty was warm and practical. The four of them together formed a kind [music] of Stone Age unit that felt genuinely like neighbors you knew.
The show was produced in color for its entire run. ABC broadcasted in black and white for the first two seasons. My plate to be on the table when I sit down.
I'm sorry, Fred. Color television sets were still a luxury in 1960 and began airing it in color starting with the third [music] season in 1962.
Premiere night and the critics hate it.
The Flintstones premiered on September 30th, 1960 at 8:30 in the evening.
Millions of Americans tuned [music] in.
The critics, almost without exception, did not share the audience's enthusiasm.
The New York Times critic Jack Gould called it an inked [music] disaster.
Variety magazine labeled it a pen-and-ink disaster.
The specific complaints included the limited animation technique.
Hanna-Barbera had developed a style that relied on fewer drawings per second with looped movements and bobbing heads to manage the sheer volume of production required by a weekly [music] primetime series.
>> [screaming] >> CAR POLISH AND POISON. AND THE FACT THAT THE show was derivative of The Honeymooners.
On that second point, the critics were not entirely wrong.
Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners had run in its most famous form from 1955 to 1956 and featured Ralph Kramden, a loudmouth ambitious bus driver with a more sensible wife, and his gentle simple neighbor Ed Norton.
The parallel to Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty was obvious enough that Gleason consulted his lawyers.
Those lawyers believed he had a legitimate case for copyright infringement. Gleason decided not to pursue it, reportedly because he did not want to be known as the man who pulled Fred Flintstone off the air. William Hanna was honest about the influence, saying that The Honeymooners was the most popular show on the air and by his bill, the funniest. I'll tell you what I will do. I'll give you a tin can and you can go as Billy the Goat.
The characters, he said, were terrific and that influenced greatly what they did with The Flintstones. Hanna and Barbera also cited an older influence, the comedy of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
The dynamic between Fred and Barney, the larger, more impulsive personality and the smaller, gentler sidekick who ends up pulled into disaster [music] anyway, owes as much to Laurel and Hardy as it does to Gleason and Art Carney.
Audiences made their own decision.
Despite the critics >> [music] >> and despite the Friday night slot, traditionally among the most difficult on the entire television schedule, with audiences prone to going out rather than staying home, The Flintstones found its audience quickly and held it. Yabba-Dabba-Doo and the voices that made it. There is one moment in the making of The Flintstones that defines the entire show. Yabba-Dabba-Doo In one of the earliest episodes recorded, [music] the script called for Fred Flintstone to shout, "Yahoo!"
a generic exclamation that would have been completely forgettable. Alan Reed looked at the line, stopped the session and asked Joe Barbera, "Hey Joe, where it says Yahoo, can I say Yabba-Dabba-Doo instead?"
Barbera said, "Yes."
Reed later explained that the phrase came from his mother, who used to say, "A little dab'll do ya."
The slogan from a Brylcreem men's hair styling gel commercial. He borrowed the rhythm and the nonsense energy of it and turned it into something that would become one of the most recognized phrases in the history of American television.
Barbera's own reflection on it was direct. I said, [music] "Yeah, God knows where he got it, but it was one of those terrific phrases."
And then some man named Eddie Call. He said, "Two girls who are interested in seeing you."
Fred's full character as Alan Reed played him was something audiences had not heard from an animated character before.
A voice full of size and bravado that could turn on a dime to tenderness, frustration, or genuine affection.
Fred was loud and sometimes foolish, but he was never cynical and never mean.
He loved Wilma. He was devoted to Barney. His get-rich-quick schemes were born from wanting more for his family, not from selfishness.
That combination, the loud impulsive exterior over a fundamentally decent interior, is what made the character survive 60 [music] years of changing tastes.
Mel Blanc's contribution was nearly derailed permanently by a near-fatal car accident in January 1961 during the second season. [music] Blanc struck an oncoming car on Sunset Boulevard. Good, we'll take it. But Fred, stop interrupting, Barney. And spent two weeks in a coma and 70 days in the hospital in a full body cast.
Daws Butler, the same voice actor who had originally voiced Fred in The Flagstones pilot, and who was known as the voice of Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, filled in for Barney in five episodes while Blanc recovered.
When it became clear that Blanc's recovery was going to take much longer than anyone hoped, the producers took the recording studio to him.
16 staffers set up equipment around Blanc's hospital bed. The cast recorded around him. He insisted on continuing through every session.
Blanc later wrote that the wires ran all over the floor around him and that the producer would check in every couple of hours to make sure he wasn't too tired to go on. Drive it with a butter yet. Oh boy, this is going to be good. He always said he wasn't. [music] By September, he was well enough to record sitting up elevated by a pulley system.
The audiences never knew a single episode had been affected.
The world of Bedrock.
What made The Flintstones hold up week after week beyond the cast and the catchphrases was the sheer inventiveness of the world Hanna-Barbera's writers and designers constructed in Bedrock.
Every modern convenience the audience knew from their own lives existed in prehistoric form.
The telephone was a bird in a shell with a beak you spoke into and an ear you listen through.
The car was a stone and wood frame with stone rollers instead of wheels propelled by the driver's own bare feet shuffling along the ground.
The lawnmower was a small dinosaur who ate grass until he had eaten enough and had to be dragged back for more. And tell me all about it and don't keep anything back. After all, I am your doctor, you know. The record player was a small bird with a sharp beak spinning on a turntable following the groove in a stone disc. The garbage disposal was an animal under the kitchen sink who was happy to eat whatever you threw in and unhappy about absolutely nothing.
The shower was a mammoth with a trunk.
The names were wordplay on rocks and minerals.
Bedrock itself, Slate, Fred's boss, Granite, Rockhead, Cobblestone.
Celebrity cameos arrived regularly as Stone Age versions of real stars. Ann Margaret became Ann Margrock, who baby sat Pebbles.
Tony Curtis appeared twice as Stony Curtis. Cary Grant became Gary Granite.
The show took genuine pleasure in the mechanics of the joke. Bam Bam Bam Bam!
The audience already knew where every punchline was going and they appreciated the execution anyway.
Fred was a brontocrane operator at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company. Though the location was sometimes called the Rockhead and Quarry Cave Construction Company in earlier episodes. He was a member of the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes, a men's lodge that paralleled real fraternal organizations, and so was Barney.
The lodge gave the writers endless material for plots that got both men into trouble with their wives.
Fred bold, Fred schemed. Fred backed into situations he couldn't get out of and had to be rescued by a combination of Wilma's good sense and Barney's [music] accidental luck.
Season 3, Pebbles arrives. By the third season, the show had settled comfortably into its rhythms. Ratings were strong.
The cast had found [music] its chemistry. Audiences knew the show and expected certain things from it. Wilma, I'll bet Fred was wondering where they serve sweet and sour ribs every day of the week. Hanna-Barbera decided it was time to add a baby. The original plan was for Fred and Wilma to have a son, a chip off the old Flintstone, as the writers put it. A marketing executive intervened. "Girl dolls," she pointed out, "sell significantly better than boy dolls. The The and the potential merchandise were simply not comparable.
Barbera reportedly said something along the lines of, "In that case, it's a girl." [music] Pebbles Flintstone was born in the third season, her name in keeping with the show's mineral theme.
Within months, 3 million Pebbles dolls had been sold. The marketing executive was correct. Jean Vander Pyl voiced Pebbles in addition to Wilma, a double duty she handled seamlessly. Wilma, my dear, our neighbors have come to call.
Oh, how delightful.
Pebbles became the emotional anchor of the Flintstone household in a way [music] that surprised even the writers.
Fred's relationship with his daughter, the enormous, blunt, impatient man, turned entirely to mush by a small, red-headed infant, gave the character a warmth that carried the show through seasons that might otherwise have felt repetitive. The following season, in season 4, Barney and Betty Rubble adopted Bam-Bam.
The Rubbles had been unable to have children, and a baby of extraordinary physical strength, Bam-Bam could lift furniture, bend iron bars, and generally cause structural damage while cooing happily, appeared on their doorstep. Don Messick voiced the boy. The two babies appeared together constantly from that point on, and the seed of a relationship that would later be explored in spin-offs was planted early.
Betty's voice changes, and the Winston cigarette problem. There's obviously been some kind of a mix-up and Just meet me at the Hollyrock Bowl in 1 hour. Bea Benaderet left the show after the fourth season to star in Petticoat Junction, the rural CBS sitcom that would run from 1963 to 1970.
Jerry Johnson took over as Betty Rubble for the fifth and sixth seasons and the transition was smooth enough that most viewers accepted it without difficulty.
Though for anyone paying close attention, Betty's voice was noticeably warmer and less sharp in the later seasons.
Benaderet's story after leaving had a painful ending.
She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1967 and died in 1968 at the age of 58 having [snorts] spent four seasons on Petticoat Junction.
She never returned to Bedrock. The show's relationship with its original sponsor, Winston cigarettes, had its own complicated trajectory.
Fred, Winston's got that filter blend.
Yeah, Fred. The first two seasons featured Fred and Barney in black and white integrated commercials for Winston pitching cigarettes to the audience as part of the show itself.
This was standard practice at [music] the time. The stars of a series were expected to sell the sponsor's product as part of the package.
The images of Fred and Barney cheerfully lighting up have become somewhat startling to modern eyes given the audience the show eventually found in Saturday morning reruns.
As the show's demographic shifted younger and as the cultural conversation around tobacco advertising and children began to change, Winston stepped back.
Welch's grape juice [music] and grape jelly became the primary sponsor for the later seasons and the pebble centered commercials for Welch's were significantly more at home in what the show had become.
Season six, the Great Gazoo.
The Flintstones ran for six seasons and five of them were straightforward, confident, excellently executed. The sixth season introduced something the show had never attempted before, a character from outer space.
The Great Gazoo appeared for the first time on October 29th, 1965, voiced by Harvey Korman. He was a small green alien, barely 2 ft tall, who floated rather than walked, wore a large [snorts] helmet and cape, and had been exiled from his home planet Zetox as punishment for having invented a doomsday device, a button that could destroy the universe, which he had built, as he put it, simply because he wanted to be the first on his block to have one.
He discovered Fred and Barney when his flying saucer crashed near them. Give me a hand, Barn.
Roll it over again, Barney. I I can't find the opening.
And immediately recognized Earth as prehistoric in time as well as technology.
Only Fred, Barney, and small children could see him.
Wilma and Betty could not.
A recurring joke had Fred arguing with what appeared to be [music] thin air, while Wilma quietly concluded she had married someone who talked to himself.
Gazoo referred to Fred and Barney as dum-dums and attempted to help them with reality-warping powers that invariably made their situations worse.
Harvey Korman gave the character an arch, condescending English accent that was [snorts] in some ways perfectly suited to the dynamic.
A being of enormous intellectual capability completely surrounded by people he couldn't figure out. Audiences were not pleased. Critics wrote about the alien the way they might write about an unexpected injury. By love, that first did prompt me to inquire.
Gazoo had appeared from a completely different kind of show, something more like The Jetsons than The Flintstones, and dropped into Bedrock without any particular explanation for why the Stone Age suddenly had visitors from the future.
The character appeared in 11 episodes before the show ended. He would become so associated with the concept of a desperate series reaching for novelty that his name became used informally as shorthand for a certain kind of creative overcorrection. He was the jump the shark moment before [music] the phrase existed. The show's final episode aired on April 1st, 1966.
166 episodes, [music] six seasons, the longest run of any animated primetime show in history at that point. A record that stood until The Simpsons came along decades later.
After Bedrock, what came next? They're just like children, and they should be treated like children. Yeah, you know.
The Flintstones did not disappear when it left primetime. It simply changed addresses.
NBC picked up the reruns for Saturday mornings beginning in 1966 and aired them until 1970.
Syndication [music] followed and local stations ran the episodes throughout the 1970s and 1980s in slots that introduced the show to children who had not been born when it originally aired.
The Flintstones were a Saturday morning fixture for 20 years after the [music] primetime run ended. A theatrical film, The Man Called Flintstone, was released in September 1966, 4 months after the final episode, as a spy parody that put Fred in the shoes of a secret agent named Rock Slag who happened to look exactly like him.
Imagine Fred Flintstone, a kind of old tycoon. It was a lighter, breezier film than the television show and served largely as a vehicle to give the characters one last big screen [music] adventure before the original cast's run was officially over.
Hanna-Barbera [snorts] continued to produce Flintstones content in various forms. The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show ran on CBS in 1971, depicting the two babies grown into teenagers navigating high school in Bedrock. A genuinely strange tonal shift from the domestic world their parents inhabited, but one that found its audience on Saturday mornings.
A series of specials followed over the years. The Great Gazoo, despite his reception, continued to appear in comics and in commercials for Pebbles cereal.
Flintstones vitamins launched and became a staple of American childhood medicine cabinets. Oh, not Gazoo and his darn magic. That guy is nothing but bad news.
Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles cereal built an entire brand around Fred and Barney's ongoing dispute over breakfast.
When Ted Turner purchased Hanna-Barbera in 1991, The Flintstones library moved with the acquisition.
TBS, TNT, and later Cartoon Network and Boomerang aired the reruns in rotation across the 1990s and 2000s, ensuring that another generation grew up with the show.
The live-action films.
In 1994, Universal Pictures released a live-action feature film adaptation of The Flintstones.
John Goodman played Fred, a casting decision pushed through by executive producer Steven Spielberg, who had worked with Goodman on a previous film and was convinced he was the right choice.
Wilma, I'm home. [screaming] Rick Moranis played Barney, Elizabeth Perkins was Wilma, Rosie O'Donnell played Betty.
Elizabeth Taylor appeared as Wilma's sharp-tongued mother. The production design was extraordinary.
The world of Bedrock was rendered in full physical detail with animatronic dinosaurs, stone cars that actually moved, and an overall commitment to the visual language of the cartoon that was genuinely impressive.
The B-52s [music] performed the film's version of the theme song as the BC- 52s dressed in prehistoric costumes.
The story involved Fred being manipulated into a corporate promotion by a scheming executive played by Kyle MacLachlan with Halle Berry as his villainous assistant.
Critics were generally unenthusiastic.
The script, which had gone through more than 30 drafts and involved dozens of writers over nearly a decade of development, Slate and Company will revolutionize the building industry by providing simple, low-cost showed the strain of that process. It grossed $341 million worldwide against a $46 [music] million budget, which made it a commercial success by any measure and a disappointment [music] by almost every other.
A prequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, followed in 2000 with a completely new cast. Mark Addy as Fred, Stephen Baldwin as Barney, Kristen Johnston as Wilma, and Jane Krakowski as Betty telling the story of how the two couples first met and how Fred and Wilma fell in love.
The Great Gazoo appeared played by Alan The film was less successful at the box office than its predecessor [music] and effectively ended the live-action series.
The legacy what Bedrock built.
The most direct line from The Flintstones to modern animation runs through Matt Groening's own account of The Simpsons. Hey, Mr. I think you made a mistake. I made a mistake?
>> Yeah. Groening has cited The Flintstones as a foundational influence on his own show.
The idea of an animated sitcom [music] built around a working-class family with a loud, impulsive patriarch, a level-headed wife, and characters who somehow remained exactly themselves, no matter what the plot required of them.
The Simpsons debuted in 1989 and broke the record The Flintstones had held for longest-running primetime animated series, eventually surpassing it by a factor that no one in 1960 would have thought possible.
Family Guy, American Dad, Bob's Burgers, virtually every animated family sitcom that followed owes something to the template Hanna-Barbera assembled in Bedrock. Oh, yeah, the Ferris wheel's empty, too.
And it's staying empty. Never mind that.
Let's take a look. The working-class husband with big dreams and small judgment, the wife who holds everything together while pretending not to, the neighbor who gets pulled into every disaster.
It was a formula before The Flintstones, but The Flintstones proved it could survive animation.
The show also proved something the television industry had quietly doubted for decades, that animation was not inherently for children, that an adult audience would watch a cartoon, >> [music] >> laugh at it, care about its characters, and come back the following week.
That proof, established between 1960 and 1966 in Bedrock, opened the door for everything that followed.
The critics who called it an ink disaster in 1960 were measuring it against the wrong standard.
Oh well, I'll borrow the bulldozer at work and clean it up in the morning.
They were looking at it as animation.
Audiences understood it immediately as television. Specifically, as the kind of television they already loved, wearing a prehistoric costume that made the jokes land harder.
60-plus years after Fred Flintstone first knocked off work [music] at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company, loaded his family into a stone car, and drove it with his bare feet to a drive-in restaurant where a brontosaurus rack of ribs tipped the car sideways, the show remains part of the cultural air. The Yabba Dabba Doo phrase has been used in advertising, pop music, political cartoons, and everyday speech. Borrowed, repurposed, and repeated by people who couldn't tell you the name of a single episode. Uh would you care for some hors d'oeuvres?
>> [music] >> Flintstones vitamins shaped the way a generation learned to swallow medicine.
Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles turned a breakfast cereal into a decades-long [music] argument between two best friends.
The image of Bedrock, stone houses, foot-powered cars, dinosaurs doing the housework is immediately readable by people who have never seen a single episode, which is perhaps the clearest measure of how completely the show embedded itself in the culture. William Hanna died in 2001 at the age of 90.
Joseph Barbera died in 2006 at 95.
Between them, they created a universe populated by a family that technically lived before the pyramids and somehow felt completely contemporary.
They had spent 15 years chasing a cat and a mouse around a house for MGM and then they built Bedrock from scratch in a television landscape that had never seen anything like it. And he's from another planet. He is.
>> And he does magic like like you wouldn't believe. The world they made outlasted both of them by decades and shows no particular sign of stopping.
They were after all just a modern Stone Age family.
Six seasons, 166 episodes, and one loud, lovable quarry worker who became the template for almost every animated patriarch who came after him.
The Flintstones started as a gamble that adults would watch a cartoon in primetime and ended up changing what television could be.
If this took you back to those Friday [music] nights in Bedrock, leave a comment below, like this video, and subscribe.
There is a lot more where this came from.
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