A Page Right Out of History

If you judge 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.

These articles are derived from lectures, talks and web posts. Most have also been posted on Ricochet.com.