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William Hanna revealed all of the almost-Flintstones eras
A modern Pilgrim family?
It's hard to imagine The Flintstones as anything other than cavemen, but that wasn't the first idea Hanna-Barbera had for them. In 1960, John Mitchell, the head of sales for Columbia Pictures and Screen Gems, approached William Hanna and Joseph Barbera with an idea to create a cartoon for primetime. Hanna and Barbera were initially hesitant, but Mitchell was persistent and excited about the concept.
Mitchell had been a huge part of Hanna-Barbera's early success and getting them on television, but at this point their cartoons were 5-7 minutes each and mostly aired on Saturdays because that was when children watched cartoons. Simultaneously, Hanna-Barbera was the only animation studio making cartoons for television and they realized that if they didn't move in on the half-hour primetime format, someone else would. Together the three of them brainstormed and came to the conclusion that they all loved The Honeymooners and could build a similar halfhour cartoon with two couples. Creatively developing the characters proved to be a struggle - at the time Hanna-Barbera mostly had animal-themed cartoons, this would be their first human-first venture. The question they were asking themselves was: what kind of people would make a primetime cartoon worth watching?
In a 1979 Jim Longworth interview, Hanna brought up "...we actually tried them in Roman costumes, we had them as pilgrims, we had them as contemporary people." A pilgrim cartoon may sound far fetched, but Hanna-Barbera kept the Roman idea around for a later cartoon called The Roman Holidays.
In Hanna's autobiography, A Cast of Friends, he also mentions "They were designed as Indians, as Gypsies, even as Pilgrims. No one was really thrilled by any of it. The sparks weren't flying." Joe Barbera also mentions the creative development "We thought about a family with kids, without kids, with a tall husband, a short wife, a nagging mother-in-law, a dog, a cat, no pets. Then we thought about a farmer and his family, which led to a hillbilly family. And, soon, we were slipping back in history. We came up with a Pilgrim family, with wide collars and high hats, then a Roman family, with togas and helmets. Nothing worked. Nothing clicked...The project seemed pretty much to be a lost cause."
Who would save this lost cause? Animator Dan Gordon. During a brainstorming session Gordon quickly drew a sketch of two cavemen dressed in skins and next to them was a phonograph with a little bird using its beak to play the record. Hanna said of the sketch "When we saw Dan's drawing, I think we all recognized the gag potential of a cartoon show that burlesqued modern conveniences (as we knew them in 1960) and adapting them to the Stone Age,". Thus, The Flintstones were born - just kidding! The original name Hanna-Barbera had for them was The Flagstones. They even pitched the show to networks as The Flagstones but they hit a snag and faced a lawsuit because there was already a comic strip Hi and Lois where the family name was The Flagstones. As Hanna put it "Our Stone Age Family was having an identity crisis...Our primitive primetime entry was happily re-christened The Flintstones, a name so appropriate to the show's characer that today I can't imagine that it could have ever been called anything else."
