The Flintstones, prime time’s first animated sitcom, premiered on ABC 66 years ago today, on Sept. 30, 1960. Less than four months later, it almost lost Barney Rubble.
Mel Blanc, the voice of Barney and Bugs Bunny, was in a head-on crash on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard known as “Dead Man’s Curve” on Jan. 24, 1961.
The morning after, doctors “did not give him a chance,” a hospital spokesman said. He’d broken most of his ribs, six vertebrae, both sides of his pelvis and his skull in three places.
He didn’t come to for 21 days.
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So the Show Came to Him
You’d figure the show just recast Barney. For five episodes, it did, with Daws Butler filling in.
Then it moved into Blanc’s house. He was home in Pacific Palisades in a full body cast, and his family built a recording studio so he could keep working.
“Tangles of wires were scattered all over the floor, and chairs and microphones were arranged around my hospital bed,” Blanc wrote in his memoir, That’s Not All Folks!
Jean Vander Pyl (Wilma) and Bea Benaderet (Betty) sat on one side of him. Vander Pyl commuted from San Diego, “two and a half hours away.” Alan Reed (Fred) sat on the other, “gulping down spoonfuls of honey and lemon” to get ready for “Yabba dabba doo!”
The catchphrase was Reed’s own. In one of the show’s first recorded episodes, Fred was supposed to yell “Yahoo!” and Reed asked to change it.
‘We’re in for a Long Evening’
Joseph Barbera, who created the show with William Hanna, produced from a makeshift control room and talked to the cast through a speaker on the wall.
“Hope you’re comfortable, Mel. We’re in for a long evening,” he said at the first session.
“He wasn’t kidding,” Blanc wrote. Every couple of hours Barbera asked if he was too tired to keep going, and Blanc insisted on finishing.
He spent months flat on his back. By September his doctors let him sit up a few inches, on a pulley, and he joked that he could finally look at the cast’s faces instead of the ceiling.
“I was glad that the shows could keep going and nobody was put out of work,” he said that November.
He also got 15,000 cards and letters, many of them addressed to “Bugs Bunny, Hollywood, U.S.A.”
Some kids even sent carrots.
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