Unfortunately, Fred is well behind on the installment payments for his television, and Barney is immediately assigned to repossess the set.
Realizing that the kind-hearted Barney is having trouble coming to grips with the requirements of his new job (though not knowing that these requirements include reclaiming his own television), Fred urges Barney to pursue his job without hesitation. “In business you’ve got to be ruthless,” says Fred, who is always willing to give expert advice even about things of which he knows little or nothing. “Your only friend is a buck and the more bucks you got, the more friends you got. . . . You do whatever your job calls for. That’s your duty.” Armed with this advice, Barney grudgingly takes the set, but then uses his own money to make the overdue payments and get the set back for his friend.
This episode is typical of the way in which this seemingly lighthearted series, much like The Honeymooners
before it, often addressed the very
contemporary concerns of its original audience. Though Fred’s espousal of a ruthless and coldhearted business ethic is clearly not to be taken as a serious recommendation on the part of the makers of the series, his very description of business in those terms does suggest a quite serious anxiety over the ethics of a corporate capitalism that, after a decade of unprecedented growth in the 1950s, was playing a bigger and bigger role in the everyday lives of ordinary Americans. Ultimately, of course, the episode chooses Barney’s genuine human feelings for Fred over the friendship with a buck advocated by Fred himself, which could be taken as an expression of a nostalgic preference for old-fashioned precapitalist values over those of modern American corporatism, though it could also be read simply as a reassurance that friendship and other such traditional forms of human relation can be preserved even amid the explosive rise of American consumer capitalism as the dominant economic force on the planet.
Meanwhile, Fred’s all-out capitalist boosterism is typical of his own unquestioning acceptance of the values of an economic system whose
benefits, as a working-class American, he did not necessarily share on an equal footing with higher-ups like his boss, Mr. Slate. Indeed, Fred seems to have accepted without question the American ethos of upward mobility and remains (despite one disaster after another) convinced that he will eventually rise in economic status if only he can come up with the proper scheme.
Sometimes these schemes involve suddenly striking it rich; sometimes they simply involve getting a better job or starting a business. And sometimes they involve both, as in “At the Races” (November 18, 1960), in which Fred and Barney hope to make enough money betting on dinosaur races to be
able to start their own business, a pool hall. Similarly, in “Cinderellastone”
Animation Comes to Prime Time: The Case of The Flintstones 15
(October 22, 1964), Fred’s Cinderella dreams become literalized when his fairy godmother momentarily transforms him into a wealthy sophisticate—
who convinces Mr. Slate to finally make Fred a foreman, giving him the increase in status and pay that he has sought for so long.
In “The Drive-In” (December 23, 1960), Fred and Barney again hope to
start their own business (this time a drive-in restaurant), especially after Fred insists that owning their own business is the only way they will ever be able to be truly happy. The plan, however, leads to near disaster when Wilma grows jealous and suspicious in reaction to Fred’s odd and secretive behavior.
Indeed, Fred’s efforts to start his own business invariably go awry, forcing him continually to return to his old job, usually after Wilma begs Mr. Slate to rehire him. But Fred never gives up, retaining his entrepreneurial spirit to the very end. In the final-season episode “Circus Business” (October 15, 1965), he even succeeds in buying his own carnival—though the acquisition of the failing business is essentially an accident. Fred ultimately manages to unload the carnival back on its original owner, but he still fails to learn his lesson. On the way home from the carnival, he nearly buys an oil well, though Wilma and the Rubbles talk him out of it. Immediately after they leave, of course, the well comes in, and oil gushes into the sky. Fred’s final business venture occurs in “The Gravelberry Pie King” (November 12, 1965), when he puts Wilma’s favorite pie recipe into production to supply a local chain of supermarkets.
Unfortunately, Fred agrees to sell the pies at a price that is lower than the cost of production, so they lose money on each pie. Wilma again saves the day, this time by selling the recipe itself to the owner of the supermarkets, thus recouping their losses and even turning a modest profit.
In “A Haunted House Is Not a Home” (October 29, 1964), Fred again