Where the Flintstones Live (Kind of)

There was a time, and maybe it hasn’t gone away, when dad would hook up the trailer to the back of the car, stuff the kids in the backseat and head out on the open road for days on end for adventures in trailer parks, campsites and tourist traps.

It was a time when a monstrously high wooden Fred or Dino would beckon you to drive on in and buy all kinds of knick-knacks and visit a representation of the very town of Bedrock you see on TV.

Yes, we’re talking about Flintstones tourist sites.

One was north of Rutland, B.C. on the main highway. It was torn down to make room for a shopping centre. Freddy’s Brew Pub is on the site; need we tell you who Freddy was? Another was east of Chilliwack, B.C. on the Trans-Canada Highway and was turned into a generic Stone Age park due to some trademark issues.

Two others were in the U.S., one in South Dakota and another in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. A reader asked me three years ago about the last mentioned one. I wrote a post and didn’t have an answer, so the post went on hold. Well, I still don’t have an answer, but I’ll up the post anyway.

Bedrock City has a website that looks like it was designed to run on Netscape 3.0. Appropriate for the Stone Age, I guess. You can go to it here. Someone pointed me in the direction of an internet post of November 2012 where the resort was looking pretty run down. You can see the full set of photos here.



The real Bedrock never looked so barren, did it? The houses have helpful signs to let you know which characters lived there. This one belonged to “the policeman.” Maybe that’s the traffic cop from the opening animation during the first two seasons that almost nobody remembered or saw for years. There is a mailbox out front.



The Rubble abode. Betty has eyes from “Cow and Chicken.” Maybe that series couldn’t get its own fun park.



The Flintstones’ house. It appears the record-playing needle-bird has flown away.



Bedrock transportation. The onion-shaped thing with a doughnut on top is a school. Something tells me it wasn’t designed by Ed Benedict. Note the school bell behind the school bus.

Here’s a theatre where, apparently, Flintstones cartoons were shown in an endless cycle. We can only presume they were on VHS. It is the Stone Age, after all. Nice buckets outside the door.

A year ago, news reports had the 30-acre chunk of land for sale at $2 million. Lots of stories were written about it but there doesn’t appear to have been a follow-up piece about whether anyone bought it. You can read more about it here.

Yakky Doodle – School Fool

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Bill Keil, Layout – Walt Clinton, Backgrounds – Dick Thomas, Written by Mike Maltese, Story Director – Alex Lovy, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yakky Doodle – Jimmy Weldon; Chopper, Kid – Vance Colvig; Pugsy, Teacher – Daws Butler.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
Episode: Production R-24.
Copyright 1961 by Hanna-Barbera Productions
Plot: Chopper protects Yakky from a bully in class.

There are two things that we learn from this cartoon: twelve divided by three is 129, and Yakky Doodle cartoons are sure weak without Fibber Fox or some other wisecracking antagonist.

The bad guy in this cartoon is a puppy who can dish it out but can’t take it. Mike Maltese builds up some sympathy for the naïve Yakky who’s picked on by the little canine jerk, but the story isn’t laden with gags or much silliness. Maltese, to reiterate a point I’ve made before, just doesn’t seem inspired by the Yakky series and had, I suspect, much more fun writing for Snagglepuss (eventually, Yakky was given to Tony Benedict).

Yakky’s pretty ignorant in this one, too. Yakky is in a classroom. Chopper makes an entrance, announces himself to the teacher, and even talks to Yakky. But after school, Yakky says to himself “Boy, Chopper’s going to be so proud of me when he hears how I can do my divided-bys.” Uh, Yakky, he already KNOWS. He was in the class with you. He saw it. Maybe that puppy was onto something when he had Yakky wear a dunce cap. Yeah, I know Chopper was wearing a wig, but still...

(As an aside, when did dunce caps become obsolete? Can you imagine the lawsuit if a kid were forced to wear one today?)

This is a rare cartoon in that Vance Colvig gets to do a voice other than Chopper’s. He plays a kid in school who sits behind the bully Pugsy. But wait. The teacher tells Chopper to sit behind Pugsy. Where’d the kid go? He vanishes for the rest of the cartoon.



Interestingly, there isn’t a lot of violence in the cartoon. At the end, when Pugsy challenges Yakky to a fight, Chopper gets involved but doesn’t directly retaliate against the kid. Instead, he uses a slingshot to cause an apple to fall off a tree and onto Pugsy’s head. This lack of direct violence seems to have pretty much become mandated in cartoons by the networks a few years later when they started bending over for do-gooder groups. The only other things that happen are Chopper flicking Pugsy’s head to make him swallow the peas he’s going to shoot at Yakky (not very hurtful) and sitting on a tack (butt violation jokes were pretty standard at Hanna-Barbera). Here’s Bill Keil’s expression on Chopper, who sits on a tack by mistake. He’s doing a good impression of Lucy Ricardo.

Keil’s animation is workmanlike, Dick Thomas’ backgrounds are functional (Yakky and Chopper seem to live in the countryside) and the sound cutter fills the score with familiar background tunes from “The Flintstones” and “Loopy de Loop.” If you’ve seen this cartoon and can pick out some moments you liked, post what it was in the comment section. But if I never saw this cartoon again, I wouldn’t be disappointed.

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, August 1966

Military tests in a protected national park? I doubt it would happen in real life, but we saw it twice in the Yogi Bear TV series in the early ‘60s and we see it again in the Yogi newspaper comics. Something we don’t see in the Sunday comics 50 years ago this month is Boo Boo. Yogi could carry a cartoon on his own—and did in the first season of the Huckleberry Hound Show when Joe Barbera, Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon worked on stories—so the little bear-type buddy’s absence really isn’t noticed.

A kind reader named Richard Holliss has sent me his large collection of coloured Yogi Bear and Flintstones Sunday comics. It’s not a complete run but covers parts of about 4 ½ years. The full broadsheet versions of the comics take up three rows. The tabloid versions of Richard’s comics are four rows, but in order to fit them on the page, one small panel in the top row (usually the second panel) had to be deleted. I’ll have to describe the missing panel in each comic. My great thanks to Richard for volunteering to help.

If you can follow all that, let’s carry on.



Yes, there’s a leprechaun family living in a tree in Jellystone. And in the August 7th comic, the plot is one of those “be careful what you wish for” routines like the cartoon where Yogi got the golden touch from a genie and turned everything into pic-a-nic baskets. Neither Yogi nor the fish seem impressed with the pond of pink goop in the final panel. It’s not exactly magically delicious. Gene Hazelton’s layouts always have intelligent use of space. He needed something to take up the space over the pond so he invented a tree with a branch and birds sitting on it. The leprechaun spell-casting within an “O” is pretty creative, too. The missing panel has Yogi with a wide, crooked, close-mouthed smile and saying “Hmmm!”



Yogi is, indeed, smarter-than-the-average bear in the August 14th comic. He comes up with an instant messaging system, at least. I like the attention to detail on the pipeline. The missing (third) panel has Ranger Smith half-way through the doorstep of the ranger station, running out, his left hand holding down the brim of his hat (he must be going fast), saying “I wonder what the trouble is.” Yogi is in the background with two curved lines next to his head like he’s shaking it a bit in surprise (Peanuts comics did this frequently).



How about this comic from August 21st? Yogi’s not only expressive, but care is given to how he’s holding his rifle as he goes through his test. I’d never think of drawing it above the head and held upside down like in the ravine jump panel, but it seems accurate to me. The design of the drill sergeant has that mid-‘60s Hanna-Barbera look. Iwao Takamoto’s influence, perhaps? I like the sign on the tree in the opening panel and the little birdies sitting on top. The missing panel has a silhouette of Yogi, with two fir trees in the distance, saying “Hmmm...What’s that up ahead?”



Well, you smug Mr. Ranger, Yogi tried to warn you. You wouldn’t listen. In the August 28th comic, Ranger Smith’s son is once again named Kevin. Isn’t that a lovely framing in the top panel of the centre action? The same with Smith hogging the kid’s pool in the second row. The missing panel has a head shot of the Ranger in quarter view, drumming his fingers against his face, saying “Hmmm...I wonder?!?” There are drops of sweat drawn is the air around his face.

Next month, Boo Boo returns, Cindy shows up and Yogi uses his ingenuity. We have full-colour versions of all four September 1966 comics to post.

Matador Huck

I love the little cartoons between the cartoons on the Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw shows. It’s neat seeing the characters interact with each other as actors on a TV cartoon show but still in character. And, at least in the early Huck series, the little cartoons are very attractive. In fact, if you look frame-to-frame, you’ll see parts of them are in full animation. Scenes are drawn on ones in some spots and you’ll find full body movement from frame to frame, not just the eyes or mouth sliding around on top of a cel of a character’s body.

Here are a couple of neat scenes from one where Huck plays a matador. Joe Barbera, or Dan Gordon, or Charlie Shows, or whoever, used the gag where the “bull” (in this case, Mr. Jinks), disappears in the matador’s cape. Huck flaps the cape and Jinks emerges in a little rolling ball before opening up and landing on the ground. The drawings are really nice. These are some of them.



“I’ll grab them mouses yet,” says Jinks, before dashing out of the scene. Check the mouth shapes. And note how Jinks’ body moves. Full animation.



The backgrounds in this mini-cartoon are great, too.

I thought the animator was Ed Love, but Mike Kazaleh tells me Phil Duncan worked on these bumpers. He knows Duncan’s work better than anybody. I presume Duncan wasn’t on the Hanna-Barbera staff, that these were farmed out to wherever Duncan was at the time (Playhouse Pictures?) or he was freelancing.

Random Hanna-Barbera Pictures

Those wonderful TV producers you see to your right brought us hours upon hours of enjoyment—and still do through reruns and home video. And with it came an endless array of this-and-that for parents to buy for kids, campgrounds, contests, and all kinds of other things. People have sent me pictures of stuff involving Hanna-Barbera and we periodically get around to posting them. So here’s a hodge-podge of Hanna-Barberiana. One or two may have been posted before.



Is this a Yogi Bear sundial? Does anyone know where this is? The World’s Largest Yogi Bear is in Cook Forest, Pennsylvania, but I don’t believe that looks like Pennsylvania. I thought it might be in Larkspur, Colorado, but I can’t find this picture there.



If you grew up in the ‘60s like I did, you can probably sing the Kellogg’s jingle. Kellogg’s headquarters was in Battle Creek, Michigan. Here is the Kellogg’s plant (circa 1960) in all its glory, surrounded by its cereal box mascots. Coco the elephant’s banner waving didn’t save his job. He was replaced on packages of Cocoa Krispies by Snagglepuss (if I had to pick a favourite Kellogg’s cereal, that would be it. I’ll bet it tastes different now).



Here’s Bill Hanna surrounded by storyboards, a box of Man Size Kleenex and someone who remains unidentified. My suspicious is he worked with Hanna at the MGM cartoon studio. Nobody I’ve asked knows who it is, including people at the studio when this was likely taken (mid-to-late ‘60s).



A publicity drawing for that new TV series, The Jetsons. I’ve seen it in several newspapers of 1962 but not in colour. Artist unknown.



I’m presuming this is a record sleeve. We posted some, er, questionable country music stylings involving Yogi on the blog a few years ago. If you really want to search for them, go ahead. I’ll pass.



Magic Slate was released in 1959 by Watkins-Strathmore Company and cost mom or dad 29 cents. The only problem with these is the grey film on top would get wrinkled if it was used too much and that would cause a broken line with whatever you were drawing. But for 29 cents, you can’t go wrong.



Aladdin Industries of Nashville made lunch kits. The company is still around (under new management) but it’s apparently out of the carry-your-sandwich-to-school business. Mind you, a lot of moms are out of the making-your-lunch-for-school business, too, what with elementary school cafeterias and such today. I’m pulling for Quick Draw in this contest.

And now, the Yowp Fashion Section. Below is an example of good fashion.



And below is an example of bad fashion.



It’s cool to think that someone is making Huckleberry Hound T-shirts, especially since Huck isn’t exactly a very high-profile character these days (though he might be if Hanna-Barbera’s owners released the final season of the Huckleberry Hound Show on DVD; music rights are not a problem with it). And, having lived through the ‘80s, I can confirm guys wore mesh half-shirts. Have they made a comeback yet?



Ah!! Headless Snagglepuss!!! This sticker book was published by Whitman in 1963. Now, if they chopped off Yakky’s head...



T.C. was long into reruns when this colour version of the studio’s 1961 publicity art was made. That pose of Top Cat got an awful lot of use.



If Yogi Bear were a Japanese stop-motion production, would he look like this? And why is Yogi carrying Easter Eggs? Perhaps we have some readers who are able to solve these puzzles.

My thanks to Billie Towzer and others who sent these pictures to the blog.