TELEVISION: Rocks on the Rocks

One new situation-comedy series that arrived on television last week parodies all the others (see below). Called The Flintstones, the program uses first-rate animated cartoons in place of second-rate actors, and its approach to satire of 20th century life is by way of the Stone Age. Fred and Wilma Flintstone live in a split-level cave. His shaver is a clamshell with a bee in it. Everybody wears skins. When the neighbors collect for an evening of song, Fred picks out the tunes on the Stoneway.

In prime evening time, the half-hour ABC show is aimed at adults, but how can children be asked to sleep while Runtasaurus (a sort of paleolithic Pekingese) is on the screen? Or while the Sunday News—a 90-lb. slab of carved stone—comes aflying through the front door and kayos daddy? Although last week’s opening episode was a little too rocky, the series has the sort of talent behind it that seldom fails.

Nine Movements. The Flintstones is the latest product of Hanna-Barbera Productions, a three-year-old Hollywood animation firm that has already established itself as the best cartoonmaker since Walt Disney and U.P.A. The stars of Hanna-Barbera are sprinkled all across the animal kingdom—from Quick Draw McGraw, the only horse who is the hero of a western, to Yogi Bear, who lives in Jellystone Park. Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound, whose flop-eared hero is one of the alltime favorites of American children, last spring won TV’s Emmy Award for children’s programing.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who formed their partnership in 1957 on a $5,000 investment and last year did $3,500,000 worth of business, have succeeded with a rare combination of organization and talent. Not only do they know how to make good, well-timed, funny films, but—to meet the demands of TV—they have vastly accelerated the complicated animation process itself. One half-hour with The Flintstones requires 43,000 individually exposed frames of film, but Hanna and Barbera are turning out more footage in two weeks than the cartoon departments of the major studios used to complete in a year. They do it by concentrating on simple closeups, avoiding elaborate backgrounds, and following such short cuts as reducing all speech to nine basic mouth movements.

The technical subtleties of the field call for long experience, and the partners have it. Both Hanna, 50, who was born in New Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, and Barbera, 47, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, had drifted among the big-time animation mills—Terry Toons, Looney Toons, Merry Melodies—before they came together at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937. There they created the most exciting mano a mano in the history of film cartoons—matchless Tom and Jerry. For 18 years they manipulated the big cat and the little mouse for MGM’s critical and financial profit, year after year sat mousily at home uninvited while some fat cat stepped forward to accept Tom and Jerry Academy Awards (seven in all).

Storyboards & Puns. When Hanna and Barbera first thought of quickie cartoons for TV, they tried to give the idea to MGM. The studio was not interested. And during one of Hollywood’s periodic panic waves it decided to stop all new production on Tom and Jerry. Hanna and Barbera were ordered to lay off their staff, and they soon voluntarily followed their co-workers out of the studio, rounded them up again to launch their own business; 70% of their present employees were with them at MGM.

The Hanna-Barbera shop is efficient but unconventional. Hanna and Barbera work harder and longer than anyone else. Hanna is the timer, who computes the mathematical intricacies of matching dialogue to action and budgeting the exact number of frames necessary to build each joke and each dissolve. Barbera, who can draw almost as fast as he can talk, does the planning-stage sketch work, can create a fully plotted storyboard (a sort of cartoon outline with dialogue) in five hours.

Now, with the half-hour weekly Flintstones to keep going, the whole company is going off its rocker trying to think up Stone Age puns. Sooner or later they may have to introduce a new character called Spelunk-head, the village idiot. Mrs. Flintstone could ask her husband to please pass the basalt and pepper, and in redoing the kitchen, she could be for marble table tops, while he is for mica. In the next few weeks the Flintstones and their neighbors will be in and out of a jazz palace called Rockland and a movie set where The Monster from the Tar Pits is being made with Gary Granite and Rock Pile. They even get a mysterious visit from Perry Gunnite, private eye—a petrified, would-be mason who covers up his insecurities by asking toughly for “rocks on the rocks.”