The summer of 1960 was a challenging one for Joe Barbera. A mogul of animation—together with his partner, Bill Hanna, he had created immensely popular characters like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and Quick Draw McGraw—he was set to embark on a more ambitious project than he’d ever tried before, a half-hour, prime-time animated show, set to air that fall.
The concept had a disastrous history—neither CBS’s Cartoon Theater, which featured animated shorts previously shown in movie theaters, nor The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show, which was based on an Academy Award-winning short, survived more than a few months. But Barbera believed he had an idea that couldn’t fail: an animated take on Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners, then one of TV’s biggest hits, set in the Stone Age. But to pull it off, he knew he needed someone who could channel the same affable, empathic energy as Gleason, someone who could sound gregarious and warm and all-American. Two months before the show was to debut, Barbera had yet to find his star.