Cartoon Stars Re-Animated: The Flintstones.

 

Cartoon Stars Re-Animated

You know, looking at the American TV animation scene and its history is a strange thing. Especially when it comes to trying to figure out why cartoons in the U.S. are usually seen as only for children. When pushed and prodded, people will go back and forth on the subject. Ultimately, the name of one prolific animation studio comes out: Hanna-Barbera.

You ask people who made it so cartoons are only for kids and people will say that it was Hanna-Barbera's fault.

Which is really funny, because Hanna-Barbera tried repeatedly to create prime time animated sitcoms aimed at an adult audience.

So, let's look at Hanna-Barbera's prime time output and figure out where this is all stemming from.

First, a little bit about Hanna and Barbera themselves. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera first met at MGM's animation studio. A seemingly more unlikely pair would be hard to find. Barbera was a fast-talking, streetwise New Yorker who liked his creature comforts. Hanna was a more introverted, laconic westerner whose interest in the outdoors seemed set from the minute he joined the Boy Scouts as a child. However, despite the odds, the two joined forces and created Tom & Jerry, possibly the biggest series to come out of MGM animation. Hanna's skill in music and timing seemed to work perfectly with Barbera's artistic ability (and later his gift as a pitchman). Hanna and Barbera's shorts won MGM numerous Academy Awards, none of which they were allowed to personally accept. But eventually things would end for MGM animation. With television making inroads into people's homes, theaters were taking fewer chances on new animated shorts. Also, they were starting to notice that they could make just as much by running classic shorts as new ones. The brass at MGM noticed this too. Before long, the MGM animation studio was disbanded and Hanna and Barbera were out of work. With no where else to go, they set their sights on television. And they brought with them a method they had developed called “limited animation” or “planned animation” that got the most animation out of the least number of drawings as possible. Hanna-Barbera were one of the first studios to make cartoons expressly for television (the other was Jay Ward, who we'll talk about at another time). Their first shows Ruff & Reddy, The Huckleberry Hound Show, and Quick-Draw McGraw were all successful, with Huckleberry Hound winning them an Emmy. It was in 1960 that Hanna-Barbera sales associate John Mitchell suggested to Bill and Joe that the next place for Hanna-Barbera to go would be to produce a cartoon for prime time viewing.

That show would become The Flintstones.

Fred and Barney as they appear in the first episode "The Flintstone Flyer".

The road to The Flintstones would not be a straight line. Initial concepts had them as Romani, ancient Romans, Native Americans, hillbillies and Pilgrims. It wasn't until animator Dan Gordon dashed off a sketch of a record player that used a bird's beak as a needle that the idea took form. In addition to a sitcom, the show would also lampoon modern conveniences filtered through a Stone Age lens. The end result is more or less The Honeymooners combined with Fleischer's Stone Age Cartoons, even if Hanna and Barbera weren't always aware that was what they were drawing from. The series stars blustering and stubborn bront-crane operator Fred Flintstone (played by Alan Reed), his strong-willed and frequently sarcastic wife Wilma Flintstone (voiced by Jean Vander Pyl), Fred's well-meaning friend and next door neighbor Barney Rubble (voiced by Mel Blanc) and Barney's cheerful wife Betty Rubble (voiced by June Foray). At least at the onset of the show.

There are actually a lot of places you can learn about the history of the Flintstones, ranging from videos on YouTube to Wikipedia to both Bill Hanna's and Joe Barbera's autobiographies. So, let's move on to impressions of the series.

The Flintstones as we would come to know them.

Rewatching the series now, I'm impressed with what a solid sitcom it is. Yeah, the jokes don't exactly seem as cutting edge in 2026 as they did in 1960, but they have the situation comedy tropes and formula down pat. On top of that, they also made sure to include a lot of visual cartoon humor. That's not always the easiest balance to strike. In Joe Barbera's autobiography My Life in Toons, Barbera tells a story of making the mistake of hiring a sitcom writer who worked on The Honeymooners and then finding that his whole script was nothing but dialogue and verbal humor, without any visual cartoon gags. I also have to give proper respect to how versatile the characters are. Fred, in particulart, is rarely one-note. Though usually loud-mouthed and stubborn, it's not the extent of his character. Sometimes he can be a jerk. Sometimes he can be a good guy (his friends and lodge brothers seem to particularly like him). Other times he can be a jerk. Sometimes he can be the source of a problem. Other times he's the victim of whatever the problem is. And it always feels like the same character. Barney, meanwhile, functions as Fred's “down for anything” sidekick in misadventure but frequently gets his jabs in as he knows not to take Fred particularly seriuously. And then there's Wilma and Betty, who are as prone to getting in and out of trouble as their husbands, which kind of a rarity in TV in 1960. Though the concept and main characters are solid in the beginning, the fine details of the world take a little bit more time. The name of Fred's workplace and boss change. So does Wilma's maiden name (from “Wilma Pebble” to “Wilma Slaghoople”). There's even an early episode that's meant to introduce Dino that has him speaking in a voice similar to Phil Silvers' voice and acting as something akin to a housekeeper. It's not long before he settles into the role of family pet, though. There are other things that never even made it into the show proper. Apparently, the pet sabre-toothed cat seen in the intro and end credits of the show was developed enough at one point to get a name: Baby Puss. In the end, the cat is barely seen in the actual show. I think this all just shows how experimental all this still was and how early in Hanna-Barbera's life as a studio it was. Luckily, this was all just fine detail and didn't effect the greater show, and most of them were hammered out by the third season.

People are fond of saying that the Flintstones is just a ripoff of The Honeymooners. So, in order to see the bigger picture, I actually watched some of the Honeymooners in order to get a sense of what the differences and similarities are. And while the Honeymooners definitely seems like the jumping off point for the Flintstones, there are definitely differences beyond the Stone Age setting. As Joe Barbera once observed, the Honeymooners was mnuch more driven by dialogue and verbal comedy. The Flintstones excelled more at its visual gags and “window dressing”. The Flintstones stock in trade is the gags about prehistoric versions of modern conveniences. Things like the record player with a bird for the needle or a shower that's just a baby mammoth spraying with its trunk. The characters in The Flintstones seem a bit softer too. Ed Norton is the butt of jokes because of his low intelligence and sometimes childlike personality. Barney Rubble doesn't seem particularly dumb, just like a nice guy who is sometimes a bit too accomodating of Fred. Fred Flintstone also seems nicer than Ralph Kramden. Fred is a grump and a grouch much of the time, but ultimately seems harmless. Watching Ralph Kramden, he always felt like he was one bad decision away from getting court-ordered anger management classes. He seems just that angry. There is one other thing that really stands out as a difference. It's a difference of social class. The Kramdens and the Nortons in The Honeymooners were poor, urban, working class folks living in a tenement walk-up. The Flintstones, with its many jabs at post-war modern conveniences was ultimately a parody of suburbia. The slightly sly underlying joke being that despite our pride in our modern suburban lives, we might not be so far removed from primitive savagery as we think. The Flintstones and the Rubbles lived in near-identical suburban houses with green lawns that they mowed with their dinosaur-powered lawn mowers. In other words, despite Fred's constant grumbling about money, the Flintstones are middle class. The Flintstones and Rubbles aren't the Kramdens and the Nortons. They're more like the Kramdens and the Nortons if they managed to just barely scrape together enough money together to move to the suburbs and stay there. Even more differences would develop over time. For example, the Flintstones and the Rubbles would have children: Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm Bamm Rubble. As far as I know, the Kramdens and Nortons never did.

And the Flintstones worked! As a sitcom for adults and family audiences,it worked for about six seasons. It may be hard to believe now, seeing as so many of us watched the Flintstones as reruns on kids' cartoon blocks and with how modern prime time animated comedies make a point of pushing into much edgier territory. At the time, though, the thing that set Fred Flintstone apart from other cartoon protagonists is that most of his worries and concerns were those of an adult man. His concerns were of holding down a job, making enough money, supporting his family, and keeping his marriage intact (yes, despite all the hare-brained schemes). Compare this to Hanna-Barbera's funny animal characters, who tend to be written as more childlike. Yogi Bear is like a mischevious kid constantly trying to steal “goodies” from a cookie jar while under the nose of an authority figure. Huckleberry Hound was like a kid playing dress-up, trying out a different profession every episode (policeman, mailman, cowboy, etc). Even later additions to the Hanna-Barbera library like Scooby-Doo sidestepped more practical concerns like why the show's cast of teenagers weren't in school and how they could afford to drive around the country solving mysteries.

Yet, the thing about TV shows that work is that they only work until they don't anymore.

Fred and Barney with the Great Gazoo, a character often accused of killing the show.

By season six, the show was running on fumes. Tastes had changed in the TV landscape. What the Flintstones offered wasn't exactly what viewers of primetime TV wanted anymore. The producers and writers had introduced new elements to try and keep interest up. In season three, they introduced the babies Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm Bamm Rubble. In season six, spurred by the success of the show My Favorite Martian, they added in the Great Gazoo, a spaceman from the future who only Fred and Barney could see. A lot of people blame Gazoo for leading to the show's cancellation, but while he wasn't a great addition, the show was pretty much on its way out anyway. But the show wouldn't be forgotten. The show would transition to syndication and Saturday morning TV and launch what seems like a million spinoffs aimed at younger viewers. Among them The Pebbles and Bamm Bamm Show, Fred and Barney Meet the Thing, Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo, The New Fred and Barney Show, The Flintstone Funnies, The Flintstone Comedy Show, The Flintstone Kids, Cave Kids, Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs, and a whole bunch of TV movies including The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, I Yabba-Dabba Do, and Hollyrock-a-Bye Baby. Plus two live action movies and various merchandise spinoffs like the various Post Pebbles cereals and Flintstones children's vitamins. And that's just all the ones I can remember.

The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show.  The Flintstones' first spinoff (basically The Archies in furs).

Probably one of the more interesting spin-offs from the Flintstones was a Flintstones comic book published by DC Comics in 2016. The comic keeps the main set-up of the cartoon series while turning it into a rather biting satire. In addition to going to some darker places, the comic book trades the misplaced pride of living in a modern suburban world with the anxiety of living in a world that feels like it's moving a little too fast. It really is very good. Check it out if you get the chance.

The Flintstones comic book from 2016

As of right now in 2026, the Flintstones is not forgotten but is in a bit of a fallow period. The cereals and vitamins live on. There have also been numerous creative people circling around the idea of frelaunching the show, like Seth McFarlane and Elizabeth Banks. Nothing's come of it, though. They still keep trying, though. Just recently, Ryan Gosling signed on to star in and produce a movie about an adult Bamm Bamm Rubble, but who knows if that will go through.

The Flintstone Kids.  One of the last network spinoffs.  Was on TV when I was a kid.

The Flintstones probably aren't coming back at any time soon. It's just hard to recapture that same 1960 zeitgeist in the 2020s. Heck, it was hard to keep it going into the '70s, '80s and '90s with all the spinoffs.  And trying to inject the 2020s vibe into the property gets something like the 2016 comic book series, which was good but could be divisive as a TV show. Besides, the property actually reached a pretty good stopping point after the TV movies.

The Flintstones was Hanna-Barbera's first prime time sitcom, though. It was a big hit, too. It wasn't the last time they'd try it either. Those efforts yielded more mixed results. That's a subject for another time, though.