The Flintstones


The Flintstones is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. The series takes place in a romanticized Stone Age setting and follows the activities of the title family, the Flintstones, and their next-door neighbors, the Rubbles. It was originally broadcast on ABC from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966, and was the first animated series to hold a prime time slot on television.
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. In 2013, TV Guide ranked The Flintstones the second-greatest TV cartoon of all time.

Overview

The show is set in a comical version of the Stone Age but has added features and technologies which resemble mid-20th-century suburban America. The plots deliberately resemble the sitcoms of the era, with the caveman Flintstone and Rubble families getting into minor conflicts characteristic of modern life. The show is set in the Stone Age town of Bedrock. Non-avian dinosaurs and other animals are portrayed to co-exist during the time of cavemen, saber-toothed cats, and woolly mammoths.
Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman considers that the series draws its humor in part from creative uses of anachronisms. The main one is the placing of a "modern", 20th-century society in prehistory. This society takes inspiration from the suburban sprawl developed in the first two decades of the postwar period. This society has modern home appliances, but they work by employing animals. They have automobiles, but they hardly resemble the cars of the 20th century. These cars are large wooden and rock structures and burn no fuel. They are powered by people who run while inside them. This depiction is inconsistent, however. On some occasions, the cars are known to have engines, requiring ignition keys and gasoline. Fred might pull into a gas station and say, "Fill 'er up with Ethel", which is pumped through the trunk of a woolly mammoth marked "ETHEL." Whether the car runs by foot or by gas varies according to the needs of the story. Finally, the stone houses of this society are cookie-cutter homes positioned into neighborhoods typical of mid-20th-century American suburbs.

Characters

The Flintstones

Over 100 other characters appeared throughout the program.
Fred Flintstone physically resembles both the first voice actor who played him, Alan Reed, and Jackie Gleason, whose series, The Honeymooners, inspired The Flintstones. The voice of Barney Rubble was provided by voice actor Mel Blanc, except for five episodes during the second season ; Hanna-Barbera regular Daws Butler filled in and provided the voice of Barney while Blanc was incapacitated by a near-fatal car accident. Blanc was able to return to the series much sooner than expected, by virtue of a temporary recording studio for the entire cast set up at Blanc's bedside. Blanc's portrayal of Barney had changed considerably after the accident. In the earliest episodes, Blanc had used a much higher pitch to the point of portraying Barney as a smart-aleck. After his recovery from the accident, Blanc used a deeper voice, quite similar to the voice of the Abominable Snowman he performed in other cartoons and was shown as somewhat dopier than before.
Reed based Fred's voice upon Gleason's Honeymooners interpretation of Ralph Kramden, while Blanc, after a season of using a nasal, high-pitched voice for Barney, eventually adopted a style of voice similar to that used by Art Carney in his portrayal of Ed Norton. The first time the Art Carney-like voice was used was for a few seconds in "The Prowler".
In a 1986 Playboy interview, Gleason said Alan Reed had done voice-overs for Gleason in his early movies and that he had considered suing Hanna-Barbera for copying The Honeymooners but decided to let it pass. According to Henry Corden, a voice actor and a friend of Gleason's, "Jackie's lawyers told him he could probably have The Flintstones pulled right off the air. But they also told him, 'Do you want to be known as the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air? The guy who took away a show so many kids love and so many parents love, too?'"
Henry Corden's voice became Fred's after Reed's death in 1977, starting with A Flintstone Christmas. Corden had previously provided Fred's singing voice in The Man Called Flintstone and later on The Flintstones children's records. Since 2000, Jeff Bergman, James Arnold Taylor, and Scott Innes have performed the voice of Fred. Since Mel Blanc's death in 1989, Barney has been voiced by Jeff Bergman, Frank Welker, and Kevin Michael Richardson. Various additional character voices were created by Hal Smith, Allan Melvin, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, and Howard Morris, among others.

Episodes

Music

The opening and closing credits theme during the first two seasons was called "Rise and Shine", a lively instrumental underscore accompanying Fred on his drive home from work. The tune resembled "The Bugs Bunny Overture ", the theme song of The Bugs Bunny Show, also airing on ABC at the time, and may have been the reason the theme was changed in the third season. Starting in season 3, episode 3, the opening and closing credits theme was the familiar vocal "Meet the Flintstones". This version was recorded with a 22-piece big band, and the Randy Van Horne Singers. The melody is derived from part of the 'B' section of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17 Movement 2, composed in 1801/02. The "Meet the Flintstones" opening was later added to the first two seasons for syndication. The musical underscores were credited to Hoyt Curtin for the show's first five seasons; Ted Nichols took over in 1965 for the final season. Many early episodes used the underscores composed for "Top Cat" and "The Jetsons." Episodes of the last two seasons used the underscore of "Jonny Quest" for the more adventurous stories.

History and production

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.
Barbera and Hanna experimented with hillbillies, Romans, 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, 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". 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.
The concept was also predated by the Stone Age Cartoons series of 12 animated cartoons released from January 1940 to September 1940 by Fleischer Studios. These cartoons show stone-age people doing modern things with primitive means. One example is Granite Hotel including characters such as a newsboy, telephone operator, hotel clerk, and a spoof of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
Barbera explained that selling the show to a network and sponsors was not an easy task.
When the series went into production, the working title The Flagstones was changed, possibly to avoid confusion with the Flagstons, characters in the comic strip Hi and Lois. After spending a brief period in development as The Gladstones, Hanna-Barbera settled upon The Flintstones, and the idea of the Flintstones having a child from the start was discarded, with Fred and Wilma starting out as a childless couple. However, some early Flintstones merchandise, such as a 1961 Little Golden Book, included "Fred Jr."
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.
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 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.
The first two seasons were co-sponsored by Winston cigarettes and the characters appeared in several black-and-white television commercials for Winston.
During the third season, Hanna and Barbera decided that Fred and Wilma should have a baby. Originally, Hanna and Barbera intended for the Flintstone family to have a boy, the head of the marketing department convinced them to change it to a girl since "girl dolls sell a lot better than boy dolls". Although most Flintstones episodes were stand-alone storylines, Hanna-Barbera created a story arc surrounding the birth of Pebbles. Beginning with the episode "The Surprise", aired midway through the third season, in which Wilma reveals her pregnancy to Fred, the arc continued through the time leading up to Pebbles' birth in the episode "Dress Rehearsal", and then continued with several episodes showing Fred and Wilma adjusting to the world of parenthood. Around this time, Winston pulled out their sponsorship and Welch's became the primary sponsor, as the show's audience began to shift younger. The integrated commercials for Welch's products feature Pebbles asking for grape juice in her toddler dialect, and Fred explaining to Pebbles Welch's unique process for making the jelly, compared to the competition. Welch's also produced a line of grape jelly packaged in jars which were reusable as drinking glasses, with painted scenes featuring the Flintstones and characters from the show. In Australia, the Nine Network ran a "Name the Flintstones' baby" competition during the 'pregnancy' episodes—few Australian viewers were expected to have a U.S. connection giving them information about past Flintstone episodes. An American won the contest and received an all-expenses-paid trip to tour Hanna-Barbera Studios.
Another arc occurred in the fourth season, in which the Rubbles, depressed over being unable to have children of their own, adopt Bamm-Bamm. The 100th episode made, "Little Bamm-Bamm Rubble", established how Bamm-Bamm was adopted. Nine episodes were produced before it but aired afterward, which explains why Bamm-Bamm was not seen again until episode 101, "Daddies Anonymous". Another story arc, occurring in the final season, centered on Fred and Barney's dealings with the Great Gazoo.
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.
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 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 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. In January 2009, IGN named The Flintstones as the ninth-best in its "Top 100 Animated TV Shows". 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."

Nielsen ratings

Films and subsequent television series

Following the show's cancellation in 1966, a film based upon the series was created. The Man Called Flintstone was a musical spy caper that parodied James Bond and other secret agents. The movie was released to theaters on August 3, 1966, by Columbia Pictures. It was released on DVD in Canada in March 2005 and in United States in December 2008.
The show was revived in the early 1970s with Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm having grown into teenagers, and several different series and made-for-TV movies, including a series depicting Fred and Barney as police officers, another depicting the characters as children, and yet others featuring Fred and Barney encountering Marvel Comics superhero The Thing and Al Capp's comic strip character The Shmoo—have appeared over the years. The original show also was adapted into a live-action film in 1994, and a prequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, which followed in 2000. Unlike its sister show The Jetsons, the revival programs were not widely syndicated or rerun alongside the original series.

Television series

Original runs:
Compilation shows:

Canceled Seth MacFarlane reboot

In 2011, it was announced Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane would be reviving The Flintstones for the Fox network, with the first episode airing in 2013. After Fox Entertainment president Kevin Reilly read the pilot script and "liked it but didn't love it", MacFarlane chose to abandon work on the project rather than restarting it.

''Yabba-Dabba Dinosaurs''

Yabba-Dabba Dinosaurs is an American animated web television series spin-off of The Flintstones that is set to premiere in 2020, the first to feature them since the 1996 series Cave Kids, and produced by Warner Bros. Animation. It was produced by Mark Marek and Marly Halpern-Graser.
Like Cave Kids, the show focuses on the lives of best friends Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble, who are joined by Dino for many adventures in the Stone Age. The show is scheduled to be released as a part of the Boomerang IPTV subscription service in 2020. The series was set to first air on Teletoon as a regular television series in Canada in September 2019, but it has currently been delayed to September 2020.
The show started airing on February 3, 2020 on Boomerang UK.

Upcoming animated film

In 2014, it was announced that Warner Bros. was developing an animated film with Chris Henchy, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, to write the script for the project. Ferrell, and McKay would also be executive producers. In 2018, it was confirmed that the project is still in development, but it is currently unknown if the crew members would still be involved.

New reboot series

In 2019, it was reported that a new Flintstones reboot series, directed to an adult audience, is in development by Elizabeth Banks and her production company Brownstone Productions.

Theme parks

Two Flintstones-themed amusement parks exist in the United States: Bedrock City in Custer, South Dakota, and another in Valle, Arizona. The one near Williams Arizona is still open for the summer of 2019 but slated to close by 2020. It cost $5 per person to get in. Both have been in operation for decades. Bedrock City, also known as Flintstone Park, closed in August 2015.
Another existed until the 1990s at Carowinds in Charlotte, North Carolina. In Canada, Flintstone Park in Kelowna, British Columbia, opened in 1968 and closed in 1998; it was notable for the "Forty Foot Fred" billboard of Fred Flintstone which was a well-known Kelowna landmark.
Another Flintstones park was located in Bridal Falls, British Columbia, which closed in 1990. Calaway Park outside Calgary, Alberta, also opened with a Flintstones theme and many of the buildings today have a caveman-like design, though the park no longer licenses the characters. The Australia's Wonderland and Canada's Wonderland theme parks, both featured Flintstones characters in their Hanna-Barbera-themed children's sections from 1985 until the mid-1990s. Kings Island and Kings Dominion had a Hanna-Barbera land, in which many Hanna-Barbera characters were featured, including the Flintstones, in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Live theater

A stage production opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 1994, developed by Universal and Hanna-Barbera Productions. It opened at the Panasonic Theater, replacing the Star Trek show. The story consists of Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty heading for "Hollyrock". The show ran until January 2, 1997.

In popular culture

and their One-A-Day vitamin brand was the alternate sponsor of the original Flintstones series during its first two seasons, and in the late 1960s, Miles introduced Flintstones Chewable Vitamins, fruit-flavored multivitamin tablets for children in the shape of the Flintstones characters, which are still currently being sold.
The Simpsons referenced The Flintstones in several episodes. In the episode "Homer's Night Out", Homer's local convenience store clerk, Apu, remarks "You look familiar, sir. Are you on the television or something?", to which Homer replies "Sorry, buddy, you've got me confused with Fred Flintstone." During the couch gag of the opening credits of the episode "Kamp Krusty", the Simpson family arrive home to find the Flintstone family already sitting on their couch. The same couch gag was reused in syndicated episodes of "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", when The Simpsons overtook The Flintstones as the longest-running animated series. In "Lady Bouvier's Lover", Homer's boss, Mr. Burns, appears at the family's house and says "Why, it's Fred Flintstone and his lovely wife, Wilma! Oh, and this must be little Pebbles! Mind if I come in? I brought chocolates." Homer responds by saying "Yabba-dabba-doo!" The opening of "Marge vs. the Monorail" depicts Homer leaving work in a similar way to Fred Flintstone in the opening of The Flintstones, during which he sings his own version of the latter's opening theme only to slam into a chestnut tree.
On September 30, 2010, Google temporarily replaced the logo on its search page with a custom graphic celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Flintstones first TV broadcast.

Foreign versions

The series was translated into several languages.
The Hungarian version was written by József Romhányi in the 1960s. Romhányi was a well-known poet, writer and translator with the speciality of extreme word-play and he rewrote the whole cartoon in rhyming form full of wordplays and puns. It became so popular that many lines found their way into popular culture or became adages. The Hungarian publisher released the series in the 1990s with new dubbing, which resulted in a backlash from fans demanding the original dubbing. The studio did not have all the original voice material and they asked the general public to provide them the original copies of the series, so the original dub was re-recorded and later released on a DVD version in the 2000s.