Collecting the Flintstones

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera needed more cash to finance their growing cartoon studio than the money they were getting for the cartoons themselves. The solution? Merchandising. Soon, Hanna-Barbera started licensing all kinds of comic and colouring books, games and puzzles, toys and dolls. Fans of 1960 seemingly couldn’t get enough. There was so much produced, a book documenting it has been written by Tim Hollis. Read about it HERE.

That merchandise has become memorabilia and fans still can’t get enough. Hanna-Barbera collectors proudly share pictures of their prize possessions, and chat about them, on social media. How different were things way back in those pre-internet days (some of our younger readers may not be able to fathom such a time). One collector who looked to share his love of his collection with someone other than his wife told his story to the Alleghany Times on June 19, 1994.

He’s a FLINTCLONE
Hopewell Township collector leaves no stone unturned in quest for Bedrock souvenirs
By Debra Utterback
Times Staff

Either you yabba-dabba-doo or you yabba-dabba-don’t.
Pete Pesut, Jr. yabba-dabba-does.
Loves the Flintstones, that is.
The Hopewell Township man goes pre-historic ape over the modern, Stone Age family. He collects just about anything related to Fred Flintstones and friends.
“I’m like a little kid back in my childhood,” says Pete, a 34-year-old postal carrier for the Aliquippa post office. “It’s a fun collection.”
Stuffed Fred dolls rest on the back of an easy chair in the corner of the basement of his Spring Street home. Ceramic Fred and Barney Rubble banks keep guard under the TV. Dozens of drinking glasses and juice jars bearing Flintstones faces clutter a table.
“This is my Bedrock basement,” says Pesut, who began his stash of Flintstones knickknacks about 10 years ago—long before the hype of the live-action movie with John Goodman thrust the cartoon family into the spotlight again.
The small basement is swarming with color. Hundreds of Freds, dressed in traditional orange-spotted tunics with bluish-green tied, take the form of dolls, banks, keychains and other toys in the room.
Likenesses of Wilma, Pebbles and the Rubbles—Barney, Betty and Bamm-Bamm—appear on beach towels, lunch boxes, and alarm clock and on the faces of more than a half dozen watches.
Pete also treasures his Flintstones dominoes, a Fred bowling game and blow-up punching bags. An inch-high Dino toy that rolls across the floor is the smallest souvenir. A 3-foot cardboard cutout of Fred is the largest.
Pete proudly shows off a smiling Dino Halloween costume made by his mother-in-law. To Pete, Dino is hot, Barney is not.
“I tell everyone there’s only one original purple dinosaur—that’s Dino,” he says.
The Flintstones fan credits his own Wilma—blond-haired Tricia—with helping him start his collection. He winces at the memory.
“I’ll show you the piece that started it all,” Pete says, lifting a small clothing hook bearing Fred’s picture. His wife gave him the hook, which sits in its original plastic wrap, as a joke because he always said Fred Flintstone was a favorite.
Tricia, a secretary at St. Titus School in Aliquippa, never realized the token would lead to a cartoon compulsion.
She never dreamed they would be dining repeatedly at Denny’s restaurant, Wendy’s and Pizza Hut, week after week when free Flintstoens toys were given away with meal purchases.
She never thought his obsession would almost cause them to miss a flight when he “just had to stop” in an airport shop before board a plane when he saw Flintstones squeeze bottles.
“Sometimes I think he’s 4 instead of 34,” Tricia says, smiling as she teases her husband. “He talks to me like Fred was a real person.”

To Pete, Fred is like part of the family. The Beaver County resident has been tuning into the syndicated Hanna-Barbera cartoon since shortly after it debuted in 1960.
“When I came home from school, I always watched ‘The Flintstones,’” says Pete, who attended Aliquippa grade school and later graduated in 1977 from Quigley Catholic High School in Economy.
He preferred “The Flintstones” over “The Jetsons” as a child. He, like hard-working Fred who toiled daily at the quarry, comes from a strong, blue-collar community. Fred is like Everyman.
“I’m a lot like Fred. I’m klutzy and lazy.”
But with good intentions, chimes in Tricia.
Unlike Fred, Pete is tall and slender. He doesn’t share Fred’s 5 o’clock shadow—he sports a mustache. The only resemblance to the Flintstones shows up on his clothes. Today he wears a white T-shirt with a happy Fred emblem and brightly colored sweat pants dotted with Flintstones characters.
“I constantly get kidded down at the post office about my Flintstone boxer shorts,” says Pete.
He also owns 50 Flintstones T-shirts, 15 neckties and numerous baseball caps. Add to that a Flintstones shaving kit. Plastic Flintstones dolls from Argentina. A 1962 Flintstones Viewnmaster disc. A Flintstones rock guitar. Even a Flintstones gelatin mold.
Pete has mixed feelings about the attention the new Flintstones movie is stirring. He and his wife haven’t seen the flick yet, but they are planning to go soon.
On the one hand, Pete is excited about the attention the Flintstones are getting. And he gives his nod to Goodman to play Fred. On the other hand, Pete isn’t interested in all the movie-related merchandise flooding stores.
“He was afraid it would devalue his collection,” Tricia says.
He usually collects only cartoon-related keepsakes he finds in magazines, stores, at toy conventions and flea markets. Friends and family contribute to the lot.
“I have things from the ’60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. I look for older stuff. I try to find unique things,” says Pete. “I’m always looking. Betty is the hardest one to find. So when I see a Betty, I have to have it.”
Since he considers his Flintstones collection just a fun hobby, he refuses to spend much money to purchase pieces.
Two things remain on his wish list: two Flintstones snow domes made in the ‘60s and ‘70s and a metal toy which features Fred operating a dinosaur crane.
Tricia insists on just one thing regarding her husband’s Flintstones mania: Bedrock stays in the basement. She’s made an exception for the small wooden cutout of Fred that waves “hi” and “bye” in the couple’s front yard.
She doesn’t want the Flintstones to overtake their lives. Like Wilma, she tries to keep her own Fred in line.
“I will draw the line. I will not name our firstborn Fred,” Tricia says.
Pete has met just a few folks like himself who love the ‘Stones. “I’ve been trying to find a Flintstones Fan Club,” he says.
His wife suggests a better organization.
“Flintstones Anonymous,” she says.

Yakky Doodle in Oh Duckter

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Allen Wilzbach, Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Written by Mike Maltese; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yakky Doodle – Jimmy Weldon; Chopper – Vance Colvig, Jr., Fibber Fox – Daws Butler.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
Episode: Production R-18.
Copyright 1961 by Hanna-Barbera Productions.

You’ve seen it in cartoons before. The plot quickly veers or builds and it’s funny because it doesn’t make sense, but there’s still a thread of logic to it. There’s a great example of that in the Yakky Doodle cartoon Oh Duckter.

Chopper is chasing Fibber Fox on foot through a hospital ward. They exit from the scene and re-emerge 12 frames (half a second) later chasing each other in wheel chairs. A few seconds later, there’s a siren sound. “Uh, oh,” says Chopper. “A cop.”

It all seems logical. It makes sense for someone zipping along in a wheeled vehicle to get pulled over for speeding. But in this setting it makes absolutely no sense. And that’s what makes it funny. Add to it Maltese’s dialogue after Fibber Fox, disguised as a traffic cop (with a police motorcycle helmet), “pulls over” Chopper.

Chopper: Aw, what’s wrong, officer?
Fibber: Doing 90 in a hospital zone, that’s what.
Chopper: Gosh, I didn’t mean any harm. I was chasin’ a fox.
Fibber: Well, we can just add that to your criminal record. Fox hunting is out of season. Let’s see your driver’s license.
Chopper: Well, uh, I haven’t got one.
Fibber: Shame, shame. Aren’t you the one. You’re going to have the book thrown at you.
Chopper: I am?
Fibber: Oh, yes.
(book hits Chopper in the face).

Of course, there are such things as hospital zones and fox hunting, but not in the context that Maltese uses them. That’s where the comedy comes in. No time is wasted between lines. The sequence’s pace is quick, making it funnier.

And instead of the thrown book being figurative, as it’s usually used, it’s literal in this case. The old switch is a guaranteed laugh if it’s done fast enough and you don’t have time to think about it.

(A side note: as this is a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, I should point out Chopper and Fibber run past the same door in the background seven times, Chopper rolls past the same table and flower pot 14 times, then Fibber zooms past the same door eight times. Why the door is replaced by a table in Chopper’s scene, since they’re supposedly chasing each other, must be for esthetic reasons and not those of logic).

Fibber Fox gets some of his humour from dialogue extensions. He’ll take a line a character has just spoken and use it for his next line. An example in this cartoon: after Yakky hands Chopper a bone and says “Bone appetite,” the observing Fibber adds “It’ll be duck appetite as soon as I get that mutt out of the way.” And later, when Chopper growls out his stock-in-trade suggestion to Yakky to close his itsy-bitsy eyes so he won’t see the pounding the fox will get, Fibber tells the audience, “I think I’d better leave before Chopper closes mine.

Other bits of dialogue:

Fibber (diagnosing Chopper, disguised as a nurse): Well, it’s a clear case of Relapso Escondido.
(Yowp note: Escondido is a town in California).

Chopper: Hello, nurse. Remember me?
Fibber: Well, let me see. Did we meet in Paris? Or Yaphank? Or was it in the Casbah?
(Yowp note: Only New Yorker Maltese would include the name of a little town on Long Island in his dialogue, especially one that likely has extremely little in common with Paris or the Casbah).

Fibber (after getting bopped by Chopper’s arm cast): As Quick Draw McGraw would say, “Ooooh. That smarts.”

The plot revolves around Chopper being in hospital after coming out on the losing end of a fight with a cat. Yakky is bringing him a bone as a present. Fibber’s foiled in his attempt to capture Yakky for lunch, despite a couple of disguises to fool the protective Chopper. Finally, Fibber’s done in by running into an elevator which, conveniently for the plot, turns out not to be there and dropping an unspecified number of floors.

The final scene features Chopper and Yakky visiting the injured Fibber in the same hospital. Yakky’s brought a present—a bone. Chopper puts up a fist to emphasize that Fibber had better enjoy it—or else.

Fibber: Ah, yes. I see what you mean. (Gnaws on bone). A bone is just what I’ve always wanted. (turns to audience) But not very much. (resumes gnawing, stops and turns to audience). Yechhh.

With Fibber chomping on the bone, the cartoon fades out.

Allen Wilzbach is the animator. Some of his violence drawings...



Here’s how Wilzbach handles Fibber zipping out of a scene. Consecutive frames.



Fernando Montealegre painted the backgrounds from Dick Bickenbach’s layouts. Here’s Yakky strolling in Monte’s lone outdoor settings.



Only four characters take part in this one: a doctor is played by Daws Butler; Fibber, Chopper and Yakky are voiced by their usual actors. The sound cutter picks Flintstones music for some of the accompanying score.

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, November 1965

What’s with that Ranger Smith? He’s happy one week and angry the next. Maybe it’s from being cooped up in the woods for so long. Oh, well. We get the two sides of Mr. Ranger in the Sunday Yogi Bear newspaper comics from 50 years ago this month. He appears in three out of four of them. Yogi also shows why he’s “smarter than the average bear” with some ingenuity.

As usual, I urge you to go to Mark Kausler’s web site where he’ll have two-row versions (and maybe three) in full colour from his personal collection.


Guest appearances are always fun, and the writer works them into the November 7th comic, where Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey show up for a game of baseball. The artist gives us various depth levels in a number of the panels and solid poses on Yogi. The effect lettering in the last row is nice, too.



Yeah, Yogi, if I were you, I’d get fed up with Ranger Smith’s foul moods, too. He’s so angry he doesn’t even rhyme in the November 14th comic (see the burn drawing, last panel, second row). A Yogi heel click again this month. Notice how the artist has some white space in the final panel to make the rope attached to the water tower more visible.


Mr. Ranger’s in a good mood in the top row of the November 21st comic. Observe the squirrel in the upper left corner of the first row and the rabbit next to Yogi. The rabbit has a more modern, stylised design, kind of like the White Rabbit in the 1966 Alice Hanna-Barbera special. Our favourite bear uses his inventiveness to save the dance for Peg, Mrs. Vicki Ranger and another young lady.


While the “reveal” gag at the end of the November 28th comic is good, my favourite is the throwaway in the first panel where the rabbit feeds Yogi’s worm bait to a bird. It’s a good thing the letters on that sign are made of something that floats. Boo Boo’s in all four comics this month. Where’s the grouchy Ranger Smith when the canoeist’s life needs saving? I don’t get the line in the middle row, second panel. Why is the canoeist in “double trouble”? Or is the writer stretching for a rhyme?

Next month, Yogi meets up with a crook, modern art, beavers, a rhyming “general” and snow (Shouldn’t he be hibernating? Oh. There’d be no comics if he were).

Ruff and Reddy Storyboard

Ruff and Reddy was Hanna-Barbera’s first foray into television animation but it was unlike any of the other series the studio was involved in. While the show was named for the Hanna-Barbera cat and dog characters, they were only a part of it. Screen Gems, H-B’s bankroller, sold NBC a half-hour show hosted by Jimmy Blaine which featured old cartoons from the original Screen Gems studio (Columbia’s cartoon operation in the 1940s) with Ruff and Reddy’s serialised adventures in between. The series debuted on Saturday, December 14, 1957 back when Saturday mornings were dominated by puppet shows, filmed live action series, and a few old theatrical cartoons strung together.

Mark Kausler, the friend of all fans of old animation, acquired some story sketches for one of the Ruff and Reddy cartoons in Series ‘B’, Pinky the Pint-Sized Pachyderm and has been kind enough to send them so you can see them. He points out they’re from the pencil of none other than Joe Barbera himself. Barbera was an able and quick artist; Bill Hanna once marvelled about how fast Barbara was in creating sketches for the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

These are, perhaps, for a first draft of the story as they don’t quite reflect what ended up on the screen. Far from it, in a way. The board is labelled “B-9 Bungle in the Jungle.” While the title was kept, the drawings describe the storyline in the following episode, “Miles of Crocodiles.” And “Miles” was the 22nd, not the 9th, episode in the series. There may be a good explanation. If you’ve ever seen the Pinky serial, you may get the impression it’s two adventures mashed together. The first number of episodes involved Ruff, Reddy and Pinky on a pirate ship. Suddenly that plot ends and we find the three in a jungle being tracked by hunter Harry Safari. My wild guess is Barbera, Charlie Shows and maybe Dan Gordon came up with an adventure, found it was too short, so they tacked on the pirate cartoons at the start after establishing the story to stretch it out.

You’ll notice the board starts with drawing number 12. My next wild guess is the recap of the previous episode was in the preceding 11 panels (with, I presume, a different production number).

Charlie Shows’ finished dialogue and the scenario don’t match the first page of panels. Don Messick’s narrator begins with: “Ruff, Reddy and Pinky escape. But Harry Safari is hot on their trail again. Sheee.” And the scene cuts to Harry sniffing the ground. Forgive the murky version of this taken off a low resolution YouTube video taken off a cable TV feed. It’s a shame we will never see these on home video. While I’m not a fan of the series, I sure like the jungle background drawings in this adventure.



In some ways, the story stuck pretty close to Barbera’s drawings. Here are 16 and 17 from the cartoon. And Shows’ rhyming dialogue in panel 19 was kept intact.



Panels 20 and 21.



Notice in Panel 34 how Barbera indicates the silhouette of Reddy is to be animated to join up with the static drawing of Ruff and Pinky.



Panels 43 and 45. The “pan” instruction in Panel 44 is ignored. There’s a cut from one scene to the next. However, the camera pans over and then jerks upward a bit to get from 45 to 46. And Shows fits in another one of his rhyming couplets in lieu of the dialogue in Panel 47. “Relax, Max,” says Reddy.



Panel 53 has Pinky pointing with his finger. The cartoon did it better with Pinky pointing with his trunk (in a cycle of four drawings on twos).



In the actual cartoon, the dialogue in Panel 56 is “Fellas! It’s a Crod-ock-odile!” Daws Butler was noted for playing with words; I suspect that’s one of his contributions. Shows gives us more rhymes, as well as the name of the cartoon. The narration from Panel 57 to 59 goes “Not a cro-dock-odile, Reddy. But miles and miles of crocodiles. And each one with a large mouth full of teeth. Aren’t those choppers whoppers?” 56 in the actual cartoon has Reddy with close together cross-eyes. The panel has wide-apart eyes; Dan Gordon liked drawing characters that way, too.

The animation’s interesting. There are drawings of two crocodiles as per panels 57 and 58 on one cel while cycle animation of waves they make are overlaid. The waves fade out. The croc in the foreground suddenly opens his mouth wide (no in-between) and the drawing is held for 58 frames while the narration continues. There’s an eye close held for four frames, an eye open held for 16 frames and, well, it saves a pile of drawing.

There are no credits on any of the Ruff and Reddys except for the names of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. There’s so little animation besides walk cycles, mouth movements and eye blinks, I can’t tell you who was responsible (one scene ends without a mouth on Reddy). One scene has a shake take that Carlo Vinci liked using. The backgrounds may be the work of Fernando Montealegre; there are some flowers in some of the scenes and he drew them the same way in later H-B series.

It’s been speculated Harry Safari was lifted from Dishonest John from the Time For Beany puppet show. D.J. wasn’t an original character. Like Oil Can Harry in the Terrytoons cartoons, he was a caricature of an 19th century villain in stage melodramas. But the lineage of Harry’s “Nyah-ah-ah!” laugh points right to Dishonest John, and the fact that both Charlie Shows and Daws Butler worked on the Beany show make the connection far more than a mere coincidence.

Those of you who are new to the blog and are interested in this series can check out this post from 2009 and this post from 2013.

Hallowe'en Bear

Did you ever dress up as your favourite cartoon character and go out on that Great October 31st Candy Grab known as Hallowe’en? It seems a lot of kids did. Some of them as Hanna-Barbera characters; the studio licensed Huck, Yogi, and others in costume form by 1960. That year, the AP’s Sid Moody reported maufacturer Ben Cooper Co. had Huck, while another company offered Alvin Chipmunk, who wasn’t even on TV yet (Charley Weaver was big in 1960, too). You can get a gander of an ad for a store in Buffalo, N.Y. that year to the right.

One could get more than a candy-triggered toothache out of the deal. For example, seventh grader JoAnn Segbers won a grand prize for dressing as Yogi Bear in the 1961 Shortsville, New York Halloween Parade. Since you want to know this, JoAnn was later president and salutatorian of Red Jacket Central School and went on to Albany State University College and pledged Chi Sigma Theta. She later became a teacher and married Sgt. David M. Lane who was stationed in Weisbaden, West Germany. See how dressing like Yogi Bear can help you along life’s road?

Artist Dave DeCaro has a blog. He’s a Disneyphile, but I won’t hold that against him because he posted an amazingly bright colour photo from 1962 of his brother wearing a brand-new Huckleberry Hound Hallowe’en costume, the one you see in the ad above. Poor Dave got his brother’s hand-me-downs. I suspect his parents, like mine, grew up in the Depression. Dig the ‘60s table lamp.



Some parents liked the home-made look. Ghost heads out of dying pillow cases were popular. But one mom or dad made Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw heads for their kids in 1963. The children are unidentified.



To switch gears, Hanna-Barbera had costumed characters all year around. Screen Gems’ promotional arm through Honest Ed Justin sent people dressed in H-B costumes to fairs, supermarket openings and so on. There was even a special stage show featuring emcee Eddie Alberian, a former Clarabelle the Clown on TV. But there were unauthorised and decidedly cheap-looking versions of the characters, too. I think I’ve posted this before but, in case I haven’t, try to appreciate that whoever came up with these eyesores had the best of intentions. The year is 1961.



There were theme park costumes, too. Kerry Cisneroz passed on these from his large collection. The first picture below is from 1965. Freddie’s looking like he tried climbing through the window of his home and was mauled by Baby Puss (which would explain why he never tried doing it in his series’ closing animation).



Next is an Associated Press photo dated May 30, 1990. It reminds me of a combination of the Yogi cartoon Space Bear, where an alien dresses as him, thinking he’s human, and Ten Little Flintstones, where aliens manufacture ten Fred robots and send them to Earth. Nobody cheaped out on these costumes. Yogi looks great.

Incidentally, if you’ve wondered what it’s like to spend your working day in a Yogi Bear costume at a theme park, reader Larry Ellis Reed would like to direct you to this post. For someone who supposedly “studied” the character, he sure needs a few lessons. Yogi Bear is not a kleptomaniac. He likes food and, though certainly not in every cartoon, filches picnic baskets. The only other time he deliberately stole anything else was in that cartoon where he and Bruno fought for the affections of Cindy Bear by giving her what she wanted—material goods. And I don’t know how he can describe the Yogi series as having “often racially insensitive episodes.” Other than Yogi’s Pest Guest with the Japanese stereotype Yo-Yo Bear, that leaves 60-plus other Yogi cartoons that don’t touch on anything to do with ethnicity.

Yogi is still More Popular Than the Average Bear, popular enough to warrant a Hallowe’en outfit for the youngsters. Here’s one I found on a costume site that takes orders on-line. Interestingly, it’s the only H-B costume it sells for kids. No Scooby, no Flintstones. And it sure is a few steps up from what costumers under Hanna-Barbera license came up with in 1960, isn’t it?

Yes, I’m sure there will be adults going to Hallowe’en parties as “sexy Wilma” or “gangsta Top Cat” or some such thing, but it’s nice to see the old characters, in their original state, still have an appeal for kids some 65-plus years after they were created by a few old hands in the animation business. Now if we could just get all the Huck and Yogi and Quick Draw and Jinks cartoons restored and on home video. Insert your own trick-or-treat line here.