DISCLAIMER: Sorry for this not quite being a comics edit, but hopefully you’ll allow me.

I love the classic Flintstones (1960). It arguably had the single-biggest collection of talent that Hanna-Barbera ever used on a series… at least for the first couple years. (shades of The Simpsons in that respect) The single-biggest reason for that is because it was, unbelievably a PrimeTime show, which had never happened before when it came to cartoons. (“The Wonderful World of Disney” was a separate case, I’d argue)

Anyway, there were lots of little one-time or continuity errors that kind of riddled the show, and I always got a kick out of them. Fred’s boss Mr. Slate undergoing a complete design change at one point was one of them, but I’d say that Giuseppe “Joe” Rockhead blew Mr. Slate out of the water. Why? Because almost every freakin’ time he showed up, he looked distinctly different from the guy before. 😂

I assembled this here collection a couple years ago, and someone just reminded me of it yesterday. I wonder, though… has there ever been any kind of counterpart across comic strips, comics or animation? It seems pretty hard to top, lol.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialOPMEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      After studying the show for some time, I think it really just came down to Joe being a ‘type’ more than a specific person. Hand-drawn episodes take a lot of man-hours to make, and at ~30 eps/season to produce in about six months time, they had to use small teams to work on groups of them. You can see the effects of this with even the main characters, who were drawn oddly distinctly from episode to episode. Why? Because it was a different team who worked on the two.

      HB was a studio that prided itself on being able to produce quality animation at low cost, and corners were routinely cut everywhere. With Dino changing color / size, the main characters being drawn differently, Mr. Slate looking completely different here and there, the cars always changing, and really the townspeople and town being so inconsistent, it’s pretty clear to me that they were going for ‘templates’ rather than specific types. So each team could draw how they wanted to as long as the quality was up to spec and all the boxes got checked.

      Joe Rockhead was just a peripheral character meant to portray a certain type, which is why I think it was never a priority to keep his exact look consistent. Coordinating something like that precisely across ~five different animation teams just would not have been a priority IMO.