Barney's Bionic Buddy

On Easter, I recounted here a memory of going to the May Co., the L.A. department store, and seeing a robot Fred Flintstone. A reader of this site named Tony Redman found this image on the photostream of an animation historian who calls himself slappy427 (he has lots of neat Hanna-Barbera stuff there). Anyway, slappy427 was nice enough to give me permission to post it over here.

That's not exactly how I recall the Fred Robot I was describing but it's close enough that that's probably it. The text accompanying this press clipping says the robot wound up in the Hanna-Barbera offices. I first visited those offices in 1975 and began working there steadily in '76 and I never saw it. I'm going to call a couple of H-B veterans and ask them if they remember it.