{"id":86339,"date":"2024-07-26T00:01:56","date_gmt":"2024-07-26T07:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=86339"},"modified":"2024-08-02T09:41:36","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T16:41:36","slug":"bizarre-bedrock-buddies-looking-back-at-fred-and-barney-meet-the-shmoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/bizarre-bedrock-buddies-looking-back-at-fred-and-barney-meet-the-shmoo\/","title":{"rendered":"Bizarre Bedrock Buddies: Looking Back at \u201cFred and Barney Meet the Shmoo\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"\n

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The \u201cModern Stone-Age Family,\u201d a Marvel superhero and a character out of the newspaper comics all walk into Saturday morning. There\u2019s no punchline here; this was an offbeat combination produced by Hanna-Barbera for Saturday morning television – Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In their book Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up With Cartoon Culture<\/em>, authors Timothy and Kevin Burke noted that the show came along at an interesting time in Saturday morning TV history. They wrote, \u201cAccording to [then CEO and President of NBC, Fred] Silverman, at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties, the networks were pretty tired of Saturday morning. Hit shows were harder and harder to come by.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cNBC\u2019s situation led to some hasty repackaging to grab ratings,\u201d explains Greg Ehrbar, author of Hanna-Barbera: The Recorded History<\/em> and host of The Funtastic World of Hanna and Barbera<\/em> podcast. \u201cFred Silverman became notorious for high-concept series and convoluted program packaging as he hustled to keep NBC above water.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe New Fred and Barney Show<\/em> premiered in early 1979. It stayed on the schedule for the new fall season in September as Fred and Barney Meet the Thing<\/em>, adding cartoons starring that character. Also in September, NBC introduced H-B\u2019s The New Shmoo<\/em>, originally a stand-alone series. By December, the network, scrambling to compete with ABC and CBS, put all three segments together as Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo<\/em>. The Thing cartoon was still in the mix, but not in the title.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOut of the over one hundred cartoons Hanna-Barbera Productions created, Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo<\/em> might be the weirdest, and not just because the title characters never actually meet,\u201d said Noah Bell, writer, animation historian, and creator of the Hanna-Barbera blog, The Exposure Sheet<\/em>, who added, \u201cBeyond the odd pairing of characters, the show also took some equally odd liberties in their depictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

A number of Hanna-Barbera\u2019s talented artists and legends of the industry worked on Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo<\/em>, including Iwao Takamoto, Hugh Fraser, Ed Barge, Gil DiCicco, Robert Alvarez, and Iraj Paran, just to name a few.<\/p>\n

The Flintstones<\/em> episodes on the show were from The New Fred & Barney Show<\/em>, a Saturday morning re-boot of Hanna-Barbera\u2019s hit prime-time animated series. On this iteration, Fred & Barney would get entangled in very’ 70s-fueled adventures, which included disguising themselves as a Kiss-like rock group and buying CB radios for their cars.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Thing, of course, was the giant rock-like superhero member of Marvel comics The Fantastic Four<\/em>, who had made his debut in 1961. His human alter-ego in the comics was astronaut Ben Grimm.<\/p>\n

In his book Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World\u2019s Greatest Comics<\/em>, author Les Daniels writes, \u201cIn the original synopsis that writer-editor Stan Lee gave artist Jack Kirby, Lee proposed making The Thing into \u2018the heavy.\u2019 Deformed, underprivileged, and argumentative, Ben actually became the most lovable group member: honest, direct, and free of pretension.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Hanna-Barbera\u2019s incarnation, he was teenager Benjy Grimm, who could transform into the massive Thing when he would touch together the pieces of a magic ring and say, \u201cThing Ring, do your thing!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Shmoo was created by artist Al Capp in 1948 for his comic strip Li\u2019l Abner<\/em>. The strip centered on the title character and other characters in a fictional rural town called Dogpatch. <\/p>\n

In Maurice Horn\u2019s book, 100 Years of Newspaper Comics<\/em>, contributor John A. Lent wrote that Li\u2019l Abner brought with it \u201cSome of the harshest commentary on American society and the human condition\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the supporting players in the comic strip was a cute, little white, blob-like character with no arms, just feet and whiskers near its sweet face. <\/p>\n

The Shmoo was very popular when it debuted. As Lent writes, \u201cThe Shmoos kept the people of the United States engrossed for a couple of months with their anti-capital, anti-labor and economy-of-plenty implications\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\"\"\n

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None of these \u201cimplications\u201d characterized The Shmoo in Hanna-Barbera\u2019s version. \u201cThe Li\u2019l Abner comic strip depicted the Shmoo as a being that lived to please others, showing how humanity will take advantage of anything it can,\u201d said Noah. \u201cHanna-Barbera reinvented the creature as a shapeshifting member of a Scooby-Doo-inspired mystery-solving gang, not unlike many of their other shows throughout the seventies.\u201d <\/p>\n

In Hanna-Barbera\u2019s Shmoo, the creature teamed up with a group of young people, Mickey, Nita, and Billy Joe, who run Mighty Mysteries Comics. Shmoo here was like a pet (voiced with cute sounds by Frank Welker) who could morph and help everyone out of spooky situations.<\/p>\n