Jimmy Dean Meets the Stone Age

TV cartoons characters don’t make too many guest appearances on other television shows. It isn’t like you can call up Hokey Wolf and say “Can you be a guest on Jimmy Kimmel tomorrow night?” After all, someone has to draw Hokey (and, somehow, I don’t think the Kimmel audience even knows who Hokey Wolf is anyway).

But it did happen on a rare occasion. Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear appeared on the 1961 Emmy telecast. And Fred Flintstone showed up on the season opener of Jimmy Dean’s variety show in 1963.

That friend of lovers of old animation, Mark Kausler, came across someone selling a print of the show and sent along these three screen grabs.



Mark points out the animation is by Ken Muse.

Here’s an animation drawing from the cartoon. It looks pretty snazzy.



Variety reviewed the show (broadcast September 19, 1963). It wasn’t impressed with what it saw.

Another bit of teaming the cartoon character of Fred Flintstone with Dean was sloppily handled with two separate introes and ran off as a familiar piece of trick photography.

A trick scene in which Dean dueted with the cartoon character Fred Flintstone was only fair, with the sound not perfectly pitched.

But technical achievement or no, who needs Freddy Flintstone, the cartoon neanderthal, paired with Dean in a song and dance of “Yabba-Dabba-Do”? I say pooh.

The Flintsones [sic] was also a big hit ABC show that year, so John [Aylesworth, a writer] came up with the idea of featuring Fred Flintstone as the guest on our first show. We wrote a sketch and a duet for Jimmy and Fred. The song was “Yabba Dabba Doo,” the catchphrase on The Flintstones. We sent the sketch and the music to Hollywood so they could get to work on the animation, which took care of at least six or seven minutes.