Some of the videos I've been linking to here are ones I figured everyone has seen…but I'm getting e-mails that tell me otherwise. So here's a real commercial in which Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble sell Winston cigarettes. A lot of folks have forgotten (or perhaps never knew) that when The Flintstones first went on the air on September 30, 1960, it was ballyhooed as "an adult cartoon." I'm not sure what that meant in 1960…maybe that the leads weren't talking animals. Or maybe it just meant that the ads were targeted at grown-ups.
It aired Friday nights on ABC. That season, ABC opened the evening at 7:30 with Matty's Funday Funnies, a Mattel-sponsored series that recycled old Paramount cartoons like "Herman and Katnip." Then the 8:00 show was a series with no kid appeal at all — Harrigan and Son, a talky sitcom starring Pat O'Brien as a feisty old lawyer who was joined in his firm by his offspring. This then led into The Flintstones at 8:30, which was followed by 77 Sunset Strip, The Detectives and a great comedy/drama called The Law and Mr. Jones which starred James Whitmore.
Obviously, if you were a programmer looking to keep an audience around from show to show, you would have gone from Matty's Funday Funnies to The Flintstones and then to Harrigan and Son and the cop shows. But ABC obviously didn't figure that the kids who watched the 7:30 cartoon show would be interested in the Hanna-Barbera sitcom…or maybe it was the Winston people who felt that way, which is why they agreed to sponsor it. Either way, it wasn't long before someone decided The Flintstones had kid appeal. At first, they didn't move it. The following season, it was still at 8:30 on Fridays but its lead-in was The Hathaways, a sitcom that starred Jack Weston and Peggy Cass as a married couple raising the Marquis Chimps. Eventually, the Modern Stone Age Family was moved to Thursday nights at 7:30, by which time the tobacco commercials were gone and Fred and Wilma instead did commercials for Welch's grape juice and One-a-Day Multi-Vitamins. (That's how it is in life: One day, you're selling vitamins. The next day, you are one.)
In 1961, ABC had Top Cat and Calvin and the Colonel in 8:30 time slots on different nights, in both cases making no attempt to program a lead-in or lead-out with children in mind. (The program on before Top Cat was The Steve Allen Show.) Both series were considered failures and thereafter, networks put their prime-time cartoon shows in the earliest time slot they had. The Bullwinkle Show was on at 7:00, which is when prime-time network programming commenced on Sundays. The Jetsons, The Alvin Show, The Bugs Bunny Show and Jonny Quest all aired at 7:30, which is when prime-time started on other nights. (Only exception: The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo aired Saturday nights at 8:00 but it followed Flipper, which was a show for the very young.).
Prime-time cartoon shows went away after that and didn't reappear until the very end of 1989 when The Simpsons debuted. You could probably make a good case that it was the most "adult" cartoon show ever done, and that it held more appear for adults than many live-action shows of its day. Still, Fox did not buck the tradition: They put it in the earliest time slot they had, which was 8:00.
Anyway, here are Fred and Barney trying to get you to smoke. I believe this is what killed off the Cro-Magnon race.
