79. The Flintstones (1960-66)

 

by Brandie Ashe

Oh, for the good old days, when almost every theatrical release was preceded by a cartoon. Nowadays, we pretty much have to rely on the folks at Disney and Pixar to get our theatrical cartoon fix, but in the 1930s and 40s, it was guaranteed that going to the movies—to see any feature—meant also seeing the latest adventures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry, Superman, Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes gang, Mr. Magoo, Woody Woodpecker, and dozens of other animated troublemakers.

Things began to change with the so-called “Paramount Decision” of 1948, in which the Supreme Court decided that movie studios could no longer force theater chains to accept the practice of “block booking” a studio’s “lesser” products (short films and animated cartoons, namely), sometimes sight unseen, and exhibiting those shorts with feature-length studio productions. In other words, studios no longer had any sort of guarantee that their cartoons would actually be seen by audiences, so what was the point in producing cartoons anymore? It was the beginning of the end of the “Golden Age” of Hollywood animation. Many studio animation departments began to suffer in the wake of the decision, and animators at those troubled and soon-to-close studios began to find refuge in television.

In 1957, MGM, home of the Tom and Jerry series of cartoons, closed its animation division, despite the continued popularity of the duo. Tom and Jerry’s “parents,” animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, soon decided to try their luck at the still (relatively) new medium of television, and started their own animation company, H-B Enterprises (eventually rechristened Hanna-Barbera Productions). They found early TV hits with two new characters: a drawling, Southern caricature of a canine named Huckleberry Hound, and a horsey Old-West sheriff called Quick Draw McGraw. But Hanna-Barbera’s greatest television success came when the duo decided to move to primetime, introducing the world to a “modern Stone-Age family” whose lives, funnily enough, came right out of the most familiar of situation comedies.

That fabled family, The Flintstones, debuted on ABC on September 30, 1960, at 8:30PM. Its timeslot competitors? On CBS, the anthology drama series Route 66, and on NBC, yet another entry in the TV cowboy sweepstakes, The Westerner. Neither of those dramas was exactly lighting up the ratings, and so The Flintstones, perhaps by default, not only won its timeslot that year—it would go on to be the eighteenth most popular show of the 1960-61 television season and be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, becoming the first animated program to ever receive a nod for that award.

Yet it did this largely without support from television critics, who dismissed the show as an unexceptional novelty. And even today, the position of The Flintstones on any countdown such as this can be expected to produce debate about the merits of the show. There’s a tinge of nostalgia to the show, especially for baby boomers who grew up watching Fred and Barney’s antics—my own father, born in 1953, counts this show among his favorites of all time, and introduced my brothers and me to its dubious charms in the 1980s via the joys of syndication. But does “nostalgia” equal “quality?”

As always, I guess it comes down to a matter of personal taste. My dad loves the show; I’m ambivalent about it. I find it entertaining at times, particularly in the pre-Pebbles episodes (what is it about introducing a child to a show that tends to stop an otherwise diverting show in its tracks? Damn plot moppets). Is it a “good” show? That’s debatable (see: The Great Gazoo). I don’t find The Flintstones as wholly derivative as some critics apparently do—yes, it is an obvious clone of The Honeymooners (and yes, Jackie Gleason reportedly threatened to sue the show for being an unapologetic rip-off of his work)—but the animators found creative ways to play with both vocal and visual puns that, regardless of your opinion of such “easy” comedy, are still pretty damn funny. And until you’ve tried to maintain an endless stream of rock-related puns for 166 episodes, are you really in a position to judge how “easy” that feat is?

What the show really has going for it—the thing that makes it work despite its questionable creative merits—is a near-perfect voice cast who deliver their punny wordplay with a zest and charm that serves to elevate the material. Alan Reed is a blustery delight as Fred, and Mel Blanc brings his typical well-honed skills to the thankless role of Fred’s lackey/sidekick (not to mention providing the frantic vocals of the Flintstones’ hyperactive pet, Dino). The always-fantastic Bea Benaderet introduced Betty’s distinctive giggle (Gerry Johnson took over the role when Benaderet left after season four), while Jean Vander Pyl (a veritable Hanna-Barbera all-star) provided just enough wifely resignation and cunning to counteract Fred’s inane plots (not to mention baby Pebbles’ sickeningly-sweet coos and babbles). All told, The Flintstones is a kind of master class in effective animation casting, one that brims with a chemistry that rises above the sometimes-mundane plot devices utilized by the show.

Whether you appreciate the show for its campy delights or dismiss it as a pale imitator of better comedies that came before, there’s no denying that the success of The Flintstones provided a path for animated primetime comedies to come, from the heartfelt emotional storylines and sharp satire of The Simpsons’ earliest seasons, to the referential cutaway humor of Family Guy (interestingly enough, the creator of that show, Seth MacFarlane, attempted to develop a reboot of The Flintstones in 2012 that ultimately went nowhere), to the familial shenanigans of Bob’s Burgers. It’s hard not to wonder whether we would have even had these shows, or any number of other animated sitcoms in the past fifty years, had The Flintstones not demonstrated that the adventures of a wacky cartoon family could be just as entertaining as those of its live-action counterparts.