The Comic Origin of the Flintstones by Alex Grand
Read Alex Grand’s Understanding Superhero Comic Books published by McFarland Books in 2023 with Foreword by Jim Steranko with editorial reviews by comic book professionals, Jim Shooter, Tom Palmer, Tom DeFalco, Danny Fingeroth, Alex Segura, Carl Potts, Guy Dorian Sr. and more.
In the meantime enjoy the show:
Dinosaur bones have been located in the world hundreds of years ago and thought of as dragon bones. In 1824, Richard Owen invented the term, Dinosaur, and in the later 1800s two men would race for dinosaur bones in the United States.
Edward Drinker Cope
and
Othniel Charles Mash.
These men used pretty barbaric methods like explosives, uncovering dinosaur bones around the country findings hundreds of them and destroying a good amount in the process, however they would get collected at the American Museum of Natural History where artist Charles R Knight painted scenes of dinosaurs which found their way into museums all over the world.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World came out in 1912.
Windsor McCay makes one of the key first animations with Gertie the dinosaur in 1914,
and Edgar Rice Burroughs makes Land that Time Forgot in 1918.
The famous film, King Kong comes out in 1933 with beautiful stop motion animation of King Kong, the giant gorilla fighting dinosaurs on a forgotten monster island.
V.T. Hamlin then created the Newspaper strip, Alley Oop in late 1932 with its first Sunday in 1933 with humans and dinosaurs interacting in prehistoric times.
Marvel fans can see these as fun precursors to the 1960s Savage Land.
The 1961 to 1970, Alley Awards from Alter Ego Fanzine were actually named after this strip.
Alley Oop, the comic strip which had comic book reprints influenced creators and producers thereafter. Check out this Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott produced 1978 Filmation cartoon called Fabulous Funnies which sports an Alley Oop cartoon.
This wasn’t Lou Scheimer’s only involvement in this strip. According to his autobiography, animators at Hanna Barbera were interested in producing a cartoon of cavemen a couple decades earlier. He writes in his Filmation Generation Memoir that while he was working at Hanna Barbera in the late 1950s, he witnessed the birth of the idea of the Flintstones.
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“I was doing layouts in a little closet next to where the writers were,” Scheimer recalled. “One day a writer named Charlie Shows came in…. He said, ‘I’ve got a great idea! You take The Honeymooners and you take Alley Oop, and you put them together, and you’ve got a great story!'”
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So throw in 1955 Honeymooners into Alley Oop and hence, the Flintstones were born with Jackie Gleason being Fred Flintstone, Art Carney was Barney Rubble, Audrey Meadows was Wilma and Joyce Randolph was Betty.
There are conflicting reports on the genesis of the Flintstones but it’s the one I believe.
It’s fun to consider how comic strips affected Comic books, but in this case, it’s fun to see how comic strips and their reprint comic books also affected cartoons.
Cheers
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