THE FLINTSTONES: Complete Series - Blu-ray (Hanna-Barbera, 1960-66) Warner Home Video

 “Yabba-dabba-do!” For 60-years, these three non-sensical words have signaled the delight of one of America’s first families of television; the beloved Flintstones – Fred (voiced by Alan Reed) and Wilma (Jean Vander Pyl), and, their kooky next-door neighbors and best friends, the Rubbles – Barney (Mel Blanc) and Betty (Bea Banaderet). Given its transparent homage to The Honeymooners a decade earlier, and America’s ‘then’ affinity for half-hour sitcoms about the close-knit family unit, it comes as no surprise The Flintstones (1960-66) went on to become a beloved part of the social fabric of the nation and a cultural touchstone besides. That Fred, Wilma and their cohorts hailed from the realm of animation, slotted into primetime to appeal to adults rather than children, and go on to be the longest running ‘cartoon’ franchise in U.S. history for many decades (until The Simpsons, 1989-present, shattered that record) is nothing short of astonishing. By now, most know the series was the brain child of collaborators, Joseph Hanna and William Barbera. Then, Joe and Bill were fledglings in the indie producers’ department, having spent many good years at MGM, creating high-quality animation for the studio’s beloved cat and mouse theatrical shorts franchise – Tom & Jerry. But by the mid-1950’s, Metro had dissolved its animation offshoot in one of many cost-cutting measures to spare them their ultimate demise and liquidation – subsequently to occur two decades later.

Undaunted, Joe and Bill were off and running with a new and streamlined venture into television – then, considered the red-headed stepchild of the entertainment industry. The movies’ loss/TV’s ultimate gain. For in the years, and decades yet to follow, Hanna-Barbera would not only revolutionize made-for-TV animation, cribbing off the UPA style, but hold a formidable monopoly on reshaping our collective childhoods with a staggering output of enduring cartoon creations. And all of this lovable nonsense began, simply because Joe and Bill desired to remain relevant in a turbulent epoch in the entertainment industry, and, re-enter it with more streamlined, if just as adult fare. During their tenure at MGM, Bill and Joe’s Tom & Jerry was revered, the animated misadventures of a silent cat and mouse, a prelude to one of the studio’s features, already with a built-in adult audience, and, to garner a slew of Oscar nominations and several wins besides. Alas, on television, animation was fast being compartmentalized as the domain of children - just a means to anesthetize the kiddies with diverting amusements while the grown-ups went off and did their thing. Hanna-Barbera’s first two ventures into TV-land – The Huckleberry Hound Show, and The Quick Draw McGraw Show skewed to this tiny tots’ market. And although popular with their target audience, in both content and form, they paled to Tom & Jerry, whose antics were still very much in circulation. Besides, Joe and Bill wanted to do something different. And thus, the concept for a half-hour animated situation comedy began to take shape.

In its earliest gestation, it looked as though Fred and Wilma might hail from the Ozarks as hillbillies, or perhaps, as pilgrims newly landed at Plymouth Rock. But eventually, the aspiring creators fell on the idea of setting their sit-com in a fanciful ‘stone age’ where all the modern comforts of home were still readily available, just in their more primitive prototypes. So, cars with stone tires powered by one’s feet rather than a combustible engine, and, a dinosaur named Dino in lieu of the family’s pet dog. Initially christened as ‘The Flagstones’ – even with such ingenuity on tap, Hanna-Barbera quickly discovered that getting a sponsor and a network to approve of their latest venture was a very tough sell. Transparently to mimic and spoof The Honeymooners, as William Hanna has always suggested, this was the template for their inspiration, in later years, Joseph Barbera somewhat begrudgingly disavowed such claims, adding “I don't remember mentioning The Honeymooners when I sold the show. But if people want to compare The Flintstones to The Honeymooners…great. It's a total compliment. The Honeymooners was one of the greatest shows ever written.” Evidently, Honeymooners’ star, Jackie Gleason concurred with that assessment, threatening a lawsuit against Hanna-Barbera Productions. Begrudgingly, given The Flintstones’ overnight popularity, Gleason relented, as he did not want to be remembered as “the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air.” Going even further back in time, one might consider Max Fleischer’s 12-part series - ‘Stone Age Cartoons’ (January to September, 1940) and the legendary, Tex Avery – a competitor of Bill and Joe’s while at MGM, as the real/reel forefathers of The Flintstones; Avery’s 1955 cartoon short, The First Bad Man, in particular, depicting a bank robbery gone awry in stone-age Dallas. Indeed, sight gags from all of these franchises eventually found their way into The Flintstones. Oh well, I suppose imitation still remains the cheapest form of flattery.

Regardless of its influences, Hanna-Barbera had a tough time winning over the network and its sponsors. Bill Hanna once described the hellish experience of ‘pitching’ his ideas to the New York execs, enchanting them with a portfolio for two half-hour episodes, reenacting all of the situations, voices and sound effects, jumping through every hoop imaginable, only to be asked to ‘do it again’ for another contingent of the executive programming branch, ‘possibly’ interested in what he had to sell. Ironically, Screen Gems – eventually to sign a distribution deal with Hanna-Barbera for The Flintstones – was the least impressed. However, a ray of hope glimmered after an exhaustive week when the idea fell to ABC, eager to take a gamble on ‘something new’ for their fall line-up. As Hanna later remembered, “…on the very last day, I pitched it to ABC. (They) bought the show in 15 minutes.” With a deal in their pockets, Hanna-Barbera began to shape their high-concept into a show. The original name, ‘The Flagstones’ was eventually changed to The Flintstones – speculatively, to avoid audience confusion with the popular comic strip characters, Hi and Lois, whose last name was ‘Flagston’. Briefly, the title morphed into ‘The Gladstones’. Also, delayed was the notion Fred and Wilma should begin their TV lives as marrieds with children. Instead, the couple would experience the joys of parenthood starting in Season 3. Much in the same way, as it had happened in the much beloved, I Love Lucy (1951-57), the birth of Pebbles Flintstone in Season Three proved a ratings’ bonanza.  

As with the aforementioned The Simpsons, Hanna-Barbera’s aspirations for The Flintstones skewed to an adult audience, as was indicative of its 8:30pm prime time slot on ABC, with mature situations revolving around marriage, love, and, the battle of the sexes.  Bizarrely, the show also featured a ‘laugh track’ – commonplace in sitcoms recorded before a live studio audience.  To ensure The Flintstones remained palpable to the more mature viewer, Hanna and Barbera hired Herbert Finn and Sydney Zelinka (both having worked with Jackie Gleason), and newcomer, Joanna Lee, who lent a faint whiff of feminism to these proceedings. The show also employed Warren Foster and Michael Maltese – great ‘sight gag’ men from the traditional sphere of animation. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, and virtually no ‘built-in’ template on which to hook its audience, The Flintstones was an immediate hit in its time slot. The show broke new ground, illustrating Fred and Wilma sleeping in the same bed (virtually taboo, even for married couples in live-action sitcoms).  As the first two seasons of The Flintstones were sponsored by Winston cigarettes, Fred and Wilma were also depicted in commercial endorsements, enjoying a good smoke.

For Season Three, Hanna-Barbera pulled out all the stops with the birth of Pebbles Flintstone. Initially, Bill and Joe had planned for the couple to have a boy. Instead, the studio’s marketing department convinced them Fred and Wilma should give birth to a girl, as ‘girl dolls’ were more popular as tie-ins to the show. Even more fascinating, the arrival of Pebbles created a dramatic arc in Season Three, carried over from mid-season to the final episode of that year. Indicative of the sweeping change a baby brings, Welsh’s grape juice replaced Winston as the show’s primary sponsor, promoting a more ‘family friendly’ outlook. From here on in, The Flintstones’ plots would aim their appeal at a younger crowd, in some ways, signaling the slow demise of its core and original target audience. Nevertheless, in Season Four, The Flintstones marked another ‘first’ in TV history, when it revealed Barney and Betty could not have a child of their own, resulting in the adoption of Bam-Bam - an ultra-strong playmate for Pebbles. Regrettably, shortly thereafter, The Flintstones popularity began to wane. Indeed, the final narrative arc was left to Season Six when Fred and Barney encountered ‘The Great Gazoo’ (Harvey Korman) – an interplanetary visitor from the future with whom they experience several misadventures.

Important to note that the first 3-years of The Flintstones represented a new high-water mark in serialized TV cartoon programming. Despite its primitive animation, the show’s solid writing, coupled with expert characterizations, resulted in a memorable ‘must see’ event on Friday nights – the toughest night of the week to make people want to stay home in front of the boob tube. Eager to capitalize on their good fortune, Hanna-Barbera launched a second primetime animated series in 1962 – The Jetsons (1962-63), basing its premise on the space-age family of a distant future.  Alas, and despite its ever-lasting appeal in reruns since, the initial response to The Jetsons was less than enthusiastic. It was canceled after only a single season. Although all of The Flintstone episodes were shot on color stock, the first two seasons were originally broadcast in B&W, and, beginning in Season Four, ABC began to move around the series’ time slot, from Fridays at 8:30pm to Thursdays at 7:30pm, and finally, back to Fridays, also, at 7:30pm. In one of the genuine ironies of our modern internet age, The Flintstones – a cornerstone in animation programming and reruns - was yanked from broadcast TV in 1997, owing to E/I regulations and changing tastes in the industry. From here, it bounced around various cable networks, drawing a sizable audience on TBS, TNT, the Cartoon Network and Boomerang before vanishing altogether – except for a ‘video-on-demand’ service until 2019 when MeTV acquired the rights to re-broadcast uncut episodes.   

Viewed today, The Flintstones offers a warm and fuzzy ‘feel good’ from another – arguably ‘better’ – time in television’s history when simple story-telling sufficed. The series’ charm is self-evident in the delightfully congenial atmosphere of the show – apart from a few bursts of fitful male testosterone on display when Fred loses his temper and acts like a chest-thumping boor. Always, he is brought back into line by the love of a good woman, who reasons that the best way to quell the beast is to placate his sense of authoritarian reason with some genuine – if highly feminized – logic.  Yes, the show plays into that era of ‘man’ as the head of his household, occasionally hapless and struggling to maintain his supremacy, and ‘woman’, as the domestic influence, whose simple joys are had in getting her hair and nails done or baking a pie. But The Flintstones is also a reminder of the power of animation to convey stories about the human condition in a thoroughly thoughtful manner, often out of reach for its live-action counterparts then – and perhaps, now still. As a child of the 1970’s, I can only offer up that The Flintstones, together with Hanna-Barbera’s other enduring creations – The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo (1969-76) – was an integral part of my formative years. I used to race home from school to catch episodes of all 3 shows, airing in syndication from 5 to 6:30pm Monday through Friday on my local UHF channel. And that warm affection for all has extended into the present, long after the bloom of childhood and youth have worn off. Indeed, The Flintstones was a trailblazer for its generation – one that, by large, continues to hold up spectacularly well under today’s more jaundiced scrutiny. As it was aimed at an adult audience, at least for its initial 3-year run, thematically, it still holds a lot of interest for someone about to turn 50-years-young in the near future.  And, as long as there are new generations coming to re-discover it, it is unlikely that this genteel relic from yesteryear – however dated in its sexual politics – will ever entirely fall out of fashion. Real/reel art endures, regardless of its vintage.

The Flintstones arrives – at last – on Blu-ray, via Warner Home Video. It has taken the studio long enough to get around to this forerunner in TV animation, perhaps due to the sheer scope of its content; also, the need to remaster and marginally clean-up at least some of the age-related damage accrued over the decades.  Warner’s set packs 166 episodes on 10-discs, preserving the show’s 1.33:1 OAR. Improved image clarity reveals the texture in background hand-painted cell animation with finite precision. Colors on the earliest episodes are vibrant. We do get the errant speckle of built-in dust, caught between the various layers of cell animation, and, light shadow flicker. These artifacts have been lovingly preserved along with film grain looking very indigenous to its source. Interesting to note, some of the later episodes from seasons 5 and 6 appear less refined, perhaps even to have been digitally scrubbed, hailing from older HD masters that were allowed to remain intact instead of being given renewed consideration and a new 1080p scan. Audio is 2.0 DTS mono and sounds about what you would expect for a vintage TV show. Nothing extraordinary but competently rendered nonetheless. What I find rather disheartening is Warner’s decision to include only some of the extras that were created for their individual DVD sets from 1998-2001. The surviving extras include ‘the lost episode’ – a brief preamble to ‘The Flagstones’ – a brief exercise in drawing Fred Flintstone, a nearly half-hour documentary on the show’s success, another of the same length devoted to the various ‘songs’ featured in the series, barely 5 mins. to ‘all about’ The Flintstones, and another of almost equal length on the various stone age gadgets to mimic the modern comforts of home. There are also featurettes on the marketing campaigns and collectible tie-ins with the show, and a barely 7 min. homage to Hanna-Barbera’s unsung hero; music director, Hoyt Curtin.

Warner has also included 2 Flintstone ‘movies’ – 1966’s feature-length, The Man Called Flintstone, and, from 2015, the atrociously awful The Flintstones and WWE: Stone Age Smackdown! However, it should be noted that neither of these has been ‘remastered’ for HD and each has severe chroma bleeding and other digitized anomalies not inherent in the original source, rather, a byproduct of inferior mastering efforts, to which no video upgrade has since been applied. Shameful, actually. I mean, why bother including ‘unwatchable’ content in hi-def? Also, inexplicably shorn from this set are all of the TV promos and audio commentaries previously recorded, plus The Flintstone Art, a featurette showing off original pencil tests and drawings, all of the ‘…and now a word from our sponsors’ content, two ‘interviews’ with Joseph Hanna and William Barbera and an intro from Earl Kress, plus the ‘stone age parenting guide’. On the whole, the loss of these extras, and extreme shortsightedness by Warner Home Video in NOT remastering either of the feature movies included herein, is a complete fail, in my opinion. Ultimately, most buying this set will be in it for the main content – the show – and, at least here, there is nothing to fear. The Flintstones on Blu looks great – if not perfect – and will surely represent a respectable upgrade from the tired, though rather handsomely packaged individual seasons of yore on DVD. But if you care about all the goodies, DO NOT ditch those old sets. Bottom line: recommended with caveats.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

Overall – 3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

Overall – 3.5

EXTRAS

2.5