A baritone voice draws out the syllables in the classic cry, “Wilma!” Ah, those Saturday morning cartoons. I know many of us spent Saturday mornings parked in front of our TVs enjoying cartoons and a bowl of cereal. The Flintstones cartoons, loosely based on the Honeymooners, premiered in 1960, and Jean Vander Pyl was the voice of Fred Flinstone’s wife, Wilma. She was also the voice of Pebbles Flintstone. But this iconic role was only one of many, and her career didn’t start there.
A Journey in Voiceover
Jean was born in 1919 in Philadelphia John Howard and Kathleen. John’s father had immigrated from the Netherlands, and Kathleen’s family was from Tennessee. She graduated from Hollywood High in 1937, and her aspirations were the stage, not behind the mic, but life had other plans.
She shared in the 1989 Los Angeles Times, “I wanted to be a star in the theater, not radio,” she says. But, after an illness interrupted her plans, Vander Pyl enrolled at UCLA and started working in radio. She promptly discovered that school and radio work didn’t mix. “My sorority sisters told me I had to either go to work or go to class,” Vander Pyl says. “So I said ‘Bye, girls.’ ”
That began a steady, if unspectacular career in radio, doing free-lance voice work for a number of stations in Hollywood. She says her strong points were that she could play everything “from the ingenue to the villainess without complaining or screwing up. Radio was a notoriously anonymous profession. It was considered a second-class art,” she says. “Agents wouldn’t even bother with us until the networks started packaging the shows and bringing more money into it. So I lived without the burdens of stardom.”
The Flintstones and Jetson
As TV came alive and radio fizzled in the mid-1950s, Vander Pyl was one of many voice performers to find work in the new medium. “When radio died, the prognosis was that we radio actors would be out of work because all we did was use our voices,” she says.“But that was wrong. Most of us came from a theater background, and making the switch wasn’t that big a deal. Then a few of us got lucky and got into cartoons.” The idea of making “The Flintstones,” a cartoon that Barbera says was based loosely on the TV comedy “The Honeymooners,” came after marketing experts discovered the audience for cartoons in the late ‘50s was more than 50% adults, Vander Pyl says.”
Early episodes of the show called her Wilma Pebble, and it wasn’t until later in the series that she was firmly established as Wilma Slaghoople. Wilma and her best friend and neighbor, Betty Rubble, enjoy shopping and spending money, and also travelling, in addition to rescuing Fred from his schemes. Also, in the live action movies created of the show, actresses other than Jean Vander Pyl played Wilma, but Vander Pyl was able to have a cameo in the conga line at a surprise party for Fred. (Just behind Dino!)
The original show ran from 1960-1966, and was the first cartoon to hold a prime time television slot. It was the longest running animated show until the Simpsons outlasted it, and has been awarded second best cartoon in history. (Right behind the Simpsons.) The humor of juxtaposing a stone age setting with a mid 20th century modern life has always been a lasting thing.
The Flintstones was not Vander Pyl’s only role at Hanna Barbera. She performed on such diverse shows as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, The Jetsons, Snagglepuss, Captain Caveman, Tom and Jerry, Magilla Gorilla, and many more. Her second most well known voice acting role was that of Rosie, the robotic maid in the Jetsons. She played the original show’s run in the 1960’s, and also during the renewal of the show during the 1980’s.
In Front of the Mic
Jean wasn’t only an actress behind the microphone. She also acted on TV. In live action appearances, she was on many shows also, like Leave it to Beaver, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, the Beverly Hillbillies, Murder She Wrote and more. She worked fairly steadily until almost the end of her life, her last appearance being in 1995, when she died in 1999. She was the last surviving original cast member of the Flintstones.
In those days, residuals for voice acting hadn’t been implemented as much as they were later, so Vander Pyl ended her days comfortable, but not wealthy, despite the length and breadth of her career. After the run of the Flintstones, she accepted a one time payment of $15,000, rather than residuals. She said later in life, that if she had accepted residuals she wouldn’t just ‘live in San Clemente, I’d own San Clemente.”
At the time, television shows that would remain popular and in reruns for decades hadn’t happened yet, but shows like the Flintstones and I Love Lucy showed the enduring power of the new medium. Actresses like Jean show us how powerful it is to grow up hearing these voices and how much they can be all around us, and we never know who they are. Voice actors can still be relatively anonymous like radio was, but Jean Vander Pyl and other trailblazers like her show us just how much impact you can still have on generations of children’s lives.
Unwavering dedication
To the end of her life, Vander Pyl loved her role as Wilma. She would sign notes, love Wilma, and kept a bunch of Flintstones memorabilia in her apartment. She felt like there was a lot of her own character in Wilma, and was always willing to come back in to work on another project with Wilma in it. This was still true even when Vander Pyl didn’t have interest in other acting any longer. She said, “Two years ago, my commercial agent told me I needed some new photographs. But at my age, I’m interested in working, not in making the drive up to Los Angeles five times a week. Of course, I’d make the drive if it meant getting to be Wilma again. That wouldn’t be such a pain at all.”