Miles Laboratories and Hanna-Barbera made sure to educate parents about Flintstones vitamins in many of their earliest commercials.
This 1974 spot has Fred (Alan Reed) and Wilma (Jean VanderPyl) in teaching mode. William Schallert (ex-The Patty Duke Show, Dobie Gillis) is the narrator.
As we've frequently noted, the product is now part of Bayer's family of vitamins.
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Trivia Time: Flintstones vitamins were first introduced in 1960 by Miles Laboratories as “Chocks”, the first chewable multivitamin marketed directly for children, and their stop-motion commercials offered a series of fun, though unfamiliar, characters. That all changed in 1968, when Miles swapped the Chocks characters for the cast of The Flintstones.
The initial lineup for the vitamin shapes were Fred, Wilma, Barney, Pebbles, Bamm-Bamm, Dino and IIRC, the Flintstones' iconic car, but no Betty Rubble. (Even the Great Gazoo was featured as a vitamin for a time.) It wasn't until Rosie O' Donnell, who played Betty in the 1994 live action Flintstones film, brought Betty’s plight to the attention of the nation that anything was really done about it. O’Donnell, during a television interview about the film, complained that all the other characters were represented as vitamins, but not Betty. A savvy marketing agency seized the opportunity to involve the consumer in the direction of the brand and launched a nationwide campaign to determine Betty’s fate. The agency set up prehistoric style voting booths in regional shopping malls across the country, as well as a 1-800 number, to allow consumers to decide whether Betty should be let in the club. As a result of this push, Betty finally became a vitamin character in December 1995, replacing the Flintstones’ car.
This situation even inspired an Atlanta rock band to give themselves one of the most creatively on-the-nose names of all time, Betty's Not a Vitamin.
And the Flintstones vitamins are still with us, 53 years later. Chocks was probably going to cut due to low sales until Miles cut the deal with H-B.
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