The Surprising Reason Why Fred Flintstone Was Forced to Change His Name
There is not a time in my life when I don’t remember The Flintstones being on television. Just hearing the name “Fred Flintstone” conjures up many wonderful memories of the first animated TV program that was part of a network’s primetime lineup. But did you know that if co-creator Bill Hanna had been given his choice, Fred would’ve had a different last name?
Set in the Stone Age but very much reflecting the present day sensibilities of the 1960s, The Flintstones’ two main protagonists were best friends Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble; their wives, Wilma and Betty, often came along for the ride on their crazy adventures.
As journalist Bill Keveney pointed out in USA Today a few years back, The Flintstones was very reminiscent of the live-action TV show The Honeymooners. However, despite some similarities to that popular program, when The Flintstones on ABC on September 30, 1960, most critics gave it poor marks and forecasted a quick demise for the cartoon. Fortunately, television viewers in the U.S. loved it and before you could say, “Yabba Dabba Doo,” Flintstones Mania was in full swing.
The influence of The Flintstones simply can’t be understated, as Mercedes Milligan pointed out in Animation Magazine earlier this year; the cartoon was “the first animated television series to air in primetime paving the way for later primetime cartoon series including The Simpsons, Family Guy and others.”
Hanna-Barbera Productions /Everett Collection
Alright, let’s get to this whole name change thing. You see, when Hanna-Barbera put together the pilot for network executives, Fred’s last name was Flagstone. I know, I know. It just doesn’t sound right, but maybe if he’d been called that for the last 60 years, Flintstone would sound odd to us.
However, the name Flagstone was just not going to work, and that’s because of well-known cartoonist Mort Walker. Walker is best known for the classic comic strip, Beetle Bailey, which always seemed to be the inspiration for Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., to me. But we’re not actually going to talk about Mort’s best-known comic strip — instead, we really need to talk about Mort’s other comic strip, Hi and Lois, which was in fact a spinoff from Beetle Bailey. You see, Lois first showed up in the Beetle Bailey comic strip because she’s Beetle Bailey’s sister.
Hi and Lois’s last name is Flagstone. And when Mort Walker heard that Hanna-Barbera was putting together a cartoon called The Flagstones, he thought that the name was just a little too similar. So, his lawyers called their lawyers, and before you knew it, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were forced to put their heads together and come up with a new name for Fred and Wilma. And that, my friends, is how The Flintstones came to be. Not because it was the best choice, but rather because no one really wanted to get sued.
Bill Hanna talked about the whole experience of creating The Flintstones at great length in the Australian magazine TV Week way back in 1979. In that article, he said, “It broke my heart to have to change it to The Flintstones. The Flagstones just sounds right to me.”
I hear you, Bill, but I really do believe that we’re all better off because of the name change. It may not have been your favorite, but it certainly is mine, and I have it on good authority that Pebbles, now that she’s all grown up, prefers Flintstone as well.
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