The “Modern Stone-Age Family,” a Marvel superhero and a character out of the newspaper comics all walk into Saturday morning. There’s no punchline here; this was an offbeat combination produced by Hanna-Barbera for Saturday morning television – Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo.

In their book Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up With Cartoon Culture, authors Timothy and Kevin Burke noted that the show came along at an interesting time in Saturday morning TV history. They wrote, “According to [then CEO and President of NBC, Fred] Silverman, at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties, the networks were pretty tired of Saturday morning. Hit shows were harder and harder to come by.”

“NBC’s situation led to some hasty repackaging to grab ratings,” explains Greg Ehrbar, author of Hanna-Barbera: The Recorded History and host of The Funtastic World of Hanna and Barbera podcast. “Fred Silverman became notorious for high-concept series and convoluted program packaging as he hustled to keep NBC above water.

“The New Fred and Barney Show premiered in early 1979. It stayed on the schedule for the new fall season in September as Fred and Barney Meet the Thing, adding cartoons starring that character. Also in September, NBC introduced H-B’s The New Shmoo, originally a stand-alone series. By December, the network, scrambling to compete with ABC and CBS, put all three segments together as Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo. The Thing cartoon was still in the mix, but not in the title.”

“Out of the over one hundred cartoons Hanna-Barbera Productions created, Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo might be the weirdest, and not just because the title characters never actually meet,” said Noah Bell, writer, animation historian, and creator of the Hanna-Barbera blog, The Exposure Sheet, who added, “Beyond the odd pairing of characters, the show also took some equally odd liberties in their depictions.”

A number of Hanna-Barbera’s talented artists and legends of the industry worked on Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo, including Iwao Takamoto, Hugh Fraser, Ed Barge, Gil DiCicco, Robert Alvarez, and Iraj Paran, just to name a few.

The Flintstones episodes on the show were from The New Fred & Barney Show, a Saturday morning re-boot of Hanna-Barbera’s hit prime-time animated series. On this iteration, Fred & Barney would get entangled in very’ 70s-fueled adventures, which included disguising themselves as a Kiss-like rock group and buying CB radios for their cars.

The Thing, of course, was the giant rock-like superhero member of Marvel comics The Fantastic Four, who had made his debut in 1961. His human alter-ego in the comics was astronaut Ben Grimm.

In his book Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, author Les Daniels writes, “In the original synopsis that writer-editor Stan Lee gave artist Jack Kirby, Lee proposed making The Thing into ‘the heavy.’ Deformed, underprivileged, and argumentative, Ben actually became the most lovable group member: honest, direct, and free of pretension.”

In Hanna-Barbera’s incarnation, he was teenager Benjy Grimm, who could transform into the massive Thing when he would touch together the pieces of a magic ring and say, “Thing Ring, do your thing!”

The Shmoo was created by artist Al Capp in 1948 for his comic strip Li’l Abner. The strip centered on the title character and other characters in a fictional rural town called Dogpatch.

In Maurice Horn’s book, 100 Years of Newspaper Comics, contributor John A. Lent wrote that Li’l Abner brought with it “Some of the harshest commentary on American society and the human condition…”

One of the supporting players in the comic strip was a cute, little white, blob-like character with no arms, just feet and whiskers near its sweet face.

The Shmoo was very popular when it debuted. As Lent writes, “The Shmoos kept the people of the United States engrossed for a couple of months with their anti-capital, anti-labor and economy-of-plenty implications…”

None of these “implications” characterized The Shmoo in Hanna-Barbera’s version. “The Li’l Abner comic strip depicted the Shmoo as a being that lived to please others, showing how humanity will take advantage of anything it can,” said Noah. “Hanna-Barbera reinvented the creature as a shapeshifting member of a Scooby-Doo-inspired mystery-solving gang, not unlike many of their other shows throughout the seventies.”

In Hanna-Barbera’s Shmoo, the creature teamed up with a group of young people, Mickey, Nita, and Billy Joe, who run Mighty Mysteries Comics. Shmoo here was like a pet (voiced with cute sounds by Frank Welker) who could morph and help everyone out of spooky situations.

“Despite its relative obscurity, Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo was notable for several reasons,” said Noah. “The New Fred and Barney Show was the first series where Fred Flintstone was voiced by Henry Corden. Corden would go on to be the primary voice actor for the character until 2005.”

“Fred, Barney, The Thing, and the Shmoo characters never appeared together in this series (though Fred and Barney would be teamed with the Shmoo the following season – as policemen – in The Flintstone Comedy Show),” adds Greg. “However, in the Hanna-Barbera tradition harkening back to 1958 with The Huckleberry Hound Show, the characters did frolic during short interstitial segments between cartoon episodes and commercial breaks.

“There have been more than a few adults who recall Fred, Barney, and The Thing dressed as song-and-dance men, doing a peppy little soft-shoe routine, and aren’t sure if it really aired or they dreamed it. It was no dream—it was NBC in the era of Supertrain.”