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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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And even more famous for being Will Robinson in “Lost In Space.”
And Lennier in “Babylon 5.”
You mean when I woke up?
Don’t remember exactly what it was, maybe stupid human tricks, where someone was doing something really, really, really stupid, and David Letterman gave that disclaimer, then said something along the lines of “or, what the heck, give it a shot”.
The best one I remember was a guy who passed through an unstrung tennis racket. Natalie Portman was the main guest.
In the last break of the show, they cut to a scene of the guy doing his trick backstage/in the Green Room, for Natalie.
Then back to Dave, who says (basically) “That kid owes me. For the rest of his life. Big time.”
My wife and her sister were in the Tonight Show audience when Peter O’ Toole was an all but incoherent guest. When I’ve seen the clip, I swear I can identify their laughter, and that’s against the background of a ROFL crowd of 200. As weird and funny as it came across on screen, it was even funnier in person. 46 years ago, you still expected a bit of dignity and professionalism from a top TV show, so the in-person, you-are-there meltdown was all the more shocking, and hilarious.
They didn’t call the guy “P.O’T.” for nothing.
And now Billy’s in a rock group with one of the Bangles and one of the Cowsills. We’re living in the Twilight Zone.
On a related note, a couple of years before he died, Richard Harris was on one of the late night shows. He was long sober and sat there for twelve minutes telling the best and most hilarious stories one could imagine about his misadventures with Peter O’Toole. After telling the last one of the segment, he mentioned how much he loved those drunken years with his pal. The host (I think it was O’Brien) asked him why then he’d stopped drinking. Without missing a beat he said matter-of-factly, “oh, because I wanted to live.” That’s always stuck with me.
A great story, Archie, thanks! The Tonight Show did something that shows don’t always do; they didn’t insert the commercials later, but ran them during the breaks, so at each break there was something like a minute and a half, to three minutes of Johnny Carson just sitting, tapping a pencil at his desk, and the audience waiting expectantly for the show to come back. Peter O’ Toole tried and fumblingly failed to light a cigarette during the break, so Carson lit it for him. When the show went live again, O’Toole absent-mindedly stuck the lit cigarette in his jacket pocket, where it started to smolder. Carson deadpanned a gesture and O’Toole sheepishly took it out of his pocket. By now the audience were in stitches. Johnny Carson could be a cold and distant man, but he handled moments like this very well. He explained to Peter, “Well, I’m the host, and I take the job seriously.”
Doc and the boys played during the breaks. At least they did in California.
Oh, for the days of only one to three-minute commercial breaks…
Same with Paul and the band on Letterman.
In early 1972 I was on the upper east side of Manhattan, the only time I was in the audience for The David Susskind Show. (Traditionally, WNEW 5 was NYC’s unofficial Jewish station, and WPIX 11 was the unofficial Catholic station.) Susskind was practically a Gotham institution (like Arkham Asylum!). His guests included William Friedkin, whose The French Connection was in theaters, British writer Penelope Gilliat, and then-famous (and obviously very gay, though you could still get sued for saying that in print) Rex Reed.
Susskind’s talk show methods were different than Johnny’s. He didn’t stop for ads, he just waved his hand to indicate where the commercial should be edited in later and kept on going. If the conversation got too rambling or obscure, he’d wave and yell, “cut!” and they’d stop and get back on track. He did that several times. But once he declined to do it.
He was teasing Rex Reed, “Gee Rex, you’re a handsome guy, how come we never see you with any girls?” Reed was not “out”, a term that would barely have made sense at the time, and was uncomfortable, so he thought he’d get clever. He said, knowing that Susskind would stop the tape, “Well, you spend money on a dinner date, and you don’t always get laid.” He put emphasis on the then-forbidden word with a slightly smug look.
But to his shock, Susskind just smiled and that’s the way it went out on the air.
I went to a Letterman taping once. Got dragged in off the street because they weren’t full up. Cannot remember the guests. All I can remember about them is that I didn’t care about them at the time. But Glen Campbell was sitting in with the band the whole night, so that was pretty good.
That sounds more like getting Ayn Rand to write Archie.
You don’t seem like someone who would ride a horse.
If they gave him a scythe and said, “Go ahead, ride through the fire. Dobbins can take the heat”, I bet he’d do it.
The Judge is a descendant of the inventor of the Brunton Engine, one of the earliest steam railway locomotives. Look it up. It is the original Iron Horse.
One of the funniest parodies was on a conservative site about a dozen years ago, Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas. The world’s children trudge to the North Pole to acknowledge that they are economically useless and don’t deserve Santa’s toys. The story notes that in the subsequent trial, Santa has a 349 page monolog about the supreme value of the self.