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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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I really thought it was Eucranium at first. But if not, then I’ll keep that for myself. It’s like green silly putty that you sick behind your ears and you can hear crickets chirping a mile away and know what they’re thinking (which if you haven’t heard them before, they’re pretty far out).
Let’s not forget Edward Everette Horton as the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tails. (and one of my favorite character actors of the 1930s/1940s).
That’s actually the name for a top secret high explosive. Like red mercury but more red.
Thought I wasn’t interested. Started reading. You got me again, sir. Loved it.
Yes, either that or the writer didn’t realize how bad it was, and nobody else noticed or cared either.
But that’s only one reason I’ll never see anything Avatar. I thought the whole “Avatars” thing was nonsense too. I don’t remember now, were they supposed to be controlling some kind of robots, or cloned beings, or did they actually mentally control actual native beings? Any of those was dumb, but especially the first.
Thanks, Dotori! Glad you liked it.
I never knew the audio came first, but it makes perfect sense.
I married a woman from Florida who had gone to Disneyland many times and was a huge fan. In the late 1980s we met a couple who collected animation cels, and suddenly we were collecting them too. By that time the traditional process was obsolete and was being replaced by electronic technology, so we were late to the game.
A good collectable cel shows main characters, whole body shown (not cut off where they were obscured by foreground objects), and having both eyes open. At the bottom end, which was all we could afford, were cels from The Fox and The Hound, at about $700 apiece.
There was a story about how the studio threw out the Snow White materials before anyone realized they might become valuable. Some guy picked out a cel from the trash showing Snow While and all seven dwarfs and kept it as a souvenir. Decades later it made him rich.
There was a store at Disneyland that sold cels which was as good as printing money. Demand was insatiable, and I sure they released just enough for people to maintain interest, but never enough to allow the price to go down. And they quit making them decades ago.
In February 1971, I gave my girlfriend this cel from Fantasia:
We still have it! And we’re still together.
That is super awesome!
Also in the late 1980s Disney released a “special final release” of Fantasia on VHS and Laserdisc. I received the laserdisc for, I think, Christmas. I didn’t have a player, and couldn’t afford one. That was just before Laserdiscs disappeared, and so when I could afford one, they were gone. I found one in a second hand shop so I was able to watch Fantasia years later.
I still have the player and a few discs. I need to play them sometime…
Your wife know?
LOL! Our birthdays are two weeks apart. We both just turned 72.
but they didn’t have Ponsonby Britt
Congratulations!
Mrs. C and my birthdays are a day and three years apart.
My wife is 9 days older than I am. The older I get, the more I appreciate having a wife of the same age as me.
Somewhere in the late 80s/early 90s, WB released a couple of Bugs Bunny movies, that were repackagings of classic cartoons, with some new animation to tie them together. I had a cel from the new animation in one of those. It was Bugs sitting back in the front row of a theater, with a tub of popcorn. Full from head to toe, eyes open, and if I remember, there was a kernel of popcorn in midair on the way to his mouth. Certificates and all that.
And it was lost by a moving company on one of my many long distance moves, along with my lacquered copy of a Frazetta painting. This one was given to me by a girlfriend, because it reminded her of me.
I don’t know… maybe around the eyes.
Sad.
I had two gold old menuki stolen from a box within a box within a carton during one move. I still miss them.
Wow, the movers must have been really digging through stuff!
Dean’s doing an inside gag here: Ponsonby B. Britt, Order of the British Empire, was allegedly the head of the Jay Ward Productions company, but he didn’t actually exist. The bombastic opening and closing music of The Bullwinkle Show is credited as the Ponsonby B. Britt Anthem. The frantic, gunshot accented knocking out of the “lights” in the final credits is worthy of Spike Jones.
Despite starring you in a half dozen fake radio adventures, I haven’t met you, and yet I already can sense from here that she was right. And yeah, probably especially around the eyes.
Damn, that’s a strong-looking horse. Not the kind that young Elizabeth Taylor rode in National Velvet.
They’re fake?
if those stories were real, Judge Mental would have the highest insurance rates in America.
“Let’s see, a man of your age, good health, good credit, good driving record, added riders to cover destroyed aircraft, enemy and otherwise, stolen spaceships, personal liability for necessary killings in orbit, and is enrolled online with @hankrhody studying the defusing of terrorist nuclear weapons…yeah, let me draw this up and shoot you a quote. Don’t even think about Geico. We’ve got you covered.”
If you’re pressed for time, don’t go cutting either the red wire or the green wire. Take out the fissionables first. That way, when you inevitably choose the wrong wire you spread your gust over the space of a block rather than an entire city.
Yet more proof that Ricochet is more than just conservative community and conversation. It’s a vast decentralized university of useful knowledge.
All I heard was “blah blah blah, cut the red wire, blah blah blah”.
(Just joined Ricochet, first attempt at posting….)
That jazzy arrangement of Norwegian Wood is by the Buddy Rich Big Band, from the “Big Swing Face” album. My high school jazz band director was a fan of Buddy Rich, we tried to play several of his charts (I played alto sax). Like you, I didn’t realize that Norwegian Wood was actually a Beatles tune.
Here’s the entire track, with some introductory remarks by Mr. Rich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzVeoTYXps8
These are problem-solving exercises. You’re a reluctant “guest” on a Russian space station. You can slip out of your sleeping quarters and steal a spaceplane for a shuttle ride back to Earth.
Here are the problems: you don’t have the special unlock key that would let you really pilot the shuttle. You have second-best, an emergency key that will activate a pre-packaged return to one of Russia’s two landing strips. But being Judge Mental, you’ve figured out that once a week, there’s an unlisted option to re-enter for a Cuban landing. So you switch on what limited systems you can, and manually force an overshoot of Cuba for a Florida landing. The Russian shuttle’s communication and tracking gear won’t work in Orlando, so you use an ordinary AM station to fix a heading. Of course, that means coming in, not at the specified 140 knots, but at 220 knots, barely able to stay on the runway, and unable to stop before it ends.
It’s a tough life. Sometimes a man needs tougher than usual life insurance.