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A Page Right Out of History
If you were to judge solely by 1950s TV, postwar America was a sunny and suburban place, with modern one-story private homes, young kids with more on the way, and a car for every happy family. Not a whole lot of racial or ethnic diversity, to be sure. Nearly every network show that wasn’t a Western had that setting.
On September 30, 1960, ABC premiered an unexpected variation on that idea by simply setting a typical sunny suburban TV comedy in the stone age, The Flintstones, with the added twist that it was an animated show. In those more innocent days, ABC’s novelty hit comedy was often called an “adult cartoon”, years before “adult” became a euphemism for “dirty”. Back then it simply meant: not just for children. (Needless to say, the closing song’s final line, “We’ll have a gay old time” was also heard very differently back then.)
What made The Flintstones unique was, it wasn’t conceived and written as if it were an animated cartoon, but more as if it were a live action Fifties TV comedy that just happened to be set 10,000 years ago. Of course, if you were an American television viewer of 1960, you knew right away just which live action show: Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners, which had gone off the air only four years earlier. Gleason was quick to see the resemblance and reached for the lawyers, but his agent and his attorneys talked him out of it. It’s hard to win this kind of vague parody lawsuit, and it would have hurt Gleason’s image, making him look like a heel for killing off the popular new series.
Ironically, of the 50s TV sitcom cliches I listed above—an upbeat, sunny setting, private homes and cars, happy families with kids—they all applied to The Flintstones, but not one of them applied to The Honeymooners. Until The King of Queens, forty years later, there haven’t been many other hit comedies about working-class couples in their thirties with no kids, starring a burly leading man who is more sour than sweet. So The Flintstones wasn’t the total ripoff that Jackie Gleason thought it was after all.
One thing nobody questioned, though: it was a big hit, helping ABC offset the critical and regulatory headaches that came along with making a mint from The Untouchables, which premiered the year before. It also cushioned ABC from the impending, long in the cards departure of Walt Disney Presents to NBC, set for fall 1961, largely to take advantage of that RCA-owned network’s pouring money into promoting color TV.
There had already been a handful of animated TV shows in prime time, but they were basically packages of old theatrical cartoons with filler material, like much of ABC’s Disney as well as brief runs of Warner Bros cartoons and UPA’s Gerald Mc-Boing Boing. Like UPA’s Mr. Magoo, The Flintstones had what was basically a one-joke premise; but the show got a lot of comic mileage out of the clever substitutions it made; brontosauruses instead of steam shovels, pigeon beaks instead of clothespins, or using a parrot as a telephone handset.
The television industry buzzed over the unexpected new success, and proved an old saying about Hollywood: Superior to fascism as a force, superior even to communism, (and given some of the old guys in this town, that’s saying something), Hollywood is devoted to one cause above all others: Plagiarism. By the start of the very next season, the fall of 1961, not only was Disney back, with its mixture of old cartoons, live action, and some segments made for TV alone, but The Flintstones had new prime-time rivals.
If The Honeymooners was ripe for a copy, how about Amos n’ Andy? Yes, in a move you’d be highly unlikely to see today, ABC tried to expand in its Flintstones success by adding Calvin and the Colonel (1961), based on the Amos n’ Andy radio and TV show, with participation of the original performers. In truth it was, in effect, the Kingfish and Andy show, like the short-lived TV version, chased off CBS in 1953 by protests and boycotts. ABC muted racism complaints by making its main characters a crafty fox and a trusting bear, but the show just wasn’t very funny.
In an odd NBC programming move that could not have pleased Walt Disney, his new Wonderful World of Color was preceded by The Bullwinkle Show, largely a mishmash of Jay Ward and Bill Scott’s afternoon Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons that had been surprisingly well received for their medium-wattage wit. At first the segments were introduced by live footage of a crudely made hand puppet of Bullwinkle, who quite unlike the cartoon moose, made snarky topical remarks about current events, politics, and other TV shows, including NBC’s 800-pound gorilla, the afore-mentioned Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. This was in the sardonic manner that (in our time) was seen in Adult Swim’s Space Ghost. The moose puppet was gone in a few months. The Bullwinkle Show barely held on for a second season.
CBS had The Alvin Show, based on the novelty record sensation of Christmastime 1958. It lasted one season. The economics of made for TV animation were tough. Labor-saving tricks weren’t all as obvious as the superimposed lip movements in Clutch Cargo. Limited animation, with simplified designs and backgrounds, became the rule. They claimed it was sophisticated impressionism. But we know what it was: cheap.
There was also “Ship it off to sweatshops in Mexico,” the one-step-farther budget solution used by two “animation studios” that had few or no animators on staff, and no film studios to speak of, Jay Ward (Rocky and Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales, Peabody and Sherman) and Total Television (King Leonardo, Tennessee Tuxedo). Jay Ward’s shows were filmed at Gamma Studios in Mexico, and visibly suffered from long distance supervision and cripplingly low budgets.
Total Television was incorporated by the ad executives who worked the General Mills account. In what sounds like an NPR consumerist dystopia, their shows were openly designed and written to tie in to selling children’s cereal. Advertisers liked owning their own royalty-free spokes-characters. Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Sugar Bear, Lucky the Leprechaun, Snap, Crackle, and Pop; they were independent, and didn’t need a license from Disney, Warners, or Paramount.
By then, Hanna-Barbera’s second big prime time show was airing, The Jetsons (1962). Its concept was stone-age simple: flip The Flintstones into the future. The underlying joke is still the same: whether it’s the distant past or the distant future, things basically look and feel like life in the US middle class in the early Sixties. Although The Jetsons is remembered fondly, it wasn’t a hit in prime time and lasted only a season there. By contrast, The Flintstones lasted for six. George was just never as popular as Fred.
In 1963, ABC rolled the dice on yet another H-B show, Top Cat. This time, the blatantly obvious inspiration was Sergeant Bilko, also known as The Phil Silvers Show, or by its original, forgotten title, You’ll Never Get Rich. The fast-talking east coast Jewish comedian voicing the main role this time was Arnold Stang, the nerdy Eddie Deezen of his era, but it might as well have been the wily, conniving Sarge himself.
Bilko’s Sancho Panza-like comic sidekick, Doberman, played by Maurice Gosfield, had his animated counterpart on Top Cat, Benny the Ball, played by…Maurice Gosfield. Although Top Cat lasted only one season on ABC primetime, it was in Saturday morning repeats forever, and was a bigger hit in Latin America than here, where Don Gato’s funny con man routines were admired. I admired them too.
From an eleven-year-old’s perspective, Top Cat had what sounded like a great life. He lived in a comfy alley, relied on his pals, and cadged free rides in fancy cars to ritzy restaurants. It was, I suppose, a useful early guide to making the most of Hollywood.
In the fall of 1964, the final series of the glory years of Hanna-Barbera’s primetime push was another one-season wonder that is recognized even now, Johnny Quest. Most animated cartoons of the classic era featured animal characters. H-B’s earlier top shows (Flintstones, Jetsons) starred people, but stylized ones. Johnny Quest was their first with realistic-looking human characters. The famously penny-pinching H-B animation shop threw everything they had at the adventure project, sort of a weekly James Bond for twelve-year old boys.
Commercially, it didn’t work for ABC, but it was an honorable effort. By this point, the novelty value of primetime animation was fading. When The Flintstones finished its run in 1966, night time cartoons retreated to being mostly animated specials and holiday seasonals, like Peanuts, and Dr. Suess.
Seven years later, after a profitable interlude going back to grinding out Saturday morning cartoons, Hanna-Barbera made another try for primetime: Wait Till Your Father Gets Home (1972-’74) which attempted to quickly cash in on the surprise hit success of All in the Family (1971). But despite a few good gags here and there, WTYFGH was if not quite a loser, (it did get renewed for a second season) largely considered a tepid snoozer. The jokes were off-the-rack tired cliches about liberals and conservatives, husbands and wives, and the young and old, and the lazy cheapness of the drawing and animation made Johnny Quest look like Fantasia by comparison.
Primetime animation eventually returned, big time, in the form of The Simpsons, Rugrats, Beavis and Butthead, Family Guy, Archer, Ren and Stimpy, and many others. For more than a quarter century, animation is done on a computer screen.
To return to the beginning: The success secret of Hanna-Barbera animation in the late Fifties was simple. Animators did as little drawing as possible. Mostly they rationalized characters and movement into previously created numbers: Huckleberry Hound, facing left (model drawing 34), running (group 34a arms, 34b legs, each with ten drawings a cycle) in front of a repeating background (desert scene 12, twelve drawings per cycle). They spent their days compiling lists on paper. It was up to the production department to retrieve the correct archived plastic cels and put them under the camera. The sheer footage of each man’s weekly output was, as a British animator put it, “frightening”. It wasn’t what they learned in art school or at Disney. For the H-B staff, prime time shows like The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Top Cat or Johnny Quest were, in relative terms, their reward, a rare chance for the animators to show what they could actually do. It’s almost poignant.
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The cartoons were forgettable for me. but what stuck with me were the Theme songs!
Sixty years ago, and Johnny is already rockin’ the Trump haircut, well ahead of his time.
Somehow, I suspect Haji has, in fact, never been on the Haj.
Race Bannon sounds like what Chat GPT would come up with if you asked, “Is there a way to tag Steve Bannon with a specific volatile issue?”
Thanks, @deanmurphy! All of them great opening credits, back in the glory days of exciting openings. Nowadays, to claw back commercial time, and reduce the chance you’ll switch away, openings are fast, and credits are buried, with a much briefer music theme and visual treatment.
But back then, the idea was to get you back into the world of the show. The H-B primetime openings did the job. To this day, I love ’em all.
Great work as usual Gary. All family shows should be done in animation. The biggest problem that face many a family T.V show was the cute kid growing out of his/her cuteness. Diffrent Strokes being the prime example. Gary Coleman wasn’t as cute when he turned into a teenager. The red headed kid they brought in just didn’t cut it. The Simpsons and South Park easily avoid this problem. Bart Simpson and Cartman can be young forever.
Our cartoons had great music, unlike anything they get now. Hot jazz or classical music. I can’t be the only on who hears classical music, and remembers the specific Bugs Bunny cartoon that used it.
Locally, we also had The Early Show, an afternoon movie hosted by Flippo the Clown, a local jazz musician, who did a show that was shockingly hip for a 60s kid show.
The youngsters don’t know what they’re missing.
Thanks, Thelonious! I’ll say this for Two and a Half Men: they had a cynical, but funny true to life evolution of innocent little Jake Harper into a sullen, gross tweener and then a lazy, half-educated wise guy of a teenager.
That’s an interesting oddity of comedy mega-producer Chuck Lorre: his shows generally have a real world timeline. They aren’t topical–not much of the news gets through the bubble protecting the comedy–but if two characters met three seasons ago, that’s how much time is reckoned with on the show.
I didn’t know that “Norwegian Wood” was a Beatles song for years and years. I knew it as a crazy hot jazz version, with all the musicians improvising at the same time. Theme song for The Early Show.
The Carl Stallings Project is online here and there, and has some of his classic re-used “bits”, like Powerhouse and The Tobacco Auctioneer.
Cheaper cartoons (like CBS’s owned and operated animation studios, ancient pioneer Terrytoons) often used stock music, which you could audition on a “library” of hundreds of phonograph records. When you found what you needed, an assistant editor filled out a form and the specific number was delivered to the editing room on magnetic 35mm film. A European composer named Roger Roger wrote many of the familiar cliche melodies of Terrytoons without ever having seen any of the cartoons.
Of course, the nighttime cartoons were also followed by a bunch of kid oriented live action shows, back when prime time included 7-8pm. Batman, The Green Hornet, Mr. Terrific, The Monkees. More shows that started out in prime time, but quickly ended up on Saturday mornings.
All I can find. Norwegian Wood in about a minute in.
I’ll never forgive Mike Pence for stealing Race Bannon’s NIL and trashing it.
Niece-In-Law?
Oh.
Excellent!
I’m actually not kidding. He was the second in command, the watch dog, the enforcer. Great character.
Full Disclosure: the familiar, bouncy Flintstones theme song quoted in this post’s title was not, in fact, the original theme of the show, an innocuous instrumental called “Rise and Shine”. “Meet the Flintstones” made its debut in the fall of 1962, when its flashy new stablemate, The Jetsons, would be premiering with its own classic, catchy opening.
The Flintstones were always made in color, although ABC didn’t broadcast them that way at first. The perpetual underdog network, jilted by Disney in part over its lack of funds to switch over to color, put The Jetsons on in color, only a year after Disney moved to NBC as if to say, “See?” But at the time, the only piece of color-capable image origination equipment in the entire network was a movie projector at its West Coast headquarters, modified to transmit color. That’s what ran The Jetsons. The signal made it from KABC Channel 7 in east Hollywood to the national affiliates over the usual AT&T video lines, and those affiliates whose transmitters had already received the relatively minor upgrade to broadcast color could carry the network program, even if their own studios didn’t have so much as a color TV camera yet.
My guess is the overall look of Race Bannon is influenced by Paul Drake, the polite but tough and terse private detective on the then-current Perry Mason.
Five years ago, i had a four part series on Hollywood’s for-real Communists, and one was about a turning point, the Disney strike of 1941. The post has a reasonably detailed description of how animation is made, and what things make it such a different business setup than “normal”, live action films.
I miss TV theme songs.
How many can You name and sing to?
I never watched an episode, but this song pretty much defined a decade:
Medium-wattage? Harumph! Harumph, I say!
Funnier than “Sex and the City.”
Still cracks Me up.
Thank you for the trip down Memory Lane . . .
That little slight almost went unnoticed by me. Very dismissive of one of the greatest shows in television history. Whatsamatta U? Gary!
I was a kid in the 50s. I never found any of the Hanna Barbera cartoons worth watching. They bored me (unlike Looney Tunes).
The show that put Frostbite Falls, Minnesota on the map … in a manner of speaking.
The show that gave us the Kerwood Derby!
I loved Johnny Quest as a kid. Watching it as an adult I was amazed by the level of violence and yes, it is a tad racist. Still enjoyed it.
Adult Swim’s The Venture Bros. is a parody of the show, taking themes that were in the original and playing them out more fully. With the great Patrick Warburton.