John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy and the first credited web animated cartoon among other things, notes with sadness the passing of Ed Benedict at the age of 94. Ed, as John explains on his blog All Kinds of Stuff, worked in animation for many years (including working with one of my great Animation Gods, Tex Avery, a revered figure to we Seventh Day Cartoonists) but is probably best known for his striking designs for the backgrounds and characters which defined the look for Hanna Barbera cartoons, most notably the original Flintstones. As John points out we are used to this style now, but at the time it first aired it was something very different and visually striking.
And as many have noted it can be seen as the first real animated sitcom (and one which depicted a blue-collar family at that, something else different); if the Flintstones hadn’t existed would we have the Simpsons today? And if we had no Simpsons would we have the rest of the televised animation we love today? Somewhere there is a parallel world where that is the case and it is a poorer reality than ours. John was a friend of Ed in his latter years and has a lovely tribute to him on his blog. My colleague Kenny points out that in a weird bit of coincidental timing we only recently added on this fabulous-looking Flintstones at the Drive In to our webstore; when you are reading John’s tribute have a look at this image which he posted (above) and then compare it to the forthcoming Drive In set (below). An animation design classic is still a classic in any decade. Mmmm… Brontoburger….
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December 19th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
[...] Despite the animation not being as detailed and fluid as the MGM work Hanna-Barbera was successful almost from the beginning in the expanding new world of TV animation with the Huckleberry Hound Show and then a little show you may recall, about a certain ‘modern stone-age family’, the Flintstones. Proving that it was more than just the quality of the animation process which mattered, it was about generating and developing characters people would engage with and care about. Hanna and Barbera not only introduced the world to a new cartoon series but broke moulds while they did so: today the Flintstones is generally held to be the first proper prime-time cartoon on TV. The show also, unusually for the time, portrayed a blue-collar, working class family and did so in a longer format, eschewing the old 3 or 4 minute cartoon short format for a longer form which fitted perfectly into a TV scheduling slot, while artist Ed Benedict (who died only a few months ago) created some now-iconic designs for the studio (most especially for the Flintstones) which are held up today as classics. [...]
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