The Flintstones: Cartoon Icons of American TV

The Flintstones is an animated, prime-time American TV series that ran from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966, on the ABC network.  Produced by the team of Hanna-Barbera, The Flintstones follows the lives and adventures of two working-class Stone-Age families, the Flintstones and the Rubbles.  Though telecast in black-and-white during its first two seasons, it was filmed in color from the start.  A clever juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns in a Stone Age setting, The Flintstones takes place in the "modern" metropolis of Bedrock.  (In some of the earlier episodes, it was referred to as "Rockville.”)  In this fantastic vision of the ancient past, dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, and other long-extinct animals co-exist with barefoot cavemen who drive cars.  Read more. . .

Hollywood Icon Tony Curtis

From 1949 to 2008, Hollywood icon Tony Curtis made over 100 films including The Vikings (1958, with Kurt Douglas), Some like it Hot (1959, with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe), Spartacus (1960, with Kurt Douglas), The Great Imposter (1961, with Karl Malden), Sex and the Single Girl (1964, with Natalie Wood and Henry Fonda), and The Boston Strangler (1968, with Henry Fonda).  An older generation remember him from his earlier films like The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951), Houdini (1953), The Purple Mask (1955), and, of course, The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).  Throughout his life, Curtis enjoyed painting--a surrealist claiming Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Magritte as influences, and since the early 1980s painted as a second career, his work commanding more than $25,000 a canvas. In one of his final interviews he said, “I still make movies but I'm not that interested in them any more.  But I paint all the time.”  In 2007, his painting “The Red Table” was on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and today his paintings can be seen at the Tony Vanderploeg Gallery in Carmel, California.  Read more . . .