Wilma

Jean Vander Pyl didn’t have a big name on television when she was cast to play Wilma Flintstone in 1960.

The others were a bit different. Bea Benaderet appeared on TV on Burns and Allen, continuing her Blanche Morton role from her radio days. Mel Blanc was known as Bugs Bunny and all kinds of Warner Bros. cartoon characters and periodically surfaced on camera on the Jack Benny show. Alan Reed had done odds and ends on the tube, but was not too many years removed from playing Falstaff Openshaw on Fred Allen’s radio show.

Vander Pyl had a number of supporting parts on network radio, starting with Jenipher Asbury on Scattergood Baines in 1937 while still attending UCLA. A 1948 article about her on the Ziv-transcribed My Favorite Story in 1948 mentions appearances on Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Aldrich Family, The Alan Young Show, The Dinah Shore Show, Dr. Christian, Sherlock Holmes, Cavalcade of America and with Fanny Brice. It skipped Lux Radio Theatre.

Her major regular role on radio was opposite Robert Young on Father Knows Best. Perhaps only Father knows why she was replaced by Jane Wyman when the show went to television.

Years after voicing Wilma Flintstone on 166 prime time episodes, and various spin-offs and specials (and in the 1966 feature film A Man Called Flintstone), she reflected back on her career in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. The feature story ran on September 29, 1989.

Meet Jean Vander Pyl, the Real Voice Behind Wilma Flintstone
By ANDRE MOUCHARD
Fred was never the Cary Grant type.
He was into bowling and burgers, beer and boxing.
His idea of dressing up meant tossing on his lodge hat—the one with real animal fur.
Still, in spite of his Neanderthal habits, Wilma Flintstone wouldn't have had him any other way.
"I loved the bum. Sure, Fred was a Yahoo and I got mad at him all the time. But we really loved each other. Our romance was one of the things that made us so popular.
"We were real."
That's the word from Jean Vander Pyl, the "real" voice of Wilma and hundreds of other radio and TV cartoon characters.
Vander Pyl, a San Clemente resident, has been an actress for more than 50 years. Her career has covered several generations of radio and TV entertainment. She's had long-running roles on radio shows, including the part of Margaret Anderson on "Father Knows Best," and made regular appearances on radio shows such as "Fibber McGee and Molly." More recently she has had bit parts on such TV programs as "Murder, She Wrote" and "Hardcastle & McCormick."
But none of those jobs, Vander Pyl says, have matched the impact she made as the long-suffering wife of TV's No. 1 caveman. "The Flintstones" was television's first prime-time cartoon, running from 1960 through '66 on ABC, according to Joe Barbera, who produced the show with William Hanna. The show has been in syndication ever since.
"I wasn't ever what you would really call a ‘star,’ but I did have Wilma," Vander Pyl says. "Millions of people grew up with us as a big part of their lives. And millions more probably will."

Vander Pyl, 70, still signs notes "Love, Wilma" and keeps a great stockpile of Flintstone memorabilia in her beach-front apartment. Next year will mark "The Flintstones'” 30th birthday, and the show's producers, William Hanna and Joe Barbera, are contemplating a Flintstone revival, Barbera said in a telephone interview from his Hollywood office.
He says they are weighing a number of options—including a possible live-action Flintstone movie—but Vander Pyl is pushing for a remake of the cartoon.
"I think we would be more popular than ever," she says. "Every time I talk to somebody about a new Flintstones series, I get a great response. I think the people who grew up with ‘The Flintstones' still want to see us.
"And, of course, if we do it as a cartoon, I'd get to be Wilma all over again."
Vander Pyl, who also provided the voices for Rosie [sic] the Robot and Mrs. Spacely on another Hanna/Barbera cartoon, "The Jetsons," notes that there is a precedent for reviving an animated show.
Though "The Jetsons" ran for only one season—in 1963 [sic]—Vander Pyl claims the show's popularity has grown in syndication. "The kids have taken up ‘The Jetsons' like some kind of cult We've become the 'Star Trek' of cartoons." In the mid-1980s, Hanna/Barbera Productions called in Vander Pyl and the rest of "The Jetsons'” cast to make 42 new episodes, enough for about two TV seasons. Last year, they made a new Jetson movie, which is scheduled to be released next summer.
Barbera, who created both cartoons and directed most of the early Flintstone episodes, says it's likely "The Flintstones" will be revived "in some animated form" in 1990.
If it is, Vander Pyl will have a job, Barbera says.
"A great [cartoon] voice is something that when you close your eyes and listen, it immediately makes you chuckle. Also, it's got to work for people of all ages, not just kids," he says. "Jean had that voice when we cast her, and she still has it."
Vander Pyl's work as Wilma was a key element in the success of "The Flintstones," he adds.
"I know I'm going to get killed for saying this, but Wilma had a great 'housewife whine' to her voice. She commanded enough authority to run the house but kept an equal amount of warmth."
"Wilma is a communicator and a lot of women relate to that at least I know I do," Vander Pyl says. "I think there's a lot of me in Wilma, and even though she's just a cartoon, I think my voice is one of the things that made her so human."
Still, Vander Pyl says she never trained to be a "voice."
When she was graduated from Hollywood High in 1937, she had just won the Best Actress award in the citywide Shakespeare Festival for her portrayal of Juliet. Her next stop was supposed to be Broadway.
"I wanted to be a star in the theater, not radio," she says.
But after an illness interrupted her plans, Vander Pyl enrolled at UCLA and started working in radio. She promptly discovered that school and radio work didn't mix.
"My sorority sisters told me I had to either go to work or go to class," Vander Pyl says. "So I said 'Bye, girls.’”

That began a steady, if unspectacular career in radio, doing freelance voice work for a number of stations in Hollywood. She says her strong points were that she could play everything "from the ingenue to the villainess without complaining or screwing up."
"Radio was a notoriously anonymous profession. It was considered a second-class art," she says. "Agents wouldn't even bother with us until the networks started packaging the shows and bringing more money into it. So I lived without the burdens of stardom."
As TV came alive and radio fizzled in the mid-1950s, Vander Pyl was one of many voice performers to find work in the new medium.
"When radio died, the prognosis was that we radio actors would be out of work because all we did was use our voices," she says.
"But that was wrong. Most of us came from a theater background, and making the switch wasn't that big a deal. Then a few of us got lucky and got into cartoons."
The idea of making "The Flintstones," a cartoon that Barbera says was based loosely on the TV comedy "The Honeymooners," came after marketing experts discovered the audience for cartoons in the late '50s was more than 50% adults, Vander Pyl says.
According to Barbera, the prime-time cartoon immediately touched a nerve.
"We must have done something right because Fred got marriage proposals every week," he says.
Vander Pyl is the last surviving member of the show's original cast. Former radio star Alan Reed was the original Fred, Bea Benaderet played Betty Rubble and Mel Blanc was the voice of Fred's sidekick, Barney Rubble, as well as Dino the Dinosaur.
"Mel was a great actor," Vander Pyl said of the recently deceased Blanc. "He was so good he made everybody sit up and notice that people who did voice work were talented."
"The Flintstones" brought Van der Pyl a modicum of fame, as well as other cartoon and TV roles. But it didn’t make her rich.
Though the show has been in syndication for more than 20 years, Vander Pyl doesn't earn a penny on the reruns.
"I think The Flintstones' and 'I Love Lucy' sort of shocked the Screen Actors Guild," Vander Pyl says. "Nobody knew that TV shows would go on forever, so our old contracts didn't call for much in the way of residuals. That's why I'm not wealthy."
But with payments from other shows still coming in, and a small pension from the Screen Actors Guild, Vander Pyl, a widow, says she is comfortable. A mother of three with two grandchildren, she lives in a small, tidy apartment about a half-mile north of the San Clemente Pier, and an Amtrak railroad line is the only thing standing between her front porch and the ocean.
The serenity of her home has helped keep her desire for acting work down to a minimum.
"Two years ago, my commercial agent told me I needed some new photographs. But I sit here and look at the ocean and I still need the [new] pictures," she says. "At my age, I'm interested in working, but not in making the drive up to Los Angeles five times a week.
"Of course, I'd make the drive if it meant getting to be Wilma again. That wouldn't be such a pain at all."

You’ll likely be surprised to learn that syndicated writer Eve Starr claimed in her June 11, 1960 column that Hanna and Barbera were unhappy with the first of the five episodes completed, but scrapping it would cost $65,000. Barbera admitted in 1960 that five soundtracks with other male leads (Bill Thompson and Hal Smith as Fred and Barney) were dumped and the parts re-cast. (Each half-hour show took about four hours to record, reported Starr).

The Stone Age cartoon wasn’t Vander Pyl’s first work at Hanna-Barbera. When The Quick Draw McGraw Show was developed in 1959, Joe Barbera insisted on new voice talent. Elliot Field was hired (he was Blabber Mouse in four cartoons). So were Peter Leeds and Hal Smith. And Vander Pyl was signed, too, debuting as the Tallulah Bankhead-sounding Mrs. J. Evil Scientist on the Snooper and Blabber cartoon The Big Diaper Caper (Daws Butler’s first time as Blab).

Besides voicing cartoons, Vander Pyl had something in common with her fellow Flintstones cast members. They smoked. A lot. Her son Michael told the Associated Press “All of them ended up dying of smoking-related diseases. That cute laugh that Betty and Wilma did with their mouths closed? They came up with that because when they normally laughed, because they were smokers, they coughed.”

He also revealed before she became ill, Vander Pyl wanted to do a TV commercial as Wilma warning kids not to start smoking.

Lung cancer claimed Jean Vander Pyl on April 10, 1999 at age 79.

Jean Vander Pyl

Jean Vander Pyl has a connection to Christmas.

She (her voice, to be specific) was one of the stars of the seasonal film “Santa and the Three Bears,” released independently to theatres in 1970. It was the brainchild of Hanna-Barbera writer Tony Benedict, who pitched it to Joe Barbera. If any company should have come up with an animated half-hour Christmas special that could run on TV every year, you’d think it would be Hanna-Barbera. But Mr. B. didn’t like the story and took a pass on it, so Tony went through some insane circumstances to get it into theatres.

This post, though, is about Jean Vander Pyl.

The four leading actors on “The Flintstones” all came out of radio, but Vander Pyl was the least prominent. Alan Reed co-starred on his own show in the early ‘30s and was a stooge on others. Bea Benaderet was one of the most sought-after secondary players on radio comedies on the West Coast and then appeared on television each week through the ‘50s with George Burns and Gracie Allen. I don’t have to tell you about Mel Blanc.

Vander Pyl appeared in a few top-level shows—surprisingly, one was “Amos ‘n’ Andy”—and was also one of countless anonymous commercial voices. Here’s a United Press article from November 9, 1949 that suggests she was pitching Arrid deodorant when she wasn’t taking up roles. (The Hollywood Reporter ad below is from 1947).

She Wants To Be More than "Half Safe"
By JACK METCALFE
HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 3 (U.P.)— Radio actress Jean VanderPyl, who swears that's the way to spell it, comes up with one of the most unusual complaints in Hollywood or anywhere else, for that matter. She's too successful.
Miss VanderP. is the lithe-tongued, dulcet-voiced lassie who beseeches her audience not to be "half safe."
That and 800 other chores for network moguls ranging from playing an ingenue to one of Macbeth's three witches have boosted her to a spot where her career interferes with her vocational ambitions.

"I just want to be in the movies," she says.
During the 12 long, yearning years she has been on the air, Jean says, she almost would have given her dulcet voice for a chance under the arcs.
It looked like waiting would pay off recently when producer George Mosko cast her in an important role in "Champagne for Caesar."
"I was ecstatic," she recalls. "I leaped at the chance, and leap is the right word. "I was so excited I jumped and fell all over director Dick Whorf."
Miss VanderPyl says she soon landed in gloom, however, because the "important role" turned out to be a "voice."
This young lady from Memphis plays a mysterious voice that takes part in a highly-charged scene with Ronald Colman in a soap tycoon's waiting room.
"I give him that double-syrup inflection which just oozes as it comes out," she says. "But unfortunately I won't see me."
So Jean, listed in the radio casting directory as "girl with sexy voice," faces the day when shell again bury her pretty self in a radio studio.
"I just wish," she comments plaintively, "I could show the world more of Jean VanderPyl than the vocal chords."

Perhaps Vander Pyl’s biggest radio role came as the mom on “Father Knows Best;” the Cincinnati Enquirer called her hiring “A change for the better.” She didn’t make the transition to television when the show appeared there and I don’t know why. This story in the Greenville News of October 18, 1951 talks about how she got it; the last sentence from a similar version in another paper.

Jean VanderPyl Natural In Part
Jean VanderPyl, lovely young actress who has just taken the leading feminine role of "Margaret Anderson", on WFBC's Father Knows Best." (9-9:30 p. m., Thursdays), is more than convinced that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
When Dorothy Lovett, who has been portraying the mother of "Father's" lively brood on the Thursday evening comedy-drama, found that she had laryngitis and wouldn’t be able to appear on the show, she suggested Jean Vander Pyl as a replacement, because Jean's voice quality is similar to hers. It was a last-minute emergency, and when Director Murray Bolen of "Father Knows Best," got in touch with Jean, an hour before program time the evening of the show, she was busy putting her youngsters to bed. Jean managed to dress, get from the San Fernando Valley to NBC's Radio City in Hollywood and have the script in her hand by the middle of dress rehearsal. The result was that she went on the air in the key feminine role opposite star Robert Young without having even having read the script completely through.
However, Jean's spur-of-the-moment interpretations of Margaret Anderson so impressed the program’s sponsors that she has been signed to portray her on the show regularly. Jean VanderPyl's reaction is that Margaret really should be an easy role for her to portray. Margaret Anderson was supposedly married at 17 and had her first child at 18; Jean was married at 18, and had her first younger at 19. Margaret has three offspring, one of whom is named Kathleen; Jean has three, also, and one is Kathleen! And a recent Father Knows Best script which revolves around Mother’s birthday falls on the day before Miss VanderPyl’s own birthday.

We should pass along something about “The Flintstones.” This feature story is from the Tampa Tribune of May 18, 1986.

THE FLINTSTONES' 25TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
By WALT BELCHER
Tribune Staff Writer
Oh, those "Stones" they just keep rolling along.
When Fred and Wilma celebrate their 25th year in show business this week, it should be a memorable event. It could rank right up there with that day in 1969 when, upon reaching the moon, astronaut Neil Armstrong repeated Fred's immortal words, "Yabba dabba doo!"
With that simple phrase, Armstrong confirmed Frederick F. Flintstone's place in our hearts and minds. Armstrong didn't have to explain; we knew what he meant.
Fred and Wilma. They're as much a part of our culture as Mickey and Minnie or Dagwood and Blondie.
But for baby-boomers, it may come as a mild shock that 25 years have passed since "The Flintstones" debuted in prime time on network television.
From 1960 to 1966, Fred and Wilma Flintstone romped through 166 half-hour adventures and earned their place forever in our cultural history.

Set in the Stone Age town of Bedrock, "The Flintstones" was a parody of modern sub urban life.
Modeled after Jackie Gleason's "The Honeymooners," the show featured a loudmouthed caveman, Fred, and his long-suffering wife, Wilma. Their next-door neighbors were Barney and Betty Rubble, the Ed and Trixie Norton of cartoons.
Fred, who operated a dinosaur-powered crane at the Rock Head & Quarry Cave Construction Co., was a hopeless social climber, a poor slob who usually blundered his way into trouble.
In addition to the situations, the series included a lot of Stone Age sight gags, such as Wilma's Stoneway piano, a hi-fi on which Fred played his "rock" music (a long-beaked bird served as the needle), Wilma's vacuum cleaner (a baby elephant) and Fred's garbage disposal (a famished buzzard-type bird stashed under the sink). The Flintstones' car was a foot-powered steam roller that flattened out the rocky roads.
"The Flintstones" was one of the first made-for-adult TV cartoons; and it lasted longer than any other prime-time cartoon series.
The original episodes still are playing around the world.
(Locally, "The Flintstones" reruns air weekdays at 7:30 a.m. on WTOG, Channel 44.)
The originals played on NBC [sic], but it is CBS that is paying tribute to this minor classic.
At 8 p.m. Tuesday, Tim Conway, Harvey Korman and Vanna White (from "The Wheel of Fortune") take us on a musical trip down memory lane.
In addition to a "Flintstones" music video, we'll hear from the series' creator, Joseph Barbera, and a few other animated characters, such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw.
Also included is a film clip from Sting's movie "Bring on the Night" in which Sting's band performs the classic "Flintstones" theme song.
Animator Barbera will explain how he and his partner, William Hanna, built a cartoon empire on the success of Fred and Wilma. He also will give the little-known origin of "Yabba dabba doo!"
"I haven't seen it yet, but I had to do Wilma again," said actress Jean Vander Pyl, who has been the voice of Wilma Flintstone for 25 years.
In a recent telephone interview from her San Clemente, Calif., home, Vander Pyl talked about her long-running role.
"I've done other things, including a 20-year career in radio before 'The Flintstones,' and there was some acting on television, but nothing has been as durable or lasted as long as Wilma," Vander Pyl said.
"It was one of the few cartoons that dealt with adult situations. This was a family show with lots of gags that went over the kids' heads, but the adults loved it. These were characters adults could identify with," she said.
Vander Pyl recalled that "The Flintstones" was created for prime time after Hanna and Barbera discovered that 60 percent of adult viewing audience in the 1950s had been watching their afternoon cartoon series "Huckleberry Hound."
Barbera has said in previous interviews that Warren Foster and Mike Maltese, the original writers on "The Flintstones," were masters of satire. They enjoyed creating the Stone Age gags. There were puns on names, too. Over the years, Fred and Wilma entertained numerous guests including Ann-Margrock, Perry Masonary, Ed Sullystone, Cary Granite and Gina Lollobrickida.
"There was a lot of satire in 'Huckleberry Hound' that the writers put in to amuse themselves," Vander Pyl said. "They helped develop the adult audience for the later 'Flintstone' episodes."
She said the shows were situation comedies in animated form.
"And those of us who did the voices were actors, not just voices," she said. "The show used a formula that had been very successful with 'The Honeymooners,' and Fred was very much like Ralph Kramden," she added.
Vander Pyl, who played the original Margaret Anderson on the radio version of "Father Knows Best," said the cast was like a family and had fun with their roles.
The animation was not completed until the actors had read their parts. "People always asked which comes first—the voices or the pictures? The voices come first," she said.
Vander Pyl modeled her Wilma after the flat, nasal sound of Audrey Meadows' Alice Kramden.
The late Alan Reed was the original Fred Flintstone. He was succeeded by Henry Corden.
Veteran cartoon voice creator Mel Blanc played Barney Rubble and the family pet, Dino.
Another veteran of cartoons, Don Messick, provided numerous voices, including Arnold, the paperboy, and many of the Flintstones' prehistoric appliances.
"I also did the voice of the baby, Pebbles, that was added in the later seasons," Vander Pyl said. "My good friend, Bea Benaderet, who worked on 'Petticoat Junction,' was the voice of Betty Rubble. So, we were real friends off stage, too."
Betty also was played by Gerry Johnson and Gay Autterson.
Originally, the Flintstones had only a baby brontosaurus, Dino.
But, in 1962, they had a baby, Pebbles. Their neighbors, the Rubbles, soon adopted a son, Bamm-Bamm, the strongest baby in the world.
In 1967-68, Hanna and Barbera produced a feature-length cartoon film with a spy theme, "The Man Called Flintstone."
In 1971, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm were seen as teen-agers in their own series on Saturday mornings. Sally Struthers and Jay North ("Dennis the Menace") supplied the voices.
More than a decade later, NBC ordered two hour-long specials, "A Flintstone Christmas" and "Flintstones' Little League."
NBC then ordered new half-hour episodes in 1979 with "The New Fred and Barney Show." Wilma and Betty also were featured in another series, "Captain Caveman."
This fall, yet another series of Flintstone cartoons will be added to the Saturday morning lineup. In "The Flintstone Kids" we'll see Fred and Wilma as toddlers. Vander Pyl won't be doing a baby Wilma voice, however.
"It does seem like every few years, I get called back into the role," she said. "There was talk of a 'Miami Vice' clone with Fred and Barney as policemen, and I've been doing Wilma in commercials."
"Part of the charm was that it wasn't too cartoony. Fred and Wilma seemed like real characters," she said.

"My favorite line is still from the opening show, where Fred comes out on the front lawn, and Arnold the news boy calls out, 'Here's your paper, Mr. Flintstone,' and he tosses out a stone slab that knocks Fred flat. And Fred says, 'I hate the Sunday paper.'
"I still crack up when I see it," she said. "I think other adults howled, too. They knew Sunday papers are like that, and they appreciated the humor, while the kids just laughed at Fred getting knocked down. Slapstick and satire—it was a good combination."

As you likely know, this blog is retired. We’ve been through all the early syndicated Hanna-Barbera that have interested me. However, this post was sitting around Santa Yowp’s bag for some time and has now been delivered.

If you’d like to read more about Jean Vander Pyl, you can check out this post, or go to her name in the TOPICS column and click there.

Jean Vander Pyl Looks Back

For the first two years of its life, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio relied almost entirely on Daws Butler and Don Messick to provide voices for all its characters. The exceptions were rare. By 1959 the studio was looking to expand its talent roster, and also to hire a woman to handle the female roles instead of using Messick in falsetto.

That’s when Jean Vander Pyl was hired.

Vander Pyl came from radio. She wasn’t in the top echelon of female supporting players like Bea Benaderet or Shirley Mitchell, but she had a steady enough career. Because of that, she didn’t get a lot of attention. That changed years later, when Hanna-Barbera cartoons became nostalgic and Vander Pyl was still around to voice her old characters.

From what I’ve heard she was a friendly, down-to-earth and level-headed person, and a good friend, so it’s nice to see her getting some publicity.

This story appeared in the Asbury Park Press of May 29, 1994. Other than misremembering which character was her first—Hanna Barbera had a bunch who were inspired by the Addams Family, so that’s understandable—she gives an interesting take on her career, including her most famous role.

Vander Pyl died on April 10, 1999 at the age of 79.

WILMA SPEAKS
By MARK VOGER
PRESS STAFF WRITER
"I was never very bold about telling actors off or telling directors what I wanted," says a familiar voice over the phone from California. "You just didn't do that in those days. But there were two times in my life that I did."
Jean Vander Pyl is reminiscing about her audition for "The Flintstones" in 1960. Present were Bea Benaderet, an old friend from her radio days, and animator Joseph Barbara, who would decide which of these two women should play Wilma Flintstone and which should play Betty Rubble.

Continues Vander Pyl: "When Bea and I read, it was the funniest thing. We read back and forth, this way and that way. And finally Joe said, 'OK — who wants to be Wilma and who wants to be Betty?' "
Vander Pyl lets out a laugh. "It was so informal in those days, so much more relaxed. Today, they would never do such a thing!
"So I said, 'Oh, I want to be Wilma!' I felt a real closeness to that character. Bea said, 'That's fine with me.' So that's actually the way it was cast."
The only other time in her long career that Vander Pyl "mouthed off" would come three years later.
When we heard there was going to be a baby on the show, she says, "we were excited. The minute I heard that, I thought, 'Oh, I want to do that baby!' Sure enough, the first time it was in the script — the birth of Pebbles — (Barbera) said, 'Now, who's going to do the baby here?'
"The minute those words were out of his mouth, I said, 'I want to do the baby! She's Wilma's baby and she should sound like Wilma!' "
If you're only going to speak up for yourself twice in your career, Vander Pyl apparently picked the two right moments.
As the creator of the voices of the voices of Wilma (which she still performs to this day) and baby Pebbles, Vander Pyl has been heard for 34 years in 86 countries. She is the only surviving member from the original cast of the 1960-66 animated series The Flintstones, on which is based the feature starring John Goodman which opened Friday.
Before doing voice characterizations for television, Vander Pyl worked in radio for 20 years, "in the early, early days, when radio was like television now. "For radio people," the actress says, "if you couldn't do more than one character in a show, you didn't work. So, cartoons were a natural for radio people."
Vander Pyl first worked for William Hanna and Barbera — the animators who created "The Flintstones" — in the late '50s, just when the need for original cartoons produced specifically for the medium of television was becoming more and more apparent.
"It was the big change, and television demanded it," Vander Pyl recalls.
"At that time, they were using the old 'Betty Boops,' the old 'Popeyes' — all the stuff that had already been done. Then (Hanna and Barbera) came up with this new method of producing cartoons quickly.
"They were credited with being the first people to be able to make cartoons fast enough for television, because television ate them up so hard."

Vander Pyl's first role for Hanna-Barbera was as Mrs. Creeply in a "Snooper and Blabbermouth" episode.
"She looked very much like the mother in "The Addams Family,' " Vander Pyl recalls. " So I thought, 'What can I do?' I fiddled with it and came up with — in my own way of thinking, as actors do — half-Katharine Hepburn and half-Talullah Bankhead, if you can imagine."
By 1960, buoyed by the success of such cartoons as "Ruff and Ready," [sic] "Yogi Bear" and "Huckleberry Hound," Hanna-Barbera set about producing what would become the first-ever prime time animated series in television history. As such, the series had to appeal to adults as well as children — which is why a certain live-action sitcom was used as a prototype.
"They showed us the cartoon, and then Mr. Barbera explained to us what it was like," Vander Pyl recalls. "He said, 'It's sort of like "The Honeymooners." ' And that was the tipoff to what type of voices they wanted. So, all four of us had a pattern that we were lead into.
"I did sort of an impression of Audrey Meadows, who played the wife on 'The Honeymooners,' which was that New York, nasal kind of thing."
Vander Pyl slips into a perfect Meadows impression. " 'Oh, Ralph! How many times do I have to tell you!' All up in the nose.
"So when we all first started, we all ended up doing almost-impressions of those four. But then, after we got the parts and the show was on, I remember Joe saying to me, 'Jean, that's a little too nasal. Let's cut down on the nasal.' But I would slip into it, because we had done several shows that way. So it became half me and half the original Wilma."
Vander Pyl says that the chemistry among the first Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty was no accident.

"The interesting thing is that Bea Benaderet, Mel Blanc (Barney), Alan Reed (Fred) and myself were all from radio," Vander Pyl says. "I think the success of the show had a great deal to do with the chemistry of that whole cast. All four of us had worked together on and off for 20 years. So when we were put together in the show, it was not like new people. We were old friends.
"Bea was one of my best friends before we ever even started. I used to take my little girl over to visit her. We used to sit in the sun around her pool back in the early days. I'm talking about the '40s, when our kids were little. These same children are now 52.
"I loved Alan. Al was one of my favorite people. He was kind of like Fred. He was a very warm, big, gentle man when you saw him, but bombastic, too. Like Fred."
Following the cancellation of "The Flintstones" in 1966, Vander Pyl continued to do voices for Hanna-Barbera: Rosie on "The Jetsons" ("she's so much fun to do"), Winnie Witch, Ogee on "Magilla Gorilla," Ma Bear on "The Hillbilly Bears" and Blutessa (Bluto's sister) on "Popeye." But Wilma never strayed too far from Vander Pyl's repertoire. She continues to speak for Wilma through all of the various "Flintstones" spinoffs, such as "Pebbles and Bamm- Bamm" (1971-76), "The Flintstones Kids" (1986-89), "The New Fred and Barney Show" (1989) and many others. And Vander Pyl plays Mrs. Feldspar, Fred's third-grade teacher, in Amblin Entertainment's new "Flintstones" feature.
But Vander Pyl found the two most recent animated "Flintstones" spinoffs — last year's TV movies "I Yabba Dabba Doo!" and "Hollyrock-a-Bye-Baby" (in which Pebbles gets married and has a baby, respectively) — particularly satisfying.
"It was the most gratifying thing to do those two movies," Vander Pyl says. "It has been wonderful for me, and I'll tell you why. When I was young, I wanted to be a famous, dramatic actress, right? Katharine Cornell. Helen Hayes, the first lady of the theater. My only disappointment — though I'd worked through the years and had a wonderful career — was that I was anonymous. I wasn't recognized on the street.

"But that was OK, because I really ended up having the best of both worlds. If I wanted to appear famous, I could just tell people I was Wilma Flintstone. But I didn't have to suffer through some of the hard part that stars, really, have to go through today, where they can't go to a restaurant without being besieged. "When I meet people today of all ages, they say 'I grew up with you.' I've had so many people come up to me and say that.
"And the most charming and touching thing is that so many of the baby boomers were latch-key kids, and I've had people say, 'You were my mommy and daddy. I came home every afternoon after school and watched you.'
"I've had people thank me for all the years of pleasure and fun. I've never thought of myself as having that kind of effect. It's so gratifying to me now. I think, 'Gee whiz — maybe I did do something after all.'
"So it has been very gratifying, but mostly it made me feel good that maybe we made a portion of the children of this last century feel good about something and enjoy something. "And laugh."

Wilma and Brickrock

Today we can enjoy DVDs or on-line streams of our favourite old cartoons (or bootlegs in some cases). A generation ago, baby boomers ooh-ed and aww-ed about the latest home entertainment technology of the day—video cassettes. Yes, people could actually see some of their favourite cartoons without having to wait for them to appear on TV.

Who better to give free plugs for these wondrous new products than the people who appeared on the cartoons?

Mel Blanc and Jean Vander Pyl were the only main cast members of The Flintstones who were alive when episodes of the ‘60s show first started appearing on home video. Blanc had a whole new career at the time as a raconteur, showing up on talk shows to gab about the old days of the Jack Benny radio show and throw in samples of the voices of his characters (mainly the Maxwell, an English horse and Warner Bros. cartoon stars) that everyone instantly recognised. Vander Pyl seems to have been less in demand. Of the four main actors, her career was arguably the one with the lowest profile. She wasn’t known for much more than being Wilma Flintstone.

Still, we’ve stumbled across this story dated August 27, 1987. In the few interviews I’ve read, she strikes me as a modest, open person, and I’m glad to see she got more recognition in her later years (especially when the live-action Flintstones movie came out). The columnist asks the right (if obvious) questions—“What about the Honeymooners connection?” “Are the old cartoons better than the new ones?” “Are you surprised with the show’s success?”

The many voices of the Flintstone family the work of one
By Mike Cidoni
Gannett News Service
Jean Vander Pyl is never alone, even when she’s by herself.
Forget Sybil. Vander Pyl is a REAL mistress of multiple personalities. Each of hers collects a paycheck.
And there’s another check on the way, as Vander Pyl — the voices of Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone as well as eight occasional characters on “The Jetsons” — picks up her profits from the videocassette “The Flintstones: The First Episodes” (Worldvision, $29.95). The tape (arriving Aug. 29) features the animated series’ first four shows, which aired on ABC in the fall of 1990. When Vander Pyl picks up the phone, you half expect a blast from that past, you expect to hear Wilma; perhaps Pebbles and Bamm Bamm cooing in the background; maybe a few of Fred’s brontosaurus burgers broiling on the grill.
What yon get is a voice that’s husky, warm, matronly.
You get a feeling that Vander Pyl loves creating the voices of Wilma and Pebbles Flintstone. She loves to review the show’s original episodes. She has a gay old time whenever she returns to Bedrock.
Yon also get a little perplexed and a lot bedazzled.
Give Vander Pyl a cue. Any cue. And out comes a quiver. Then a nasally quake.
“Fred!”
One word reveals it all. It’s Wilma, alright.
“And you’ll never believe it," says the 67-year-old Vander Pyl. “That’s all I need to say and I get surrounded by people. I’m more popular now than I was 20 years ago. It’s still a big deal.”
And it still gives the San Clemente-based Vander Pyl a bounty of work. She says her character is featured in a new series of ads, including one for MasterCard of England.
While she’s grateful for the recent Flintstone gigs, Vander Pyl agrees that they don’t make ’em — or write ’em — like they used to.
“Amen,” she says. “The writing, that parody, that wit. It was really ahead of its time. The originals — from 1960-66 — that we did ... Everybody says they’re the best. I have met so many people, kids 35 and 40, who grew up with the originals.”
Those first “Flintstone” shows, which make up the longest-running animated series in prime-time history, are now in syndication. They’ve also inspired a string of spin-offs including the Saturday-morning series “Pebbles and Bamm Bamm” and ABC’s current “The Flintstones Kids.”
Hanna-Barbera also is in pre-production with its big-budget live-action “Flintstones” feature starring Jim Belushi as the hard-headed Fred.
Vander Pyl hopes the new projects will recapture the spirit and success of the earliest episodes.
“(Producers) Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna were such pioneers,” she explains. “They had seen that something like 90 percent of ‘Huckleberry Hound’s audience was over the age of 19. So they decided to try an experiment an animated series strictly for adults that would air in prime time.”
The late Alan Reed gave a voice to Fred. Mel (“Bugs Bunny”) Blanc played neighbor Barney Rabble. Vander Pyl originally auditioned for the role of Barney’s wife, Betty. But she lost the part to the late Bea Benaderet (who simultaneously played Kate, the mother, on CBS’ “Petticoat Junction.”)
“Almost all of us came from radio,” Vander Pyl says. “And in radio days, if you couldn’t do two or three characters in one show, you didn’t work. Who’s gonna pay for three actors if you can get just one to do three parts?"
Impressed with Vander Pyl’s versatility, Barbera cast her as Wilma.
“He showed us some drawings and told us ‘This show was kind of inspired by “The Honeymooners’.” So, at first, Vander Pyl based Wilma on Jackie Gleason’s “Honeymooners” wife, Audrey Meadows.
“You know what I mean,” Vander Pyl explains. Then she breaks into flat, through-the-nose Meadows impersonation. “Oh, Raaalph!”
She says Barbera’s direct command to clone “The Honeymooners” separates “The Flintstones: The First Episodes” from the rest in the series.
"When we first started the show, we were all striving — more or less — for that ... I have to come out and say it. We were copying THEM,” she says, laughing. “But it only lasted for about three or four shows because we quickly eased into our characters. Now, I think Wilma’s more like me. A caricature version. People that know me well can spot me in Wilma. I get awfully angry at men sometimes.”
Oddly enough, in its debut season (1960-61), “The Flintstones” scored a higher Nielsen ranking than its original inspiration. It also had a longer run (the original “Honeymooners” ran just a season, “The Flintstones” ran for six).
“And nobody really expected it to go that long. It was just something they were going to try out,” she says.

Vander Pyl may have won the audition for Wilma, but it wasn’t her first role at Hanna-Barbera. When the studio expanded in 1959 to add the half-hour Quick Draw McGraw Show, Joe Barbera went out to look for new voices. One was Vander Pyl, whose first role was Mrs. J. Evil Scientist on a Snooper and Blabber cartoon.

Vander Pyl and the Flintstones’ cast received an unexpected honour in the series’ second season. This is likely a news release from studio PR flack Arnie Carr and appeared in the Binghamton Press of January 6, 1962.

Flintstones Are Invited To Film Festival

A new honor has just been bestowed on the ABC-TV television program, The Flintstones, in the form of an invitation to enter the Monte Carlo TV Film Festival being held this month.
The invitation specifically requested that the Flintstone episode, "Alvin Brickrock Presents," represent the Flintstones show in the comedy category.
"Alvin Brickrock Presents" has to do with a neighbor of the Flintstones and the Bubbles, Alvin Brickrock, whose strange activities with spades, shovels, and coffin-like boxes leads Flintstone and Rubble to suspect that Alvin has done away with his wife — whose absence from the Brickrock home is not satisfactorily explained.
To qualify for the Monte Carlo Festival, the "Brickrock" script had to be translated into French and dubbed with French subtitles. Elliot Field, well-known Hollywood "voice," stars as Alvin Brickrock. Wilma and Fred Flintstone are played by Jean Vander Pyl and Alan Reed, Betty and Barney Rubble by Bea Benaderet and Mel Blanc.

Someone else hired at Hanna-Barbera in 1959 appeared in the cartoon mentioned above. It was Color Radio KFWB disc jockey Elliot Field. Elliot was hired as the voice of Blabber Mouse and appeared in the first four Snooper and Blabber cartoons (and provided incidental voices). However, he explained to me once he ended up in hospital for surgery and when he was fit again, Daws Butler had taken over the role. As you can see, he came back to the studio, but any further cartoon work was cut short by a radio career move to Detroit.

Elliot sent a note several days ago to let me know he’s still out there. He’s the last of the pre-1960 Hanna-Barbera voice actors kicking around (Jimmy Weldon wasn’t hired to be Yakky Doodle until late 1960). We wish Elliot good health and hope to hear from him again. His book about his time in ‘60s rock-jock radio, commercials and animation is still available.

Advice from Yogi and Wilma

Here’s a little something for Daws Butler fans.

Hanna-Barbera got together with the U.S. National Safety Council in 1973 and put together a record featuring the studio’s characters giving safety advice to kids. (Adults should pay attention to some of this advice today). “Hear See Do” features Jean Vander Pyl as Wilma Flintstone and Daws as a large barrel-full of characters. A colouring book was included.

What’s interesting listening to this is how Daws handles characters normally voiced by other people at Hanna-Barbera. As you may know, he voiced Barney Rubble for several episodes of “The Flintstones” after Mel Blanc’s near-fatal car crash. But the Barney on the record doesn’t sound like the Barney he did in the cartoons. His version of Top Cat is, as you might expect, the Bilko-ish sound he gave to Hokey Wolf. His Fred Flintstone is a little more growly than the Gleason voice he used in the Flintstones demo cartoon (mistakenly called a “pilot”) as well as in various Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward productions. Perhaps his oddest voice—and I haven’t listened to all of the cuts below—is the lisping version of Magilla Gorilla which doesn’t sound anything like the way Allan Melvin played him. Daws also speaks for Boo Boo, So-So and Ricochet Rabbit; it’s a shame Don Messick wasn’t hired to voice his own characters. For some reason, there is no A-11.

This wasn’t the only public service campaign the studio was involved with. In 1989, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were honoured by B’nai B’rith as ‘Men of the Year’ for their involvement in a long list of worthy causes, including such campaigns as A Drug Free America, Buckle Up For Safety, and Just Say No To Drugs (Variety also reported: “MCA prexy Sid Sheinberg, honorary chairman for the event, quipped that some people figure Hanna-Barbera is an “Italian woman with a Jewish first name.’”)

Anyway, listen and see what you think. It’s neat hearing the characters do something outside of cartoons. One of the cuts is missing. And I’m not quite sure what to make of that sabretooth mouse on the cover.




A1 The Safe Way To School


A2 Don’t Ride With Strangers


A3 How To Ride A Bike


A4 Obey The Safety Patrol


A5 Walking Where No Sidewalks Exist


A6 Lock Car Doors


A7 Don’t Take Chances


A8 Don’t Throw Stones


A9 Don’t Play With Strange Animals


A10 Walk, Don’t Run


A-12 Keep Arms Inside Car and Bus


A13 Be Careful On Skateboards


A14 Be Careful With Knives, Scissors And Sharp Objects


A15 Keep Toys Off The Floor


A16 Don’t Run With Things In Your Mouth


A17 Store Poisons Properly


A18 Green Means Go, Red Stop


B1 Safety At Night, Wear White


B2 Play in a Safe Place


B3 Enter And Leave Cars On Curb Side


B4 Wet Hands And Electricity Don’t Mix


B5 Never Step From Behind Parked Cars


B6 Cross Streets At Corners


B7 Watch For Cars In Driveways


B8 Fasten Seat Belts, Don’t Stand Up


B9 Never Swim Alone


B10 Stop, Look, Listen


B11 Use Lights And Reflectors On Bicycles


B12 Don’t Play In Streets


B13 Look Both Ways Before Crossing Streets


B14 Correct Signals For Riding a Bike


B15 Don’t Ride Double On A Bike


B16 Remove Skates Before Crossing Streets


B17 Don’t Run Around Swimming Pools


B18 Prevent Forest Fires

Just Another Day at Hanna-Barbera

Recognise this scary face?



Why, of course you do. It’s Carlo Vinci, animator of some of the funniest drawings in the early days of the Hanna-Barbera studio. And you may recognise the picture as being similar to one which opened a story on the studio in Life Magazine published on November 21, 1960. You can read it HERE.

Amid over at Cartoon Brew was nice enough to point out that all the photos taken in the shoot by Allan Grant for that story are now on-line. Allow me post a few of them (for non-commercial purposes, naturally, as this is a fan site).

Fans of the Modern Stone Age family should recognise the drawing the anonymous inker is working on. Thanks to the DVD of “The Flintstones,” we’re able to see the original opening of the first two seasons of the show where Fred is driving through Bedrock, running errands and then going home. He is stopped by a cop for a fire truck, designed by the great Ed Benedict. The inker is working on a drawing of the “truck.” The dino’s legs would be on separate cels as the animal is running. I have no idea who animated the opening and would accept any and all educated guesses (several people have sent me the same answer; see Mike Kazaleh’s note in the comment section). You can spot a piece of the Flintstones’ size chart in the corner. Inkers and painters were the unsung heroes of old cartoons.



The brilliant Mel Blanc is at the centre of this photo of a break in (or just prior to the start of) a voice session for “The Flintstones.” Bea Benaderet has her back to the camera, and the others are Jean Vander Pyl, Joe Barbera, Alan Reed and associate producer Alan Dinehart. In the corner of the shot, that’s John Stephenson with the pencil; he appeared on several cartoons as early as the first season in 1960. I gather from Tony Benedict’s interview with Mark Evanier at this year’s Wonder Con that this session was recorded at the Columbia Pictures studio. Remember that the Hanna-Barbera studio at 3400 Cahuenga hadn’t been built yet; H-B started in the Kling studio on La Brea in 1957 and then moved to a building at 3501 Cahuenga (a block from their future home and a block and a half from Jack Kinney Productions) by August 1960. Incidentally, those Ampex tape machines in the booth were great. I imagine the studio recorded the reels at 15 ips and then cut reference discs for the animators to use when drawing mouth movements; there’s another picture in this set of Carlo at his drawing board with a turntable and record nearby.



Here’s Joe Barbera paying rapt attention to his secretary.

And here’s a gag picture of Joe Barbera after being kicked out of his office. Alan Dinehart is passing in the hallway. Life doesn’t have the pictures captioned so I don’t know exactly what's going on here.

You’ll notice in picture with the secretary (Scott Shaw! tells me she’s Maggie Roberts), the table has an Emmy (for The Huckleberry Hound Show), a wooden key and little models of Huck, Quick Draw and a wooly mammoth, as well as Tom and Jerry, who were still property of MGM. Someone, maybe it was Jerry Eisenberg, described the window-less studio where H-B was located when he arrived in 1961 as “the bunker.” Those painted brick walls sure leave you with that impression. The building is still there today. It’s still without windows and still has painted bricks.



Look at the talent in this room for what may have been a development meeting. The greatest cartoon writer in the world, Mike Maltese, is on the right side of the picture talking to Alex Lovy (the bald chick-magnet to the right). From left to right in the photo are: Arnie Carr (studio flack), Dan Gordon, Alan Dinehart, Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna and the marvellous Warren Foster to Hanna’s left. Maltese is blocking production supervisor Howard Hanson, who you can’t see. The drawings on the blackboard we’ll discuss in a post next week.



A recording session. No, that’s not Hoyt Curtin conducting. Curtin was a beefy guy with a rum nose; he looked like a character out of Guys and Dolls. Hanna has his foot up on the step. Listen to some of the orchestra’s work by clicking on the button.





“You must live in a hole if you don’t like to bowl! Hey, hey, hey, hey!” The studio had a bowling team. Could the third person in the shot be Tony Benedict? By the way, this building is still there but this side entrance is different today.



And here’s one more of the stars of “The Flintstones” and their cardboard cut-outs. You can see the old-time network radio influence as they’re all gathered around one mike. There must have been a lot of bobbing in and out to read lines but all of them worked in radio in the ‘40s, so they’d be used to it.

We’ve captioned more photos in this post. If you want to look at all the photos, click HERE. There are others of Carlo; one of them shows layout drawings for “The Golf Champion.” My thanks again to Amid for the link.

Jean Vander Pyl Remembered

How good an actress was Jean Vander Pyl? Well, she fooled me. During all the time I grew up and many years thereafter, I thought she was using her real voice when she played Wilma Flintstone. It wasn’t until listening to the end of an old radio comedy somewhat recently and hearing the words “Also appearing were Jean Vander Pyl...” that I learned that wasn’t really her voice at all. She had a fairly gentle, quiet sound.

It was an honest mistake. You couldn’t really compare her voice to much else because, unlike the rest of The Flintstones cast members, Jean didn’t really do anything than Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Mel Blanc, of course, was ubiquitous. Bea Benaderet was the star of Petticoat Junction, and you could see her on reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies. Alan Reed turned up in character roles on all kinds of sitcoms. But I’d never seen Jean on TV (I realise she did Leave It to Beaver, known in the Yowp doghouse-hold as Leave It on a Different Channel).

But she carved out a nice career at Hanna-Barbera. She was the first woman hired on a regular basis at the studio. She told the SPERDVAC meeting of February 1989 her first role was in the Snooper and Blabber cartoon Big Diaper Caper (1959), where she evoked Tallulah Bankhead in playing Mrs. Evil Scientist. She showed her versatility on The Quick Draw McGraw Show, portraying Snooper’s secretary Hazel as a breathy southern belle, Quick Draw’s mom as a drawling hillbilly (she used the voice later as Ma Rugg in The Hillbilly Bears) and instilling a New Yorkish sound in several incidental characters. When it came time to cast The Flintstones, it would appear Vander Pyl was the only one who had a lock on a role. June Foray and Daws Butler appeared with her in a Flintstones demo reel. They were replaced. Then Bill Thompson and Hal Smith won the principal male roles. They were replaced. Jean stayed the whole time. Vander Pyl was the first original voice actor on the show and the last at the time of her death.

And, of course, she went on to other roles for the studio—the Shirley Booth-evoking Rosey the Robot on The Jetsons was the best of them. I needn’t name them all. Surely you don’t want to be reminded of the eye-rollingly bad Where’s Huddles? Instead, let’s dig up a couple of contemporary articles about Jean Vander Pyl and link to a couple of others to give her the attention she deserves.

Before that, a couple of biographical notes:

Jean Thelma Vander Pyl was born on October 11, 1919 in Philadelphia. Her father John Howard Vander Pyl had married a Tennessee woman, Kathleen Hale Holtsinger. He was a salesman who moved the family to Illinois and then to Long Beach, California by the ‘30s. She went to Beverly Hills High School where she won a Shakespeare contest playing Juliet “opposite a Romeo whose name she no longer recalls,” as a newspaper squib put it.

Her first radio job was on a show called “Calling All Cars,” in 1934 in some interviews and 1937 in others. The show aired in Los Angeles from 1934 to 1941, first on KHJ then KNX. KHJ writer and producer Carroll O’Meara hired her to do a show called The Phantom Pilot with Howard Duff, then later married her. He died in February 1952 and she re-married.

Her biggest radio role was as the third Margaret Anderson opposite Robert Young on the radio version of the insipid Father Knows Best. June Whitney originated the character then Dorothy Lovett took over in 1951. But Lovett couldn’t appear one evening and Vander Pyl got a half-hour’s notice to show up at the studio and fill in. She eventually took over the part and continued in it until the show left radio in 1954. When it jumped to TV that year, for reasons unknown to yours truly, the much better-known Jane Wyatt was hired for the role.

After some odds and ends, she was hired by Joe Barbera and the rest is, well, you know.

Our first stop is a piece by Carroll Lachnit in The Orange County Register of February 4, 1987.

Voice, not face, is what gives Wilma Flintstone away
Jean Vander Pyl is famous. And yet for 17 years, she has lived in San Clemente in pleasant privacy that she doesn’t have to protect with wigs, masks, bodyguards or lawsuits.
But if she wants to be noticed, all she has to say is one word, delivered in three sliding tones in a high, flat, nasal voice that springs from somewhere around the prehistoric Bronx:
“Fred!”
As in Flintstone.
In 1960, Vander Pyl breathed life and spunk and down-to-earth loving common sense into the cartoon character of the Stone Age suburban housewife, Wilma Flintstone. Wilma needed all those qualities to keep her caveman mate, Fred, in line.
To the wonder of all connected with “The Flintstones,” it became a hit. It aired for six years in prime time, becoming the longest-running animated series in prime-time history.
It also aired in 52 countries in English and in many other countries where the voices were produced in the local language.
Vander Pyl said she didn’t think she had achieved fame until, during the 25th anniversary celebration of “The Flintstones” two years ago, a radio interviewer noted the number of countries in which the show had aired.
He ventured that Vander Pyl probably has the most famous female voice in the world.
“It really shook me up,” she said. “To think I’m world famous and I have none of the problems.”
Vander Pyl, 67, said that Wilma is “an exaggerated me.”
“The character is very close to me,” she said. “If I’m excited or mad, I go into it, not because it’s Wilma, but because it’s a facet of my personality.”
And Vander Pyl does indeed go into it, punctuating her recollections of the “The Flintstones” or “The Jetsons” with quick drops into her character voices, which have been honed by years of playing everything from ingénues to hags in more than a dozen radio drama and comedy series.
For the first three years of “The Flintstones,” she and Bea Benaderet, who gave voice to Betty Rubble, did all the female voices on the show.
Vander Pyl was both Wilma and her goo-gooing, cooing baby girl, Pebbles. In “The Jetsons,” Vander Pyl did the voice of Rosie, the Jetson family’s robotic maid, and eight other characters.
Vander Pyl recalls her work in “The Flintstones” as a glorious hoot.
Radio was her favorite medium, but it died with the advent of television, she said. Acting in live television was fine, but “The Flintstones” was more fun.
She knew the rest of the cast from the 20 years they had spent in radio. In “The Flintstones,” they reviewed the story board, rehearsed the script and recorded the show just as if they were back in radio. Animators later matched the animation to their dialogue loop.
Vander Pyl did not invent Wilma’s voice. “The Flintstones” was a cartoon takeoff of “The Honeymooners.” Originally, Wilma’s voice was based on that of Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden, the long-suffering wife of the bus driver-Everyman, Ralph Kramden.
But with time, she softened Wilma’s voice a little, making it less a mimic of Meadows, Vander Pyl said.
Vander Pyl still is Wilma. She worked this past week on voices for a two-hour animated feature, in which the Flintstones meet the Jetsons. She also recently completed recording 42 new episodes of “The Jetsons.”
She marvels at the Flintstones-and-Jetsons cult that flourishes; among college students and the adults who grew up watching the characters’ antics.
And she wishes Bedrock were back in prime time.
“I would even watch ‘The Flintstones’—even me—on Friday night right now,” she said
“There’s not a damn — pardon me — thing to watch.”

Now, we’ll move forward to part of a column by David Martindale, which appeared in the San Antonio Express News of August 3, 1998.

Speaking up gets Vander Pyl noticed
When it comes to superstars of American pop culture, Jean Vander Pyl may be among the best-loved “no-names” in the business.
“I was not a star,” she says modestly. “Believe me.”
But we beg to differ. Her face rarely sparks instant recognition because she specialized in doing radio and cartoon voices. And her voice doesn’t ring a bell unless she steps into character.
But do you know somebody who even knows somebody who can’t place the voice of Wilma Flintstone. From “The Flintstones” (1960-66) TV’s first prime-time cartoon series chronicling the lives of a modern stone-age family, Vander Pyl achieved pop-culture immortality. She was also the voice of Rosey the Robot on “The Jetsons” (1962-63) and did many other Hanna Barbera cartoons. The result—a unique combination of anonymity and worldwide fame.
“The neat thing about having been Wilma is the people who come up to me now she says
‘It’s so nice. I grew up with you. I just loved Wilma.’ And I still get fan mail,” Vander Pyl says. “The Flintstones” is still popular, first and foremost, because of the cleverly written comedy. But the performances of Alan Reed as Fred Flintstone, Vander Pyl, Mel Blanc (Barney Rubble) and Bea Benaderet (Betty Rubble) can’t be dismissed. Limited to only their voices to make the characters come alive they called upon skills that were honed while working in radio.
“We were all radio actors,” Vander Pyl says. “When television came along everybody said, ‘Oh the radio actors will be out of work.’ Well, excuse me, I was radio for 20 years since ‘37 from the day I graduated from high school. I was the mother on “Father Knows Best.” I was in “Amos and Andy.” I was Andy’s girlfriend for two years. And when radio ended we all went on to do television. The only difference we used to say was that we were actors with an additional talent which was the ability to use our voices to convey whatever we wanted to convey. For example when Pebbles was born, when we did that scene, both Alan and I teared up. Now you can believe that or not. But we were acting the part that subtle a thing and we really became emotionally affected.
Vander Pyl is the only surviving cast member from the series. She did a cameo in “The Flintstones” movie in 1994 and while on the set gave Elizabeth Perkins (the movie Wilma) and Rosie O’Donnell (Betty) valuable pointers.
“They had me do the voice for them,” she recalls. “I told Elizabeth, ‘You must remember that Fred is a two-syllable word: ‘Fre-ed.’ And I told them ‘It's always a closed-mouth giggle.”

There was a deliberate reason both Vander Pyl and Benaderet used a closed-mouth giggle. Her son Michael revealed to author Tim Lawson it was because they both smoked and they coughed if they laughed out loud. Vander Pyl succumbed to lung cancer on April 11, 1999. Benaderet died from the same thing in 1968.

Here are two more fine pieces on Jean. The Los Angeles Times of October 29, 1989 wrote a feature article on her. And you can read a portion of her SPERDVAC interview about her radio career.

Jean Vander Pyl is certainly remembered fondly by cartoon fans and it’s only appropriate we remember her as we approach the 50th anniversary of the debut of The Flintstones this month.