Fred Flintstone is the main character of the animated sitcom The Flintstones, which aired during prime-time on ABC during the original series' run from 1960 to 1966. Fred is the husband of Wilma Flintstone and father of Pebbles Flintstone and together the family live in their homely cave in the town of Bedrock. His best friend is his next door neighbor, Barney, who has a wife named Betty.
Fred lives in the fictional prehistoric town of Bedrock, a world where dinosaurs coexist with modernized cavepeople and the cavepeople enjoy "primitive" versions of modern conveniences such as telephones, automobiles, and washing machines. Fred's trademark catchphrase yell is "yabba dabba doo!", a phrase that was originally his club's cheer, and later adopted as part of the theme song from the third season on and used in the 1994 live-action Flintstones film.
Since the original series' run, Fred has appeared in various other cartoon spinoffs, live action adaptations, music videos, video games, and commercials.
Biography
While the mid-1980s spin-off series The Flintstone Kids depicts Fred as a child, the series may be apocryphal due to its presenting Wilma as a childhood friend of Fred and Barney; the original series asserts that they first met as young adults. Still, the series' depiction of Fred as the only child of Ed (a handyman) and Edna (homemaker) Flintstone might be canon. (Pops Flintstone was in a comic strip.)
As young adults, Fred and Barney worked as bellhops at a resort. There, they met and fell in love with Wilma and Betty, who were working there as cigarette girls. Fred met Wilma's mother, Pearl Slaghoople, and the two took an instant dislike to each other. An unspecified amount of time later, Fred married Wilma.
Fred is a typical blue-collar worker, who works as a "bronto crane operator" at Slate Rock and Gravel Company (also known as Rockhead and Quarry Cave Construction Company in earlier episodes). Fred's job title in the second-season episode "Divided We Sail" is "geological engineer".
During the original series' third season, Wilma gives birth to the couple's daughter, Pebbles. Years later, when Pebbles is a teenager, Fred and Barney join the Bedrock police force for a time as part-time police officers. Eventually, Fred becomes a grandfather to the adult Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm's twins, Chip and Roxy. Fred's family grew again in A Flintstone Family Christmas, when he and Wilma adopted an orphaned caveboy named Stony, and despite a rough start, Fred and his new son bonded well.
Relatives
The Flintstone family's paternal side originally came from the prehistoric state of Arkanstone in Camp Mastodon, where they had been engaged in a feud similar to the Hatfield–McCoy feud. The feud was originally started by an ancestor of Fred's making a joke about a Hatrock family portrait ("I don't know what the artist got for doing that painting, but he should've gotten life!"). In the fourth-season episode "Bedrock Hillbillies", the feud is ended when Fred helps rescue Pebbles and a Hatrock baby, only to start up again when Fred makes the same joke as his ancestor. The Hatrocks later appear in the follow-up fifth-season episode "The Hatrocks and the Gruesomes", where they visit Bedrock. The last of the Camp Mastodon Arkanstone Flintstones was Fred's great-great-granduncle Zeke Flintstone who lived to 102.
Other relatives of Fred include: Rocco Rockbottom "Rocky/Stony" Flintstone, Fred's grandfather, who was a Camp Mastodon veteran of Air Force Stone World War One; Uncle Giggles Flintstone, a rich, eccentric practical joker whose jokes drive Fred into a mad rage; James Hardrock, Edna's father; Uncle Tex Hardrock, Fred's rich Texan uncle; Tumbleweed and Mary Lou Jim, Fred's rich Texan cousins.