Somehow “Flagstones! Meet the Flagstones! They’re the modern Stone Age family!” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
But in his original incarnation, Fred Flintstone went by the name Flagstone, according to Remind Magazine. William Hanna and Joe Barbera, riding high off the success of The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Quick Draw McGraw Show, wanted to break into primetime, and The Flagstones was the pitch that got them their first shot at adult animation.
The premise was simple — rip off The Honeymooners, then spoof modern-day troubles with prehistoric gags. The original concept, featuring Fred, Wilma and their son, Fred Jr., was pitched over eight long weeks to networks and advertisers. “Here we were with a brand new thing that had never been done before, an animated prime-time television show,” Barbera remembered in an interview with Leonard Maltin. “Pitch, pitch, pitch, sometimes five a day.”
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ABC eventually bit on The Flagstones, but the title didn’t last for long. The problem was the long-running comic strip Hi and Lois, a daily feature about a family with the last name of Flagston. Not exactly Flagstone, but close enough for Hi and Lois cartoonist Mort Walker to get itchy.
That meant Walker lawyers getting in touch with Hanna/Barbera lawyers. “It broke my heart to have to change it to The Flintstones,” Hanna told TV Week in 1978. “The Flagstones just sounds right to me.”
So Fred got a new last name — Fred… Gladstone? According to the BBC, The Flintstones also spent a brief period of its development as The Gladstones, likely based on the Los Angeles telephone exchange GLAdstone. That one didn’t last long either.
As for The Flagstones? Cartoon Network was ecstatic when it found a couple of minutes of the original pilot pitch in 1994. “It was this mythological sort of thing —animators had heard of it, but nobody had actually seen it,” according to Mike Lazzo, Cartoon Network’s head of programming. “So we sent out teams of researchers to look for it all over. It was like the search for the Holy Grail.”
That sample is easy to find now on YouTube, with some notable differences from The Flintstones we know today.
Fred’s voice change is the most disconcerting. That’s Daws Butler as Fred, better known as the voice of Hanna-Barbera characters like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey. Butler was replaced by Alan Reed for the eventual show, though Butler did voice Barney for a few episodes in the second season.
Thanks to those lawyer complaints, Hanna and Barbera eventually landed on Flintstone, an objectively better name since it includes not one but two rock puns. Yabba dabba duh.