The Flintstone Comedy Hour

The Flintstone Comedy Hour is a one-hour Saturday morning cartoon Anthology series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. The program originally aired on CBS as an hour-long show from September 9, 1972 to September 1, 1973 on CBS. The show's first half-hour featured two shorts with Fred & Barney, gags and horoscopes, one short with the cast of Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm and two songs performed by the new Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm band called "The Bedrock Rockers" followed by four new episodes and reruns of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show in the second half-hour. The show also featured bad-luck Schleprock, Moonrock, Penny, Wiggy and the Bronto Bunch (Bronto, Noodles, Stub and Zonk) from The Pebbles and Bamm Bamm Show.

Mickey Stevens replaced Sally Struthers as the voice of Pebbles in four new episodes of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show and in brief in-between segments, Struthers at the time being fully committed to her role as Gloria Stivic on All in the Family. This was the final spin-off to feature Alan Reed as the voice of Fred Flintstone before Reed's death in 1977. For the 1973-74 season, CBS dropped The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show episodes and repackaged the first half-hour segments of The Flintstone Comedy Hour in reruns under the new title The Flintstone Comedy Show from September 8, 1973 to January 26, 1974; these segments were later featured on the syndicated weekday series Fred Flintstone and Friends in 1977. The program continued to air in rebroadcasts under The Flintstone Comedy Show title on USA Cartoon Express, Cartoon Network and Boomerang.

Like many animated series created by Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s, the show contained an laugh track created by the studio.

Episodes
The show's first half-hour episodes usually featured one or two shorts with Fred & Barney, one short with the cast of Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm and the characters were also featured in Laugh-In-style gags and horoscopes shown in-between segments.

The Bedrock Rockers
The Bedrock Rockers were Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble and their friends Moonrock, Penny and Wiggy. They performed two songs per episode which included:


 * "And I Love You"
 * "Sunshine Man"
 * "Summertime Girl"
 * "Yabba Dabba Doozie"
 * "Being with You"
 * "Singing Song"
 * "What's Your Sign?"
 * "Hop, Skip and a Jump"
 * "Oh, How I Love You"
 * "Sunny Sun Day"
 * "Keep in Time"
 * "Flying So High"
 * "It Should Always Be A Saturday"
 * "Shadow, Shadow"
 * "Rock N Roll Circus"

The music was written by various Screen Gems staffers, which at the time included David Gates (later of "Bread") penning the popular "Summertime Girl" and Tony Dancy (of Tony's Tygers) writing with Craig Fairchild & Jackie Mills on "Being With You". Mills would also write "Sunshine Man" with Leonard Pettit, and "Yabba Dabba Doozie" with Tom Jenkins. The actual group on the recordings were known as the Ron Hicklin Singers, featuring Tom Bahler on lead (he would later go on to pen the classic Michael Jackson song "She's Out of My Life"), John Bahler, Jackie Ward, and Stan Farber. This lineup would record on hundreds of commercials, TV themes, and the Partridge Family LPs. Bahler's lead vocals are also prominent with the group "Love Generation" who had a few LPs in the late '60s as well.

Voices

 * Alan Reed - Fred Flintstone
 * Mel Blanc - Barney Rubble, Dino, Zonk, Stub
 * Carl Esser - Fabian
 * Gay Hartwig - Betty Rubble, Wiggy, Cindy
 * Don Messick - Schleprock
 * Mitzi McCall - Penny
 * Jay North - Bamm-Bamm Rubble
 * John Stephenson - Mr. Slate, Noodles
 * Mickey Stevens - Pebbles Flintstone
 * Jean Vander Pyl - Wilma Flintstone
 * Lennie Weinrib - Moonrock, Bronto

Home Media releases
The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm episodes ("Squawkie Talkies", "The Suitor Computer", "Beauty and the Beast", "Bedlam in Bedrock") were released as bonus episodes on the 2-disc DVD set The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show: The Complete Series by Warner Home Video on March 18, 2008. Note that these are simply the shows, they do not feature the musical selections of the Bedrock Rockers, which have not been released in any commercial form. It is unknown when Warner Archive will plan a release of the entire complete series in its original form.