 This is the SF Productions podcast network Let me see. There's a tape on the end here. Let me hook this up here. Let me see what we got. Back with us to the 60s and 70s, the dwelling place of the lost generation. An era whose heroes, role models, and very lives were molded and formed by weekly installments of favorite television programs. Welcome to the place your parents didn't understand. Welcome to the vast wasteland. Welcome home. Oh, and welcome to another exciting episode of Last Wasteland. I'm your host, Mark Schmidbauer, along with Wilbert Neal and Marty Wiley. We're here to talk about 60s and 70s television. And this week, we're continuing from last week on the big Hannah Barbera shows. But before we jump right in there, we just want to tell you that we're on Tuesdays at 6, Wednesdays at 10, and Thursdays at 3 here on AZTB cable 21. Also, I want to tell you in case you want to write into vast wasteland for some reason. I'm not really sure why, but if you do, for some strange reason, our address is vast wasteland box 151526 Columbus, Ohio 43215. And now let's go right on and continue. I think when we left off, we were just about to delve into the Flintstones. The tragedy of the Flintstones. Yeah, the rise and fall of the Flintstones, that's the word. So let's go right into that. Shall we? Wilbert, what's going on? Well, by golly, back when the Flintstones started back there in the 60s, when they were on a late night TV and they first started off, it was just, it was really an innovation to have a primetime cartoon about a family, well, a couple of families, I guess, really. Flintstones and the rubbles. We lived next door to each other and it was pretty much the Honeymooners, not as a cartoon, basically. Yeah, pretty much. Where Fred and Barney, well, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble were always going out and, oh, I don't know, trying to find ways to get off work and go to... Get out of the opera and go bowling. They were supposed to do something they wanted to do and it would backfire somehow. Pretty much your Honeymooners episode. Exactly. For all intents and purposes, because it was pretty much the same show. It simply didn't work at the bus station in the sewer, it was the quarry. And then, who knows what Barney did. Yeah, I was going to say, what did Barney do? He did have a boss, but he didn't work where Fred worked. We don't know what Barney did. Barney worked for the CIA, I guess. We don't know. We just don't know. If you have any ideas to... What Barney did. What Barney did for a living. For a while we know he worked with Fred for a while. We were given that impression. But we don't know what the deal is on that. Anyways, this show was on from 60 to 66 in what was then prime time. We're talking 8.30 to 9, 7 to 8.30, 7.30 to 8 throughout all that time. And that wasn't like little bits, that was pretty well continuous. Certainly just a lot of episodes. We went through at least three different openings on the show. We had Fred and Barney going to pick up... Well not Fred and Barney, Fred and Wilma going to pick up Wilma and Betty so they could go to the drive-in, they'd come home, they'd let the dog in, let the cat out. That was the early one when the cat was in the car. When the saber-toothed cat they had. That was the unknown, really the neglected pet of the Flintstones. Baby Puss, that was its name. Baby Puss, okay, well that's fine. They had a name. And Dino was just the star pet. Okay, going to the fact that they didn't really have a good continuity. Continuity. Continuity. Thing, damn thing. Whatever. Anyway, when the first episode where they found Dino... Yes. Dino talked. Yeah. And it's like they domesticated him and... Bam. Lost that voice. When they went to that, you know... Never spoke again. Maybe then it was like, you know, in the Stone Age it was like getting your dog neutered or it would be getting your dinosaur just about to leave. Getting your Snorkosaurus. Yeah. Oh, that's sad, that's sad. Oh well. We went from having a nice, sarcastic voice to... Whippa bow! Whippa bow! Which sounds much like the Chihuahua next door to me. Yeah. We'll die if it doesn't stop. So what happened was they got through the original six years with... Although there were continuity problems, but really it was pretty much the same show from beginning to end. Hey, and you've got to mention in there that when pebbles... The whole thing of Wilma being pregnant and then they had pebbles... I think that's comparable really to little Ricky being born. Yeah. Oh yeah. And I love Lucy. But on the honeymooners, the honeymooners wound up adopting a child. Right. And the rebels wound up adopting a child. Well they left. Somebody came along and just left Bam Bam on their doorstep. But they adopted him. They would do the whole thing. If you could do the house. I know I would, but... So they've had the first six years and then they said, you know, people are getting bored with that. And so it's like, okay. We need more. So that was when this is pretty much the beginning of the fall of the Flintstones. First... It's like Coke and classic Coke. Exactly. It's like classic Flintstones and... Pebbles and Bam Bam as teenagers. Pebbles and Bam Bam show. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Damn it. Busy. But what always made no sense to me was the fact that... Fred and Wilma and Barney and Betty, when you saw them, never aged. Well hey, now when you're a kid though and you grew up, does it really look to you like your parents of age? Yeah, but the audience saw the Flintstones. Obviously we're about, what, 15, 16, maybe 17 years older and yet... I don't understand that. They never grew older. It's the temporal stagnancy. You reach a certain age and from there on, you just don't do anything until you get the big decline and then it's suddenly evident that you definitely aged. And then... Well they did have... Jay North was Bam Bam. Right. Sally Struthers was Pebbles. Yes. And then they had all these goofy people. And Dino was still around. How old were you? None of my dogs lasted that long. Oh, it's a dog. It's a dinosaur. It's a dinosaur. It's a dinosaur. It must have a longer life. Well the... The Hopperoo shirt didn't last. Well that's true. They never saw a Hoppy anymore. The poor little Hoppy just croaked off after a couple of... But they had a little woolly mammoth or something that ran around and... Well they used to have one that would be the dishwasher or something. They liberated it. But they did have... I think in the Pebbles and Bam Bam show they had one that was a pet but I don't... He's not pictured here. I don't know if it had a name or anything. Oh well. I want to say woolly. Yeah I think that might have been it. You know, they were real original. Dino the Dino, come on. And then the things got even worse when they started to bring other characters into it. Because it was kind of like... I don't know, like Flintstones Helper or something. Kind of like adding more stuff into there just to keep them going. They show some old episodes. They show some new stuff. And by then it was like what was that... The Flintstones comedy show? No. What was that weird creature that was there? The Shmoo. Wasn't the Shmoo in that? Yeah the Shmoo. There's the Shmoo. Yeah. It's a very small picture. Well didn't the Shmoo kind of come over from another show? Like... There was a Shmoo... No there was a Shmoo... There was a Shmoo... A Shmoo show. A Shmoo show. A Shmoo show. Okay. Now a rented lift. Look at that. And then as if all this wasn't bad enough. Now in the 80s we... I know we usually don't talk about the 80s. We just want to... This just goes along. The final end. The final decline. The final blow in the... The Flintstones' kids. The Flintstones' kids. Yeah they're all... They're all little children now. And they know each other despite the fact that it was... So that earlier they didn't even meet each other until they were like in college. Out of high school, yeah. Out of high school, yeah. And they tried to impress each other. There we go. And all of a sudden... Oh no no. They knew each other when they were little kids. It's like... What? Like they woke up from a dream or something? A dream. Oh the Dallas complex there. And hey back when they were really the Flintstones. Gazoo. The great mighty Gazoo. Harvey Corman. From Mars. Yeah. From the future. He's from the future. He took them to a glimpse of the future and they kinda met or ran into a civilization that was pretty much like the Jetsons. Yeah. They never saw the Jetsons. I mean another city in the... Of the future time. But I never thought Gazoo ruined it. Gazoo was fun. He was another form of extender, but it worked. But it worked, yeah. It was still original. It was back in the original thing. Yeah. It did work. Although the one thing that's always interesting to me is Barney's eyes have gone through several changes. They were like little beady things for a long time. Then they got bigger. They were always just black. Then they got some personality where they had pupils and whites. But then it's just funny. We had a little cosmetic surgery. Contacts. Contacts. We just went to Bedrock Hospital. Bedrock Opticians. Bedrock Opticians. Well, so while you bring that up, let's go on to certainly the other extreme. And let's say, Hanna-Barbera, please, no more baby shows. Right. We don't need any more babies. Exactly. I think even the babies would agree. We don't need any more baby shows. Well, babies will still go on. I mean I guess other people or other... Well, they're just doing it with so many now. Yeah. Yeah. So the other extreme, of course, the Jetsons. The Jetsons. And certainly that's the big thing right now with the big Jetsons movie. Jetsons movie. Jetsons everything. And there's the big Jetsons movie coming up. Coming up. It's out. Where have you been? George Jetsons. Jane is wife. Daughter. Judy. Their boy. All right. And Astro. Astro. And certainly this, we talked about this last week and the fact that there were only what, 24 original episodes of this. In the mid-80s put together another package of shows, which brought it up to something like 45. But considering the longevity of this series and the fact that it was virtually even, it was only on TV for like a year in original running, but it's been on Saturday morning cartoons pretty much until the mid-80s. Right. In some form or another kept pulling it back. And it's like there's only 24 episodes that exist. But they kept showing them and showing them. It was a Rosie Hazel. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. From the old Hazel series. Yeah. Pretty much. And why did Jane need a maid when everything was automatic? Well, it just got tiresome to push in those buttons. Didn't you see that? Well, Rosie couldn't even punch the buttons. Where they got Rosie is like Jane kept pushing those buttons and her finger ended up like a accordion or something. Yeah. Like the famous food oracka cycle here. Food oracka cycle. I mean, you know, why did she need a maid? I still have my questions. To run that sweeper, to walk those kids. Walk the kids. And the dog walker, wasn't that neat? Well, between that and who is the handyman? Henry. Henry. Henry. Yeah. Yeah, Mr. Getson. That's Henry had a robot. He made his own robot. Mac. Well, Mac. What you got? Ah. Ah. Yeah. Bye, Golly. So, certainly, I mean, the Getsons really couldn't complain about having enough people helping them. Hey, hey, another thing in there. You've got Spacely Sprockets and Cogsville Cods. Cogsville was definitely a descendant of Mr. Slate. Oh, yeah. There's no question. There's no question. Yeah. That's just interesting. Of course, done by the, oh, where is it here? Oh, I don't see it on here. Here you go. No, Blake did do. He did. He did do Spacely. Spacely, yes. Yeah, I mean, the man who did this. Cogsville! Cogsville! Well, I liked the way of them. Okay, a lot of the stuff they had on the first Getsons, we pretty much have now. Well, a lot of it, yeah. We have a lot of that technology. So I think, but making the new shows, they've not scaled down the computers. Right. Okay, what's the one saying, Rudy? Yeah. The place cards? Uniblab? It's an enormous computer. Place your bets. Place your bets. I mean, they still have the enormous computers, but we had those then. Yeah. Our computers were huge, yeah. Well, to round out the prime times, of course, both with the Sows and Getsons, a rare thing. This was only on, I think, for one year, the Hanna-Barbera happy hour. This was in 1978. Oh, my goodness. Let's see if I can find out some information about this. This sounded like pretty much Hanna-Barbera's attempt to copy Sid and Marty Croft. Hanna-Barbera hash, okay. Yeah, pretty much. Tried their hands at a prime time variety hour with a short-lived series. His program was certainly unusual. Instead of a live host, he had his emcees two life-sized puppets. And Tony Randall, Dan Hagerty, Twiggy, and Leif Gerritor on there. Oh, my. Yeah. Where have they gone from there, huh? So this was early as springboard for a lot of people. Of course, Tony Randall did, and he did make an appearance at least as a voice in Gremlins 2, The New Badge. Well, he's done a lot of things. Quite a few. So anyway, so of course we wanted to go back and really pick up some other ones that we kind of skipped over. One of my personal favorites, and this was part of the, trying to remember the name of the hour that had all of the various series. And back in the 60s, Hanna-Barbera stuff, other than it wasn't, I don't think it was, I'm just losing it at this point. They were the big puppets. Oh, those weren't puppets, those were actually people. Those were the Banana Splits. Banana Splits. All right, golly. Now that was a great show. Yeah. Here's Hanna. I was an actual member of the Banana Splits fan club. I knew the Banana Splits code. I didn't know the words of the song, though. We got it there. No, one banana, two banana, three banana, four banana. Make a bunch of soda, many more, over hills and highways. Well, of course, this is a picture after they changed Snorky. Snorky started out as a mammoth, as a wooly mammoth, and then he got it, like, shaved. They gave him eyes and put a vest on him. It just totally ruined the Snorky hit. This was sort of little kid's monkeys. Yeah, exactly. Little kid's, little kid's monkeys. Because, I mean, most of us little girls was chasing after Davey Jones. Anyway. But one of my favorites then was, I think it was running, and that was Secret Square on Morocco Mall. Well, they were actually, I guess, a little bit before that. 129 in there. 129 in here. Really a pretty good picture. This is the Hanna-Barbera Bible here. Yeah, pretty much. There they are. This was one of my personal favorites of all the pretty much generic animal shows of the late 60s for Hanna-Barbera. This was probably one of my favorites. It wasn't just Secret, it was Secret Squirrel. So, we had that one. I pretty much enjoyed that. We mentioned the Impossibles. Frankenstein Joe here in the Impossibles. I wanted to go a couple things that, one, it certainly seemed to spawn a trend at Hanna-Barbera, and this is on 176. This is Wheelie and the Chopper Bunchies. And this became, I think this was the first one that started the whole thing of humanizing cars, which Hanna-Barbera really seems to like and thinks this is a really great idea. It's over here. Over here, wrong one. You're getting the hair-bearer. There we go. Anyways, I think that was one of the... There's a little picture of here. One of the things, because they had other shows. I'm trying to remember some of the other ones. I can remember a later one called the Turbotine or something. Well, Turbotine, I don't know. There we go. There's Wheelie. That's the Chopper Bunchie. Oh, let me see. I just had it right there. Oh, no, we're losing our minds. Believe me, there was a ton of shows of Hanna-Barbera that they seemed to just try over and over. Oh, a human car is really going to be a great idea. Not speed buggy, but it's some kind of... Speed buggy. Speed buggy. Exactly. Exactly. They were convinced that was going to work. We weren't. That's what it came down to. Well, basically, I guess that's where a kit comes from. Yeah. Pretty much. Pretty much. Well, let's see. We've got another one, 181. Certainly, this was a departure for Hanna-Barbera. I'm getting there. Wait till your father gets home. This was really a difference. This is really a different... I mean, the styling was obviously just radically different. And if I remember correctly, this was a lot like all in the family. Somewhat. I saw an interesting show about this one. Originally, they had planned to do it with lions in the jungle. And they were running... They showed some of the original drawings, and they had put the voice into it. And first they played it with the lions saying, and then they faded in with the people saying it. And it would have worked, I think, but it probably wouldn't have gotten accepted. But it was the same concept, just different family grouping. I did remember that. I thought that was a fairly good show. Well, they're family grouping shows. Where I lived, we had that in the evenings. Yeah, it was on the evenings. It was an evening show, like a seven o'clock show. Somewhere around there. But it was syndicated, though. I think it was also in the summer, if I'm not mistaken. We got it in the summer, yeah. Somewhere around there. Because, well, you got that one way to your father get some. You got Where's Huddles. Huddles. And it was on in the summer. Well, Huddles was one that they used where I lived. Anyway, I lived down near Cincinnati at the time. And they would pop it in on Sunday afternoons, like after baseball games. Okay, well, that was just going along with football games. Football games. Yeah. And you've got that one. You've got the Roman holidays, which was back in the past, but we're still talking a family situation thing there. Those were the days. Those were the days, right? Which was in, like, the 30s. Victoria area. No, it was Victoria. It was more, okay. Victoria was, like, right around, like, 1930. No, they got an old car here, so. Yeah. And what was the other one? Partridge family, 22. 22. Hey, we were brokenhearted. Throw them into the future. Well, they did a lot of that. They did Gillingen's Island in the future. Yeah, they did. They did Brady Bunch in the future or something. That was when they just started. Oh, what the heck? We don't need to put any original ideas. Let's just rip off some idea. Yeah, when they could have been working on Jetsons, what were they doing? Messing with the Partridge family. Yeah, exactly. Now, we're calling them on that. And also doing stuff like, and we mentioned this before, this is Yogi's gang slash space race slash treasure hunt. Laugh Olympics. Slash great escape slash Laugh Olympics. Laugh Olympics. Pretty much all the same show. The whole concept was, Hanna Barbera said, we have thousands and thousands of characters, which we only use for, like, one season, and we're going to bring them all back because we stole the rights to them, and it'd be free. It'd be a really cheap show. So, and it was a really cheap show, and it was pretty bad. Well, what's sad about that, too, is the kids that were brought up with that, they don't get the original characters like we had. We had the original Top Cat, original McGilligarilla. Right. What did some of the others they bring back on them? The Laugh Olympics. Quick-Drama Grawl. Yeah. Puckleberry Hound. Yeah. That's a Puckleberry Hound. My gosh, they throw him in there. Yeah, they do. I mean, Yogi Bear, both. The expendables. Yeah. They're like the diplomats of the Hanna Barbera thing. We'll just throw them into everything that we can, and it's just not as good. It's no, the characters don't have any personality. Right. They're just really one-dimensional. I mean, what got them away from the fact? We're talking cartoons anyway, but we'll just really make them one-dimensional. But there were so many characters for them to handle. Yeah. They couldn't really spend any time on any one character. It was like, bam, get in. Here's this guy. What was really the sad thing about the, well, go and jump it into the 80s again. Well, the 90s, well, the 80s. The, their big Hanna Barbera 50th anniversary thing. Yeah. They just kind of threw everybody in there just real quick. And then they, they, they hung around with, with Scooby-Doo of all things. Scooby-Doo's really quite popular. Well, he's quite popular, but he just wasn't. He's probably one of the longer running. I just, I don't know. The original, the original few Scooby-Doo's were probably the best ones, but then after that. After that. Well, they started throwing in every celebrity you could imagine. They started throwing in all the, all the celebrity things. Oh, look, we just ran into Vincent Wright. We ran into Sonny and Cher. Sonny and Cher. Sonny and Cher. Ben and Robin. Yeah. Jonathan Winters. It's like, who else are they going to run into? They just have to be there. Jerry Lewis. Honestly. They go around the corner and it's Don Knot. For real. It was everybody they could think of. It was the all star. But no, even though the first ones, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, they weren't drawn beautifully, like the original Tom and Jerry's for MGM. The fact that these characters had such personalities. Oh, yeah. That's what charmed us. And kids today that are watching, like my kids turned on that Laugh Olympics. Don't watch that. They don't get any of the feeling from, they can identify the characters. Only get, they don't know the characters. Yeah, yeah. If that even. That's, that's what they just barely, okay, I guess you could catch phrases into the more popular ones. The other ones are just kind of like generic character we just had to have in that spot. And characters like Snaggle Puss, he just comes in as an exit, stage left. That's it. Oh, he's gone. He's out of there. No more Snaggle Puss. He is such a great guy, too. A truly great actor of our time. Snaggle Puss. Well, when I forget. His acting was his life. Yes, it was. My goodness. Augie Doggie, that's another one. Augie Doggie Doggie Daddy. Augie Doggie Doggie Doggie Daddy. Is just tossed onto these little Hannah Barbera junk shows. It's just really sad. I just wonder, you know, my wonder is, yeah, at the beginning I could understand money was tight. But come on, guys. Come on, put some money into it. I understand the Jetson movie. Got some money put into it. Right. That's a movie. I want to see good artwork on TV. And now, of course, the question is whether if the Jetsons movie does well, they keep talking about this live-action Flintstones movie. I don't want to see it. I mean, I do curiosity, but I don't want to see that because Fred Flintstones is a great actor of our time who can play his life. Who do they? Joe Piscopo, supposedly. When they keep talking about it, they keep saying Joe Piscopo for Fred. I keep hearing John Goodman for Fred. That makes more sense. Now they're seeing John Goodman, since he's established himself and everything. But when they were first talking about it, they were talking about Joe Piscopo for Fred, but where's Joe now? He does a movie. He complains about the movie. Well, he just don't talk about Joe Piscopo anymore. I'd like to see a big Flintstone movie on the scale of Jetson movie. That would be nice. Even if they want to do it and have Pebbles and Bam Bam grown up, I wouldn't mind. As long as they did it well. Get rid of these Flintstone babies. Yeah. Have Fred wake up and realize it was a dream. So they don't have to fit that in the constitution. The great dream escape? I got a dream escape clause in my contract here. But I wish the artwork would come up. That's really what's hurt him. The whole thing's all done on the computer. It's like, well, we've got Fred, like he's like this, and then he's walking, and he's like this. He's got all the stuff in between. And it really doesn't, it really looks fake. That same window. Well, that was standard. To me, that's some of the fun things. The fun thing was the fact that you'd see. Because those characters were done by actors, and they had a personality. They had a personality. We need more personality in our cartoons, Hannah Barbera. Listen to me. I mean, even the laugh tracks on them are a lot, we used to be a lot better. Because it's like, okay, we'll have a laugh where there's a line, where there's a funny line, rather than everything they say. Bola, haha, Bola, haha. No matter what they say, there's a huge laugh after. Sorry guys, it can't all be funny. This isn't part of the funny. But I think that if the Jetson movie does do well, and I do hope it does, it will improve. Because when you got well, I guess we'll have to mention like somebody else, when they just went really bad with the Disney movies, Don Bluth went away from them, and he started doing his own movies, and they got increasingly better. And so then, from there, you just got the Roger Rabbit kind of thing, and that really threw cartoons forward. To end up the show, let's make a plea, please, next time on Vast Wasteland, SPY SHOWS! We'll see you in two weeks. Good night everybody!