Flintstones: Hanna Barbera making the Flintstones- LIFE magazine pics from 1960

Hard to say, because in syndication, for the first two seasons at least IIRC, pretty much the same end credits are shown for each episode, a source of frustration for me as a fan and I'm sure those who worked on those episodes. They couldn't show the original closings with the sponsor's logo visible.

 

I could be related to the segmented nature of the animation, with the lines providing a guide for replacing the mouths on the characters. I do know that on Hanna-Barbera television cartoons they put ties and other neck adornments on characters to hide the separation between the head and the body of the characters. When they animated a character they would only animate the parts of the bodies that moved with the rest of the body remaining static.

 

Although they became known for "How cheap can we do this?", some of the very early Hanna/Barbera stuff was actually well done.

 

This was a still taken from the original color print.

 

Any footage of the voice actors recording in the studio?

 

The following video shows both Bea Benaderet and Mel Blanc in live action (was surprised to see some of the characters that Benaderet voiced and that she and Blanc worked together before The Flintstones):

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This appears to be a painted animation cell, not a frame from a film print.

dan c

 

I think it is a difference between theatrical animation and animation for television. The theatrical cartoons that Hanna-Barbera (HB) did for MGM (like Tom & Jerry) looked very good and I think was on par with Disney and Warner Brothers of the time. When they moved to television, the budget caused them to move to limited animation, and to focus more on verbal humor rather than visual humor (I remember reading that their TV cartoons were described as radio with pictures).

With The Flintstones, I think it was a blend of visual and verbal humor. While there was a great deal of verbal humor, they also took advantage of animation to do stories that could not have done in live action...or at least not without a massive budget. An example of this is the episode where they literally steal every antenna in Bedrock to prevent their wives from seeing them on a "Candid Camera" type show, doing this entire episode in live action would likely exceed the entire year's budget for the series.

 

Every time dad sat down for dinner, he used to say to us kids "yabba dabba doo!!"

Coolest job in the world!