Yabba-Dabba-Doo: The history of the flintstones
It was Sept. 30, 1960 — 60 years ago today — that Fred Flintstone first knocked off work at the quarry, rushed home to pick up his family and his next-door neighbors and treated them to a drive-in movie and a huge rack of yabba-dabba-delicious brontosaurus ribs.
“The Flintstones” were television’s first prime-time animated series. It lasted six seasons on ABC and, since then has lived on via reruns, spinoffs and reboots.
The First Animated Prime-Time TV Series
Animated film producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had won seven Academy Awards for their “Tom & Jerry” cartoons. Their goal for the 1960s: Create a series that would appeal to both kids and adults alike.
The two most popular TV shows on the air in the late 1950s were Lucille Ball’s “I Love Lucy” and Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners.” Hanna and Barbera decided to create a 30-minute sitcom that would parody family shows but with a twist: They’d set the show 10,000 years in the past and have cavemen be the stars.
They called their show “The Flagstones” but changed that when they realized that was also the name of the couple in the “Hi and Lois” comic strip.
Animator Ed Benedict designed Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble with long beards, scraggly, unkempt hair and hunched-over backs. Barbera didn’t like the design, so he had Benedict “straighten them up” and make them more “clean cut.”
As work progressed on the show, Hanna and Barbera realized it would be better to parody family sitcoms by hiring writers who had worked on TV sitcoms. They hired away a writer for “The Honeymooners” but he didn’t work out, Barbera said.
“He just wrote words. It was all dialogue ... when you’re doing animation, you’d better go beyond that. You can’t just have people making faces at each other. You have to move them.”
ABC bought the series and ran it in prime time: 8:30 Friday nights. Hanna and Barbera had the show created in color, but ABC ran it in black and white for its first two seasons.
After ABC canceled “The Flintstones” in 1966, the show reran in syndication for decades and was revived and reinvented time and time again for Saturday morning cartoon audiences. Live action movies starring John Goodman and Rosie O’Donnell were made in 1994 and 2000.
Joseph Barbera and William Hanna
The Flinstones and Its Spinoffs
And how long each series lasted in terms of seasons and episodes.
A Page Right Out of History
In one of the first episodes recorded, Fred Flintstone was to exclaim, “Yahoo!” The actor who voiced Fred, Alan Reed, asked if he could change that line to “Yabba Dabba Doo!” His inspiration for this was Reed’s mother, who had been fond of the old commercials for Brylcreem men’s hair styling gel: “Brylcreem: A little dab will do ya.”
Legendary voice actor Mel Blanc — who voiced Barney Rubble — was in a near-fatal car accident in 1961 and spent months in a full-body cast. Fellow voice actor Daws Butler filled in for him for five episodes but then the hospital allowed the studio to set up recording equipment around his bed. It took 16 staffers to record all of Blanc’s dialogue for each episode.
Dino’s first appearance in the show is as a talking Snorkasaurus, voiced by Jerry Mann doing an impression of Phil Silvers. That’s the only time Dino speaks. For the rest of the run of the show, Dino behaves like a pet dog who has a tendency to greet Fred by knocking him off his feet at the front door. Dino’s barks were supplied by Blanc.
The first two seasons of “The Flintstones” on ABC were sponsored by Winston cigarettes. Nearly every episode ended with Fred and Barney taking a smoke break from yardwork and Fred telling the audience that “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” The built-in commercials were removed when the show went into syndication.
Jackie Gleason considered suing Hanna and Barbera for adhering a little too closely to “The Honeymooners.” Gleason’s lawyers thought he could win but one did ask 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, too? Gleason decided to let it go.
Jean Vander Pyl voiced not only Wilma Flintstone but also Pebbles and, later, Rosie the Robot on Hanna Barbara’s “The Jetsons.” “Sure, Fred was a yahoo and I got mad at him all the time,” Vander Pyl told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “But we really loved each other. Our romance was one of the things that made us so popular. We were real.”
Bea Benaderet was the original voice of Betty Rubble. After three seasons of “The Flintstones,” however, Benaderet departed the show to star in the sitcom “Petticoat Junction.” Gerry Johnson replaced her on “The Flintstones.” Benaderet spent four seasons on “Petticoat Junction” but was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1967 and died a year later.
The plan for Season 3 was for Fred and Wilma to have a son — “a chip off the old Flintstone.” But a marketing expert pointed out that girl dolls sell better — a lot better — than boy dolls. Oh, well, Barbera replied, in that case, it’s a girl. Sure enough, 3 million Pebbles dolls were sold within just a few months. Betty and Barney adopted Bamm-Bamm the next season.
