The Flintstones

and production The idea of The Flintstones started after Hanna-Barbera produced The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Quick Draw McGraw Show , which were successful. However, they did not appeal to a wide audience like their previous theatrical cartoon series Tom and Jerry , which entertained both children and adults. Since children did not need their parents' supervision to watch television, Hanna-Barbera's programs became labeled "kids only". Hanna and Barbera wanted to recapture the adult audience with an animated situation comedy .

Hanna and Barbera considered making the two families hillbillies, a theme which was later incorporated into two episodes, "The Bedrock Hillbillies" and "The Hatrocks and the Gruesomes", ancient Romans , an idea which was later developed into The Roman Holidays , pilgrims , and Native Americans before deciding on a Stone Age setting. According to Barbera, they settled on the Stone Age because "you could take anything that was current, and convert it to stone-age". Under the working title The Flagstones , a treatment was written by Harry Winkler . The family originally consisted of Fred, Wilma, and their son, Fred, Jr.

A brief demonstration film was also created to sell the idea of a "modern stone-age family" to sponsors and the network. It was a difficult sell, and required eight weeks of daily presentations to networks and ad agencies. June Foray and Hanna-Barbera regular Daws Butler voiced the characters for the demonstration film, but Foray was dropped without warning before production began; Foray was upset about the rejection and refused to work with Hanna-Barbera for many years afterward, despite Barbera's efforts to offer her other work. Animator Kenneth Muse , who worked on the Tom and Jerry cartoons, also worked on the early seasons of The Flintstones .

William Hanna was honest about the inspiration, saying, "At that time, The Honeymooners was the most popular show on the air, and for my bill, the funniest. The characters, I thought, were terrific. Now, that influenced greatly what we did with The Flintstones ... " Joseph Barbera disavowed these claims in a separate interview, stating, "I don't remember mentioning The Honeymooners when I sold the show, but if people want to compare The Flintstones to The Honeymooners , then great.

It's a total compliment. " Jackie Gleason, creator of The Honeymooners , considered suing Hanna-Barbera Productions, but decided not to since he did not want to be known as "the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air". Gleason was sued because The Honeymooners was similar to The Bickersons , as critics noted at the time, but the lawsuit served by Bickersons creator Philip Rapp was ultimately settled out of court. Another influence was noted during Hanna-Barbera's tenure at MGM , where they were in a friendly competition with fellow cartoon director Tex Avery .

In 1955, Avery directed a cartoon entitled The First Bad Man , narrated by cowboy legend Tex Ritter , which was about the rowdy antics of a bank robber in stone-age Dallas . Many sight gags from The First Bad Man antedated similar situations used by Hanna-Barbera in The Flintstones by many years. Therefore, students of American animation call The First Bad Man a progenitive seed of The Flintstones . The concept was also antedated by the " Stone Age Cartoons ", a series of 12 animated cartoons which Fleischer Studios released from January to September 1940.

These cartoons show stone-age people doing modern things with primitive means, such as " Granite Hotel " including characters such as a newsboy, telephone operator, hotel clerk, and a spoof of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Barbera explained that selling the show to a network and sponsors was not an easy task. Here we were with a brand new thing that had never been done before, an animated prime-time television show. So we developed two storyboards; one was they had a helicopter of some kind and they went to the opera or whatever, and the other was Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble fighting over a swimming pool.

So I go back to New York with a portfolio and two half-hour boards. And no-one would even believe that you'd dare to suggest a thing like that, I mean they looked at you and they'd think you're crazy. But slowly the word got out, and I used the presentation which took almost an hour and a half. I would go to the other two boards and tell them what they did, and do all the voices and the sounds and so-on, and I'd stagger back to the hotel and I'd collapse.

The phone would ring like crazy, like one time I did Bristol-Myers , the whole company was there. " So I had many of those, one time I had two agencies, they'd fill the room I mean God about 40 people, and I did this whole show. I got to know where the laughs were, and where to hit it, nothing; dead, dead, dead. " he was so angry at them.

What it was, was that there were two agencies there, and neither one was going to let the other one know they were enjoying it. But I pitched it for eight straight weeks and nobody bought it. So after sitting in New York just wearing out, you know really wearing out. Pitch, pitch, pitch, sometimes five a day.

So finally on the very last day I pitched it to ABC, which was a young daring network willing to try new things, and bought the show in 15 minutes. Thank goodness, because this was the very last day and if they hadn't bought it, I would have taken everything down, put it in the archives and never pitched it again. Sometimes I wake up in a cold-sweat thinking this is how close you get to disaster.