Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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.
Published in General
I once dreamt of Perhapsburg, Pennsylvania. I always took it as a Bullwinkle moment.
I remember watching The Flintstones on Saturday mornings and being disturbed by the sudden change in Barney Rubble’s voice. Mel Blanc was in a near fatal automobile accident and Daws Butler was brought in to temporarily replace him.
Alan Reed
When I was in my teens I discovered that there was an entire universe of recorded network radio programming. And when I began my journey down that rabbit hole Saturday Morning sounded entirely different to me. Alan Reed just wasn’t Fred Flintstone, he was Falstaff Openshaw in Allen’s Alley.
Bea Benaderet wasn’t just Betty Rubble, she was Gertrude Gearshift from the Jack Benny Program and Blanche Morton from Burns and Allen. And then I connected her to her on camera work in Petticoat Junction.
Jean Vander Pyle was the original Margaret Anderson on Father Knows Best, but lost the role to Jane Wyatt when it moved to television. Besides being Wilma Flintstone she was Rosie the Robotic Maid on The Jetsons and appeared on a host of other Hanna-Barbera productions.
I always preferred the descriptions of the business provided by the previously alluded to Fred Allen: “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.” (He also called it “A treadmill to oblivion.”)
Thanks for another great history lesson!
I made that connection while listening to an old radio show, probably Broadway Is My Beat, and a growling NYC tough guy with a distinct touch of Yiddish suddenly made me sit up. Hey! That’s Fred Flintstone! For the rest of that show it was hard to keep that image out of my head.
“Heh, heh! Barney, this caveman schtick is gettin’ old…how about we toss these schmatas and buy us some sharp threads?”
BTW, the two minute 1959 test film that sold the show was titled The Flagstones, but it turned out that comic strip Hy and Lois had the last name of Flagston. Then they tried Gladstone, but Disney has a minor character named Gladstone Gander.
“That Barney Rubble… What an actor!”
Okay, maybe I was too tough on Jay Ward…I didn’t say low wattage! There’s a distinct “world” that his shows take place in, and we remember characters like Boris and Natasha. Funny thing is, I loved the Rocky cartoons as a little kid, but I was put off by The Bullwinkle Show a few years later because I really disliked the puppet. I wasn’t alone.
But when the gang was cooking, they were good. The greedy king in this Fractured Fairy Tale looks…strangely familiar!
There’s also the scene in Better Off Dead where Barney (on the TV) asks Lane if he minds if he asks Beth out.
I LOVED Bea Benaderet on Burns and Allen. She was fantastic.
The credits to Calvin and the Colonel. TV credits ran longer in those days. I’ll say this for C& the C: the credits show that they had US-based animators, unlike some of their competitors.
Same here!
Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
Quiet, you!
In all but the rarest cases, in animation the soundtrack comes first. Actors record the script; the audio tape is transferred (re-recorded) on magnetically coated 35mm film; and an assistant sits at a bench running the sound through a simple mechanical counter, writing down the exact timing.
23 feet, 2-16 frames: sound of Bluto hitting the wall.
This becomes the timing sheet, something like a musical score. The animators use it as their guide, either drawing or re-using the pictures. While they work, they use character model sketches to remind themselves what the character looks like in detail.
The finished, inspected paper drawings were hand-traced on sheets of celluloid in black ink; they are then filled in by color painters.
Those finished cels now go to the camera department. It’s a batch operations deal, like the way programmers used to drop off punched cards for a run. The camera crew works from an exposure sheet, broken down into which cels are filmed, how many frames per cel, and any camera moves, x and y axis, and the z axis (closer and farther away).
Unlike almost any other form of filmmaking, no one looks through the camera. They already know exactly what they’re going to get. “Pull back from a 4 Field to a 9 field while panning right -15”.
On the subject of themes:
Peter Gunn – Henry Mancini
Perry Mason – Ray Coniff
The Rockford Files – Mike Post/Pete Carpenter
If you’ve never seen it, The Venture Brothers is in major part an homage to Johnny Quest. Its theme song is nuts and fantastic:
In the Nineties, H-B rebooted Quest as a slightly rougher, tougher character, but it didn’t succeed. I had similar dubious vibes from the later, rebooted Teenage Ninja Turtles–this time they’re ripped! Cut! Aggressive and hot tempered!
I always thought those revisions were a humorless joke, but once in a while, they do work. In a million years, I would never have believed that a TV show (Riverdale) could be made out of a hitherto unknown dark, violent, sexual side of Archie Comics. A truly dopey idea, but it made money.
Yes it made money, but that doesn’t prove it was GOOD.
The Simpsons had an episode where Bart meets a bum who invented the characters for the immensely popular in-show cartoon Itchy and Scratchy before they were stolen from him. In the ensuing lawsuit, when the corporate executive realizes he’s losing, he gets in front of the judge and everybody and gives an impassioned speech in defense of his industry:
It doesn’t go well for him.
Jughead Unbound!
And I was standing outside the Perhapsburg Gazette office and reading the front page posted by the front door. When I woke up I actually checked a map looking for Perhapsburg, PA, but didn’t find one.
I remember a Rocky & Bullwinkle episode where they were, as I recall, trying to stop Boris and Natasha from stealing the secret behind a new material used to make blimps that didn’t need helium, or something like that. It was called Upsydaisyum.
That was the first name they wanted for that element they sought in Avatar, but it was taken. So they went with Impossibilium or Eucranium, or something — I forget.
No, Eucranium gives you extra mental powers, so that’s not it.
“unobtainium”.
Which I am convinced was just a name the screenwriter put in as a placeholder, and then forgot to go back and change it out.
James Cameron didn’t come up with “unobtanium”. It’s an old joke among engineers.
IIRC, the Family Guy episode where they go to Springfield and meet The Simpsons has a number of inside gags written by Simpsons writers noting how many “resemblances” there are.
I’m not making fun of him for making up the name. I’m making fun of him for using it.
One of Jay Ward’s most unique TV projects was Fractured Flickers, basically verbal jokes matched with clips of silent movies. It had a minor cult at the time, and big stars often did uncredited guest appearances.
Full disclosure: I feel a bit like a traitor for enjoying this silly show, because film scholars have long fulminated against it for trashing old movies. It occasionally went over the top: I recall a scene from a 1920s nature documentary that showed (thankfully, from a distance) a pack of jackals feasting on a zebra. “The National Restaurant Association reminds you that this is Take Your Family Out to Eat week!”
Sure, but by rights the stuff they were mining on Pandora should have been named McGuffinite.
One of the Treehouse of Horror stories they did had Homer discovering that his hammock, of all things, could be used to clone him. As the stories progress his clones figure out they can clone themselves too. In one shot the show pans over a field of Homer clones, getting worse and worse as replication errors propagate. And then there’s Peter Griffen, just standing in the field with the rest of the Homer Simpsons clones.
I rate it “Harsh, but deserved.”