I hear they’ve deciphered another Mayan inscription. This one says: WHEN FRED FLINTSTONE TURNS FIFTY, THE WORLD WILL END.
Seriously, Fred Flintstone just had his fiftieth birthday. Dear God, I am older than Fred Flintstone. And he’s a caveman.
I watched “The Flintstones” when it was brand-new. I remember Fred and Barney smoking Winston cigarettes and talking about how smooth they were. Pebbles loved her Welch's Grape Juice. I was there for Pebbles’s birth, and the night Barney and Betty found Bamm-Bamm on their doorstep. I’m practically a member of their modern Stone Age family.
Partner, who is a little older than me (I won't be specific, but I do believe he rode a real dinosaur to school), remembers not liking “The Flintstones.” They looked simple and underdrawn to him. And, to be fair, they were.
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were young animators working at the MGM studio back in the 1940s. You may have heard of their first great creation: Tom & Jerry. In the Fifties, they struck out on their own. TV was going strong, and they recognized that TV had a great appetite for programming; cartoons were a natural.
The problem with studio cartoons was that they took a long time to create. Every cel needs to be hand-drawn and hand-painted. If they wanted to create cartoons for TV, they had to speed the process up somehow.
So they did. They simplified the characters and the animation. They did away with delicate Disney-style drawing, and the rich backgrounds of the MGM cartoons, and the sly cultural references of the Warner Brothers cartoons. They used stock backgrounds and minimal character movement. They even streamlined the music. MGM and Warner Brothers had rich musical catalogs to choose from; Warner Brothers had an extremely talented musical director/arranger named Carl Stalling, who created some of the most brilliant scene-painting music and some of the best musical pastiches in the history of the movies, period. Hanna-Barbera, on the other hand, created an all-purpose soundtrack, short snippets of action-enhancing music full of funny bassoons and trombones and piccolos, and used that music in just about every episode.
And ideas: well, cartoons always parodied movies and radio anyway. Foghorn Leghorn, to take just one example, is just a cartoonization of Senator Claghorn from Fred Allen’s radio show. So Hanna and Barbera parodied (or stole) TV characters and situations. They took a look at “The Honeymooners” and came up with “The Flintstones.” Huckleberry Hound is the early aw-shucks Andy Griffith. Hokey Wolf (anyone remember him?) is Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko. Yogi Bear is Art Carney as Ed Norton.
Joe and Bill recognized that early TV was a simple medium. Most people were watching on small black-and-white screens. It was much better to use easy-to-recognize characters, broad gestures, simple situations.
And Joe and Bill delivered.
And it wasn’t bad. There’s a wonderful clunky charm in those early HB cartoons that I still find very endearing. But then other studios – UPA, DePatie-Freleng – broke into the market. TVs got better, and bigger; people bought color sets. Bad animation started looking, well, bad. By the time you hit the late 1960s/early 1970s, the stiffness of the HB cartoons isn’t clunky and charming anymore; it’s stiff and silly-looking.
Fred and the rest of the Bedrock gang stayed iconic for a long time, however. When I moved to Providence in ’78, I chose to open an account at the Old Stone Bank, which used Guess Who as a logo, and which used “Yabba Dabba Doo, Love That Bank!” as a slogan.
They’ve faded over the years, as have we all. Now we have another prime-time animated family, the Simpsons, who owe a real debt to Fred and Wilma (it’s probably no accident that the kids watch an ultra-violent cat and mouse cartoon a la Tom and Jerry on the show).
But now Fred’s fifty years old.
The cycle is complete.
Grab your pterodactyl and head for the nearest exit: the end of the world is here.
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