The Flintstones

**The Flintstones** is an American animated sitcom created by American animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, produced under their Hanna-Barbera Productions banner, originally broadcasting on September 30, 1960, on the American multinational commercial broadcast television network, ABC.

The entire episodes were made available at launch.

## **Premise**

*The Flintstones* takes place in a romanticized Stone Age setting and follows the activities of the titular pre-historic family, the Flintstones, and their next-door neighbors, the Rubbles (who are also their best friends).

## **Cast**

### Main

#### **The Flintstones**

* Fred Flintstone - The main character of the series. Fred is an accident-prone Bronto-crane operator at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company and the head of the Flintstone household. He is quick to anger (usually over trivial matters), but is a very loving husband and father. His famous catchphrase is "Yabba Dabba Doo!"

* Wilma Flintstone - Fred's wife and Pebbles' mother. She is more intelligent and level-headed than her husband, though she often has a habit of spending money (with Betty’s and her catchphrase being "Da-da-da duh da-da CHARGE IT!!").

* Pebbles Flintstone - The Flintstones' infant daughter, who is born near the end of the third season.

* Dino - The Flintstones' pet dinosaur that acts like a dog. A running gag in the series involves Fred coming home from work and Dino getting excited and knocking him down and licking his face repeatedly.

* Baby Puss - The Flintstones' pet saber-toothed cat, which is rarely seen in the actual series but is always seen throwing Fred out of the house during the end credits, causing Fred to pound repeatedly on the front door and yell "Wilma!", waking the whole neighborhood in the process.

### Recurring

#### **The Rubbles**

* Barney Rubble - The secondary main character and Fred's best friend and next-door neighbor. His occupation is, throughout most of the series, unknown, though later episodes depict him working in the same quarry as Fred. He shares many of Fred's interests such as bowling and golf, and is also a member of the "Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes". Though Fred and Barney frequently get into feuds with one another (usually due to Fred's short temper), their deep fraternal bond remains very evident.

* Betty Rubble - Barney's wife and Wilma's best friend. Like Wilma, she, too, has a habit of spending money and also is highly jealous of other pretty women being around her husband.

* Bamm-Bamm Rubble - The Rubbles' abnormally strong adopted son, whom they adopt during the fourth season; his name comes from the only phrase he ever speaks as a baby: "Bamm, Bamm!"

* Hoppy - The Rubbles' pet hopparoo (a kangaroo-dinosaur combination creature), which they purchase at the beginning of the fifth season. When he first arrives, Dino and Fred mistake him for a giant mouse and are frightened of him, but they eventually become best friends after Hoppy gets help when they are in an accident. He babysits the kids as he takes them around in his pouch, which also serves as a shopping cart for Betty.

## **Production**

### Conception

The idea of *The Flintstones* started after Hanna-Barbera produced *The Huckleberry Hound Show* and *The Quick Draw McGraw Show*. Although these programs were successful, they did not have the same wide audience appeal as their previous theatrical cartoon series *Tom and Jerry*, which entertained both children and the adults who accompanied them. However, since children did not need their parents' supervision to watch television, Hanna-Barbera's output became labeled "kids only". Barbera and Hanna wanted to recapture the adult audience with an animated situation comedy.

### Production

Barbera and Hanna experimented with hillbillies (a hillbilly theme was later incorporated into two *Flintstones* episodes, "The Bedrock Hillbillies" and "The Hatrocks and the Gruesomes"), Romans (Hanna-Barbera eventually created *The Roman Holidays*), pilgrims, and Indians as the settings for the two families before deciding on the Stone Age. According to Barbera, they settled on that because "you could take anything that was current, and convert it to stone-age". Under the working title *The Flagstones*, the family originally consisted of Fred, Wilma, and their son, Fred, Jr. A brief demonstration film was also created to sell the idea of a "modern stone-age family" to sponsors and the network. It was a difficult sell, and required eight weeks of daily presentations to networks and ad agencies. Animator Kenneth Muse, who worked on the *Tom and Jerry* cartoons, also worked on the early seasons of *The Flintstones*.

The show imitated and spoofed *The Honeymooners*, although the early voice characterization for Barney was that of Lou Costello. William Hanna admitted that "At that time, *The Honeymooners* was the most popular show on the air, and for my bill, the funniest. The characters, I thought, were terrific. Now, that influenced greatly what we did with *The Flintstones* ... *The Honeymooners* was there, and we used that as a kind of basis for the concept." However, Joseph Barbera disavowed these claims in a separate interview, stating that, "I don't remember mentioning *The Honeymooners* when I sold the show. But if people want to compare *The Flintstones* to *The Honeymooners*, then great. It's a total compliment. *The Honeymooners* was one of the greatest shows ever written." Jackie Gleason, the creator of *The Honeymooners*, considered suing Hanna-Barbera Productions, but decided that he did not want to be known as "the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air". Another influence was noted during Hanna-Barbera's tenure at MGM, where they were in a friendly competition with fellow cartoon director Tex Avery. In 1955, Avery directed a cartoon entitled "The First Bad Man" (narrated by cowboy legend Tex Ritter). The cartoon concerned the rowdy antics of a bank robber in stone-age Dallas. Many of the sight gags from that series predated similar situations used by Hanna-Barbera in the Flintstones series by many years. Many students of American animation point to this cartoon as a progenitive seed of the Flintstones.

Despite the animation and fantasy setting, the series was initially aimed at adult audiences, which was reflected in the comedy writing, which, as noted, resembled the average primetime sitcoms of the era, with the usual family issues resolved with a laugh at the end of each episode, as well as the inclusion of a laugh track. Hanna and Barbera hired many writers from the world of live-action, including two of Jackie Gleason's writers, Herbert Finn and Sydney Zelinka, as well as relative newcomer Joanna Lee while still using traditional animation story men such as Warren Foster and Michael Maltese.

### Release

*The Flintstones* premiered on September 30, 1960, at 8:30 pm Eastern time, and quickly became a hit. It was the first American animated show to depict two people of the opposite sex (Fred and Wilma; Barney and Betty) sleeping together in one bed, although Fred and Wilma are sometimes depicted as sleeping in separate beds. For comparison, the first live-action depiction of this in American TV history was in television's first-ever sitcom: 1947's Mary Kay and Johnny.

After Pebbles' birth, the tone and writing became more juvenile and ratings from the adult demographic began to decline. The last original episode was broadcast on April 1, 1966.

### Broadcast

The first three seasons of *The Flintstones* aired Friday nights at 8:30 Eastern time on ABC, with the first two seasons in black-and-white. Beginning with the third season in 1962, ABC televised the *Flintstones* in color, one of the first programs in color on that network. Season four and part of season five aired Thursdays at 7:30. The rest of the series aired Fridays at 7:30.

In the U.S., syndicated reruns of the series were offered to local stations until 1997, when E/I regulations and changing tastes in the industry led to the show's move to cable television. From the time of Ted Turner's purchase of Hanna-Barbera in 1991, TBS, TNT, and Cartoon Network aired the program. On April 1, 2000, the program moved to Boomerang, where it aired until March 6, 2017 (in its last years on the channel, it had been relegated to a graveyard slot) and returned to the channel on July 30, 2018. Online, the series was made available on the In2TV service beginning in 2006, then the online version of Kids' WB until that service was discontinued in 2015. As of 2017, full episodes are only available in the U.S. on Boomerang's subscription video-on-demand service, with select clips made available on the official YouTube account tied to the revamped Kids' WB website. In 2019, MeTV acquired rerun rights to the series, returning the show to broadcast television for the first time in over 20 years.[

## **Reception**

The continuing popularity of *The Flintstones* rests heavily on its juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns in the Stone Age setting. *The Flintstones* was the most financially successful and longest-running network animated television series for three decades, until *The Simpsons*, which debuted in late 1989, outlasted it.

### Critical

The night after *The Flintstones* premiered, *Variety* magazine called it "a pen and ink disaster", and the series was among many that debuted in a "vast wasteland" of a 1960–61 television season considered one of the worst in television history up to that point. As late as the 1980s, highbrow critics derided the show's limited animation and derivative plots. Despite the mixed critical reviews at first, *The Flintstones* has generally been considered a television classic and was rerun continuously for five decades after its end. In 1961, *The Flintstones* became the first animated series to be nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series but lost out to *The Jack Benny Program*. The first season of the series received an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on five reviews. Common Sense Media gave the series a three out of five stars, saying: "Still a classic, but times have changed."

### Awards

In January 2009, IGN named *The Flintstones* as the ninth-best in its "Top 100 Animated TV Shows".  In 2013, *TV Guide* ranked *The Flintstones* the second-greatest TV cartoon of all time (after *The Simpsons*).

## **Trivia**

* The series is widely known for being the first animated series to hold a prime time slot on television.
* The first two seasons were co-sponsored by Winston cigarettes and the characters appeared in several black-and-white television commercials for Winston (dictated by the custom, at that time, that the star(s) of a TV series often "pitched" their sponsor's product in an "integrated commercial" at the end of the episode).