The Flintstones is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions , which takes place in a romanticized Stone Age setting and follows the titular family, the Flintstones, and their next-door neighbors, the Rubbles.
It was originally broadcast on ABC from September 30, , to April 1, , and was the first animated series with a prime-time slot on television.
The show follows the lives of Fred and Wilma Flintstone and their pet dinosaur, Dino, and they later on have a baby girl named Pebbles. Barney and Betty Rubble are their neighbors and best friends, and later on adopt a super-strong baby boy named Bamm-Bamm and acquire a pet hopparoo kangaroo called Hoppy. Producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera , who had earned seven Academy Awards for Tom and Jerry , and their staff faced a challenge in developing a thirty-minute animated program with one storyline that fit the parameters of family-based domestic situation comedies of the era.
After considering several settings and selecting the Stone Age, one of several inspirations was The Honeymooners , which was itself influenced by The Bickersons and Laurel and Hardy Hanna considered it one of the finest comedies on television. The enduring popularity of The Flintstones mainly comes from its juxtaposition of modern, everyday concerns with the Stone Age setting. The Flintstones was the most financially successful and longest-running network animated television series for three decades, until The Simpsons surpassed it in The show is set in a comical version of the Stone Age , with features and technologies that resemble midth-century suburbia in the United States.
The plots deliberately resemble the sitcoms of the era, with the caveman Flintstone and Rubble families getting into minor conflicts characteristic of modern life. Animation historian Christopher P. Lehman considers that the series partly draws its humor from anachronism , mainly the placing of a "modern" 20th-century society in prehistory which takes inspiration from the suburban sprawl developed in the first two decades of the postwar period.
