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TV Series

Series Name:    The Flintstones Format: TV Series IMDB: IMDB Page Years: 1960 - 1966 Country:   USA Language: English Genre: Comedy, Animation Rating: 7.8  Rate Collection:   Seen It     Wishlist  Community:  39 Have Seen » Search eBay #AD  » Search Amazon #AD This site contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.

Selected Cast	Alan Reed as Fred Flintstone (voice)
	Mel Blanc as Barney Rubble (voice)
	Jean Vander Pyl as Wilma Flintstone/Pebbles Flintstone (voices)
	Bea Benaderet as Betty Rubble (voice)
	Gerry Johnson as Betty Rubble (voice)
	Don Messick as Bamm-Bamm Rubble/various characters (voices)
	John Stephenson as Mr. Slate (voice)
	Harvey Korman as The Great Gazoo (voice)
	Daws Butler as Barney Rubble (voice)

Notes

First successful prime-time animated series and the longest running until The Simpsons. Strongly influenced by the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners. Daws Butler replaced Mel Blanc as the voice of Barney for part of Season 2 due to Blanc being hospitalized after a car accident.

Original broadcasts opened with sponsor ads as part of the opening credits, including Winston Cigarettes. The Flintstones was not originally broadcast as a children's program but was pitched to adults; this changed after a couple of seasons.

On DVD & Blu-ray World

DVD

The Flintstones: The Complete Series - Warner Home Video - USA (2008)

DVD Box Set

The Flintstones: The Complete First Season - Warner Bros. - USA (2004)

DVD

Cartoon Network: Cartoon Crack-Up's - Warner Bros. - USA (2001)

VHS

Gli Antenati - Mondadori Video - Italy

VHS

The Flintstones: Wacky Inventions - Hanna Barbera - USA (1994)

VHS

The Flintstones First Episodes - Hanna Barbera Home Video - USA (1991)

VHS

Os Flintstones: O Campeonato De Freddie - Lusomundo - Portugal (1996)

Blu-ray Box Set

The Flintstones: The Complete Series - Warner Bros. Home Entertainment - USA (2020)

Comments and Reviews

GEMSMFAN 23rd Dec 2018		"Familie Feuerstein" the German version of The Flintstones
henry29 13th Nov 2017		@23skidoo. I know what You mean. When My Cousins came over from Canada (Mum's Sisters Children) from at the time Banff now Alberta were the Bears raid the Bins. They were Using some Language that was Ok over there but Offensive to UK people. And another thing was every time We passed a Policeman they were reaching for their Papers. I told them there are no Checks Here In The UK. They were amazed at the Freedom We have here. H.
23skidoo 12th Nov 2017		@henry29 Fair enough, it's just in the US the term bollux is not considered to have any connection to the anatomical reference. They might have come from the same origin, but the meaning diverged. There are a few words that are not considered offensive at all in Canadian or American English but say them in the UK and someone might give you a dirty look.
henry29 12th Nov 2017		@23skidoo. It has been a few Years for this one to. But Here In the UK If You Mess something up We say ( You made a right Bollocks Up) So the term ology of both are the same Lol. H.
23skidoo 12th Nov 2017		@Neil Forbes It's a couple years late, but as far as I understand the story, Daws Butler taking over for Mel Blanc as the voice of Barney was not due to Mel being too busy, but because Mel was in a serious automobile accident and unable to work for a while so Butler took over the voice temporarily. I have seen a photo of the cast supposedly recording an episode gathered around Mel's hospital bed, but this was likely just a publicity shot.
GEMSMFAN 12th Oct 2015		The Flagstones: The Flintstone's pilot, subtitled "The Swimming Pool"
23skidoo 3rd Oct 2015		Something I never realized until just now: when the series changed its opening credits to feature the Meet the Flintstones song and the drive-in movie sequence, they actually did away with the on-screen title. The title "The Flintstones" never appears until the very end of the closing credits.
23skidoo 3rd Oct 2015		@RC That was likely an 8mm release. In the pre-home video era you could buy silent and sound 8 mm films from TV shows and movies. They were hellish expensive for the day. I remember seeing an advertisement for a Flintstones 8mm film on the back of a Batman release my grandfather had (not the 1960s Batman - the 1940s Batman).
Record Collector 3rd Oct 2015		I seen a film reel of this show same size of a small tape reel
Neil Forbes 3rd Oct 2015		Yaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaachoooooo! Gesundheit!
Record Collector 3rd Oct 2015		Funny how at one stage Barney sounded like if he had the flu
Neil Forbes 3rd Oct 2015		Mel Blanc was a very busy boy, what with voicing Barney Rubble in the first(and possibly second) series of "The Flintstones" combined with his Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes work, something had to go, so Blanc handed over to veteran voice-over man, Daws Butler, who'd worked with Stan Freberg, among others, and had given voice to other Hanna-Barbera characters(Officer Dibble, in "Top Cat" may have been one of his other characters).
23skidoo 14th Jun 2015		The Flintstones has something in common with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Like TNG a feature-length film was produced immediately following the end of production on the regular series, in this case The Man Called Flintstone. After Alan Reed died in the 1970s, Harry Corden took over the role of Fred for later revival series, but he can also be heard in the original 1960s series as he was often called upon to provide Fred's singing voice, though there are episodes where it's clearly Reed singing... and in several early episodes one could swear it was Mel Torme! (Apparently that might have been Corden though I personally think Corden did the singing on The Man Called Flintstone and that's a very different voice from the Torme-style heard in episodes like Hi-Fi.)
Monolith 30th May 2015		MMMMMMmmmmmmmmmm 3 heads, indeed, what can he mean?
23skidoo 30th May 2015		She's not saying bollocks, she is saying bollix. It's an old American term that meant "mess up" or "wreck". There's a lot of outdated terminology in the show a lot of it dating back to WWII. Now it's harder to work around another joke that appeared in an episode where Barney wonders what use he would have for 3 heads (since he apparently already has two!). I do not know how to embed YT videos but the clip in question is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC2D14fBtow
Trainman 29th May 2015		The Flintstones was actually a ground breaking program. It was the FIRST program on American television that actually showed a married couple SLEEPING IN THE SAME BED. The first one using live actors was "Bewitched" with Elizabeth Montgomery
henry29 27th May 2015		@BiggieTembo. Lol. Yes It actually happened on a British broadcast not a soundbite Inserted. I remember going Into to School and everyone was talking about It. that would have been the Original broadcast. Even watching this clip today brings It all back. The Worzel Gummidge thing was the same reation to. H,
Neil Forbes 27th May 2015		"The Flintstones was not originally broadcast as a children's program but was pitched to adults" The above was true of most cartoon features, Even the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes shorts shown at half-time in cinemas, and later on TV weren't really made for kids, it was just fortuitous that kids found them entertaining, though some very early WB Merrie Melodies cartoons that didn't feature any of the recognised characters, were somewhat silly and childish, could be said that they were "infantile" but those ones date back to the 1930s and 1940s. The best of the MM and LT Warner cartoons date from the 1950s and 1960s. As for The Flintstones, this show had an answer in the form of "The Jetsons", same basic idea but brought up to the "future", and also produced by the Hanna/Barbera Productions crew.
23skidoo 27th May 2015		@BiggieTembo Bit of a tangent but the DVD release of MASH I believe offers the choice of listening with or without a laugh track, which is cool. I remember when MASH did an episode without one it was actually considered groundbreaking. In US TV laugh tracks were so commonplace and accepted that it took awhile for audiences to accept comedy series without them (the term "dramedy" was often used). Had Orange is the New Black been made in the 1970s (if it could have been made in the 70s) it would have had a laugh track! Back on topic, one bizarre aspect of The Flintstones that I wasn't aware of until recently is until the 1990s almost all the opening and closing credits were wrong in the versions I'd been watching since the 70s. When they put the show into syndication they stripped the original opening and closing credits from the first two years and used the later Meet the Flintstones theme to standardize things. This was in part due to the practice broadcasters had of showing syndicated episodes in random order (one reason there were very few series made with story arcs before the 1980s). The original theme for the first two years (a tune called "Rise and Shine" which had virtually the same melody as "Overture," the them song from The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show") and the proper closing credits were finally restored to the reruns in the 90s. Though the Winston cigarette promos (as well as One-a-Day vitamins and other products) that were worked into the opening and closing sequences were naturally omitted.
zabadak 27th May 2015		Superb but, as a kid, I didn't get the Americocentric bits (like a drive-in food place)... :erk:
Monolith 27th May 2015		I was very young in the 60s and this was such a joy to watch then, very innocent and very much of it's time. Things like the shell phone and the bird as the works hooter etc were quite inventive to a young 8 year old idiot. I would get home from school, do my homework then watch this whilst waiting for my dinner, heady days. :grin: The MASH thing, I loved the fact I could laugh when I choose to, not "being told" when to. The first time I saw an episode with canned laughter was on RTE (southern Irish channel) and I found it quite jarring and intrusive, so much so that I couldn't watch the whole episode.
henry29 27th May 2015		Brilliant. H.
BiggieTembo 27th May 2015		True, 23, true. Lots of things I just maybe didn't get when I was a kid. The adult humour thing would have gone way over my head. Punk was happening and I couldn't really infiltrate that 50s domestic Wait Till Your Father Gets Home mortgage-comedy context, I guess. Apart from Road Runner. I thought that was so avant-garde and left-field, abstract too. And funny. Surrealistic shenanegans out there in the desert ;-) But The MASH laugh track was straight off a record. They're showing it now with the laugh-track on one of the now-myriad British terrestrial channels (just been to the UK, can't remember which channel) and here in Denmark too I've see it with the canned laughs. It worked much better without. And yes, agree, sitcoms and comedy have been made with a live audience for decades, providing the live-laughs. This works much better I think ;-)
23skidoo 27th May 2015		@BiggieTembo I found the show worked better when you watched a number of episodes in a row and caught pieces of continuity and some surprisingly adult humor for the day. Of course I also have fond nostalgic memories of the show always playing at lunch time. I'd run home from school and eat my mac n' cheese watching the Flintstones! Interesting comment about the canned laughter re: MASH. In the US it aired with a laugh track as a matter of course, and the producers had to fight to get it stripped for the more dramatic episodes. The UK isn't immune. The only difference is they tend to record live laughter of people watching the episodes (the filmed season of Red Dwarf did this).
BiggieTembo 27th May 2015		I know this series had tons of fans the world over but for me it was like a mind-drill. Canned laughter for one - always a problem for European audiences - why did we need to be told when to laugh, and what parts were funny? - the BBC did the same in the UK with an episode of MASH - they broadcast by mistake an episode with canned laughter (normally it was shown without) - and there was nearly a national outcry... Also the Flintstones had some awfully bad predictable scripts, that I could see-through even as a child, and irritating character voices (Wilma, for one)... Thank God for The Hair Bear Bunch! That was much of the same but at least the characters were cooler! Here it was like a 1950s domestic sitcom with menhirs! It did have some interesting takes on stone-age problem-solving technology though ;-)

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