The Flintstone Comedy Hour

Summary

The show's first half-hour featured two shorts with Fred & Barney, one short with the cast of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, comedy gags and two songs performed by the new Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm band called "The Bedrock Rockers"; the second half-hour featured four new episodes and reruns of The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show. The show also featured Moonrock, Penny, Wiggy, bad-luck Schleprock 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 the sitcom 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 television season, CBS dropped The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show episodes and repackaged the first half-hour segments of The Flintstone Comedy Hour for a second season of reruns under the new title The Flintstone Comedy Show from September 8, 1973 to January 26, 1974. The "Fred & Barney" shorts and "The Bedrock Rockers" segments were later featured on the syndicated weekday series Fred Flintstone and Friends in 1977–78. 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 a laugh track created by the studio.

The Bedrock Rockers

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

1. "And I Love You"
2. "Sunshine Man"
3. "Summertime Girl"
4. "Yabba Dabba Doozie"
5. "Being With You"
6. "Singing Song"
7. "What's Your Sign?"
8. "Hop, Skip and a Jump"
9. "Oh, How I Love You"
10. "Sunny Sun Day"
11. "Keep in Time"
12. "Flying So High"
13. "It Should Always Be Saturday"
14. "Shadow, Shadow"
15. "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 recordings. Bahler's lead vocals are also prominent with the group "The Love Generation" who had a few LPs in the late 1960s as well.

Voices

Episodes

With the exception of certain episodes, each episode featured two Fred & Barney segments with one Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm segment between them.

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.