Eleven of you have written since last night to say that I forgot one prime-time network animated show that came between the cancellation of The Flintstones (it went off in '66) and the debut of The Simpsons (it went on in '89) and you pointed to Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home, which aired from 1972 to 1974. Well, you're right and you're wrong. Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was a Hanna-Barbera production which starred Tom Bosley as the voice of a working class guy. The show was created by the team of Harvey Bullock and R.S. Allen, who wrote some wonderful things both for animation and live, and the show was largely styled by the great magazine cartoonist, Marty Murphy. The advance publicity made it sound like it would replicate All in the Family as much as The Flintstones had echoed The Honeymooners but that wasn't particularly evident in the show when it got on the air.
It was not, however, really a prime-time network show. It was syndicated. In the early seventies, the F.C.C. instituted its Prime Time Access Rule, which forced networks to cut back on their evening programming, effectively returning a half-hour each night to local stations. This caused a flood of syndicated shows to be created for those time slots and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home was one of them. Most of the NBC affiliates bought it and ran it Tuesday evenings at 7:30 so it may have looked like a network show…but it wasn't.
But I'll tell you what was. The messages about Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home reminded me that Hanna-Barbera produced ten episodes of a show called Where's Huddles? that ran on CBS in 1970 as a summer replacement (remember summer replacements?) for half of The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (remember Glen Campbell? For that matter, remember Goodtime Hours?). This one was about football players and it starred the voice of Cliff Norton as Huddles, who for some reason looked but did not sound an awful lot like Walter Matthau. Mel Blanc did the voice of his buddy Bubba, and they had a kind of Fred-and-Barney relationship. This was probably quite intentional on Joe Barbera's part. Blanc, of course, was the voice of Barney Rubble and Cliff Norton had once been up for the role of Fred.
(Here's a quick trivial aside of the kind for which this weblog is famous: Throughout the development of The Flintstones, Hanna and Barbera were highly sensitive about getting close to The Honeymooners without getting too close. The original pilot had Daws Butler doing the voices of Fred and Barney, and June Foray as Wilma, and both Daws and June did the same impressions of Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows that they'd done for the Warner Brothers cartoon series, "The Honeymousers," which had been done with Mr. Gleason's blessing. It's just a theory, but probably a good one, that Daws and June were replaced because H-B was worried that the use of them would make it too easy for Gleason to take legal action. Anyway, Cliff Norton auditioned for both Fred and Barney, and I'm just wondering if they thought to call him in — and maybe if they ultimately rejected him — because his name recalled Carney's character on The Honeymooners, Ed Norton. Did they perhaps want him for Barney — he would have been great in the part — because Hanna said to Barbera, "We can't hire a guy named Norton to play a character we may have to swear in court was not inspired, even unconsciously, by a character named Norton"? Maybe, maybe not. I once startled Mr. Barbera by asking him if the name "Barney Rubble" was a conscious in-joke because it rhymed with "Carney Double." He did a Tex Avery-style double-take and swore to me that no one had ever brought that up before…but allowed as how it may have been a subliminal confession.)
Sorry, where was I? Oh, right: Where's Huddles? Well, that one was a pretty quick flop but it was a prime-time network animated show so I should have mentioned it. And now, I should get back to a script that's due.