January 2nd. Looks like Dino’s dreaming of Sassie in the first panel (she has a new wig, it appears). And Fred must still puffing on Winstons as there’s an ashtray next to his living room chair. Mr. Stone is his boss, not Mr. Slate. And apparently modern railways existed in the Stone Age, judging by the last panel. The night-time shadows are nice. I’d like to see how it was handled in colour. Wait! Aren’t the Flintstones in the suburbs? Where are all the other houses?
January 9th. Betty appears. Bamm Bamm’s playing with cute wooden dinosaurs (left panel, bottom row). A relative of Barney’s in the picture on the wall has a turn-of-the-20th-century moustache. The end gag is a repeat of one in the dailies the previous month when a huge stone Christmas card falls on Barney. And there are hungry incidental bird characters in the first panel.
January 16th. Dino has the best expressions in this one. He’s clobbered with a pillow (top row), gives Fred’s loud buddy a dirty look (middle row) and laughs his butt off (final row).
January 23rd. A frozen steam spout from a volcano again this month (middle row). I like how there’s only dialogue in the final panel. You know that snowman isn’t going to last, Fred.
January 30th. Another “what’ll they think of next” gag, found every once in a while in the daily Flintstones strips. The opening panel’s got some neat things, including snow-capped lettering, a lizardsaurus with a goofy smile watching things while the mastodon plow seems to have its eye on the lizardsaurus. I like the silhouette in the right column, first row. And there’s sure a lot of detail in the first panel of the middle row. Very nice.
Click on any of the comics to make them bigger.
We have a local school built in 1965 that was designed with the 'heat comes up through the floor' duct system, so my guess is that type of design was in vogue as well in Southern California in the mid-1960s to set up that gag in the Jan. 30 pannels (they later found out the 'heat comes up through the floor' design meant if there was a duct problem you had to tear up the concrete floor, as well as learning that certain animals could bore under the buildings and then get into the ducts ... including, at the local school, a skunk. Which, if not good enough for a comic panel, mirrored the end gag for Chuck Jones' "Louvre, Come Back to Me")
ReplyDeleteOn the January 2nd panel, when I first saw Wilma in the black dress, I though she and Fred were going our dining and dancing. Looks kind of formal
ReplyDeleteAnd apparently modern railways existed in the Stone Age, judging by the last panel.
ReplyDeleteOff the top of my head, there's a train in "Trouble-in-Law" (1962), "Sheriff for a Day" (1965), and the series finale, "The Story of Rocky's Raiders" (1966).
All these materials were drawn by Gene Hazelton and Dick "Bick" Bickenbach.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pity that the Flintstones daily strips from this month (drawn by Gene Hazelton) aren't included on this topic.
But, in the Ger Apeldoorn's blog (http://allthingsger.blogspot.com), there are some Flintstones daily strips from January 1966, which are included on this blog.
If you find them, click in The Flintstones tag.
These are some of the best yet! There are delightful details of stone-age domestic life in each one. I particularly like the first panel of the January 9th episode--it's as though the reader is standing directly outside the Flintstones' window. It's also nice to see Bamm-Bamm in what is becoming a very infrequent appearance.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder how long that snowman is going to last with a roaring fire about five feet away.
In the last panel on January 16, Fred seems to have turned into Jack Benny!
Thanks again for the twice-monthly "fix"!