The Flintstones debuted on September 30, 1960 when I was eight years, six months and twenty-eight days old. For a while, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen or ever would see. That changed. It lasted in ABC prime time for six seasons but by about halfway through Season Four, I was bored with it. I liked a lot of cartoon shows better, including some Hanna-Barbera shows. When The Jetsons joined the ABC schedule on September 23, 1962, I thought that was a much better program even though it only lasted one year.
As you may know, The Flintstones occasionally had celebrity guest stars like Ann-Margrock (Ann-Margret) or Stony Curtis (Tony Curtis) and they'd have had more of them if they could have figured out stone/rock puns for more celebs' names. I was always kinda baffled by the first one of these they did. The first episode of Season 2 featured the composer Hoagy Carmichael…and they didn't even turn him into Hoagy Carmarble or anything. He was Hoagy Carmichael, doing his own voice and living in the Stone Age.
At the age by then of 9.5 or so, I vaguely knew who Hoagy Carmichael was and I suspect that 75% of the viewership didn't. He was a great writer of songs but he wasn't that famous. I don't recall seeing him on any other TV show for the rest of his life, which ended in 1981. I regret that, years later when I worked for Hanna-Barbera, I didn't think to ask Bill Hanna or Joe Barbera just how or why someone thought it was a good idea to snag Hoagy Carmichael as a guest star. I pestered both men with questions aplenty but somehow never got around to that one.
I'm going to guess that since they obviously did it for whatever publicity value it had — which was probably not much — somewhere out there, there are a few magazine-type articles about this. They probably explain about Hoagy being a huge fan of the show and Bill and Joe being huge fans of him and somehow they connected and it was too good an idea not to do…which it wasn't. And I'll further guess that while some of all of that was true, there was also some connection like Hoagy and H-B having the same agent or some idea about H-B doing a cartoon series with famous songwriters.
Whatever the catalyst, here's a clip from that episode. Despite the animated Hoagy giving credit for the song to Barney Rubble, it was all a Carmichael composition which, maybe they hoped, would become some kind of hit record…