As even the logo on the Google page is noting, today is the big five-oh for The Flintstones, which debuted on ABC on September 30, 1960. Two of the zillions of eyes that watched that night were mine. I was eight (eight and a half, actually) and I suddenly had a new favorite TV show. It was allegedly a cartoon for adults…and it was on at 8:30 and sponsored by Winston Cigarettes but come on! It was about funny animated cave people and dinosaurs and how could that not be for kids? I sure liked it. I watched every week…every week but one.
One evening — during the show's second season, I believe — someone gave my parents great free tickets to a Friday Night Lakers game. These were incredibly good seats, it was an important match-up versus the Celtics and my mother and father both wanted to go. They couldn't locate a sitter and felt I was still too young to leave alone…so I was informed I was going with them. Having zero interest in basketball (I still have zero interest in basketball) and total interest in The Flintstones, I did not like this idea. In those pre-V.C.R. days, not being home meant not seeing that episode, maybe ever.
My father said, "They'll rerun it" but I wasn't sure. An article I'd read somewhere said that they made around 30 shows each season. (They made 31 for Season 2) Since there are 52 weeks in a year and the program was occasionally preempted for a special, that meant not every episode was aired a second time during the rerun months. What if the one I missed was one they never reran? At the time, I didn't know that The Flintstones would rerun forever in syndication and elsewhere. I was horrified at the thought that there might be one I'd never experience.
I begged. I pleaded. I even argued (remember my age at the time) that the first half of a basketball game wasn't the interesting part. Maybe we could leave our house at 9 PM and get there in time for the third and fourth quarter? No quarter was given. We went and I had a miserable time which grew even more miserable the next day when friends told me what Fred and Barney had done the night before.
I have other memories of Flintstone Love: Finding the first Flintstones comic books…learning to draw the characters…actually getting excited when Wilma told Fred they were going to have a baby. I guarantee you I would not have been that excited if my mother had told my father she was pregnant. I had Flintstones toys and books. I even remember owning one of these…
As a purist, I was annoyed at the miscoloring of Barney's hair, as well as his and Fred's outfits and of course, I drew in Fred's missing ear on the box cover. It was a lousy game that really had nothing to do with the series…but it was The Flintstones so I made my friends play it.
And as a purist, I eventually lost interest in the show as it strayed from its funny, inventive roots. I think I stuck with it religiously for the first three years then it started to become missable. By the time The Great Gazoo showed up, he wasn't ruining anything I cared that much about. I loved the early ones though and the comic books. In the seventies when I got to write the comic book, it was a thorough thrill, in part because I got to be eight-and-a-half again. It also made me realize how important those characters have been to my generation and a couple of others. What a grand legacy.