Year: 2010

Today’s Google Doodle is a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the cartoon The Flintstones, which first aired on September 30, 1960. So I thought I’d help celebrate by posting about Pebbles, the Flintstones-inspired baby name.

The Flintstones originally featured Fred and Wilma Flintstone, along with their neighbors Barney and Betty Rubble. The couples’ babies, Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble, weren’t introduced until 1963 — Pebbles in February, Bamm-Bamm in October.

And, the same year, the unusual name Pebbles appeared for the very first time in the U.S. baby name data:

• 1965: 14 baby girls named Pebbles
• 1964: 31 baby girls named Pebbles
• 1963: 31 baby girls named Pebbles [debut]
• 1962: unlisted
• 1961: unlisted

While the name never became popular, its usage did increase slightly both in the early to mid-1970s and in the late ’80s to early ’90s. Why?

• In October of 1971, Pebbles breakfast cereals (e.g., Fruity Pebbles, Cocoa Pebbles) were introduced to the market. The TV commercials featured various Flintstone characters.
• In the late 1980s, several songs by dance-pop singer Perri “Pebbles” Reid became top-5 hits on Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart. (One of those songs was “Mercedes Boy.”)

What are your thoughts on the name Pebbles? Would you consider using it?

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Update, Mar. 2015: Looks like Pebbles Flintstones may have been named via contest. (Either that, or the “contest” was for marketing purposes only.) From a Neatorama article about The Flintstones: “In 1963, a new angle was added to the show with the birth of Pebbles Flintstone, Fred and Wilma’s daughter. In anticipation of her birth, a huge nationwide contest was held to “name the Flintstone’s baby.”

Update #2, Sept. 2020: M Cain’s comment below inspired me to research the Pebbles name contest a bit more. The following story, which I found in Joseph Barbera’s 1994 autobiography My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century, suggests to me that the contest was rigged.

[The idea] — to give the Flintstones a baby — set off two days of uncharacteristically rancorous meetings at the studio debating the sex of the offspring. After much collective hair pulling, we decided: It’s a boy.

Relieved at having reached a decision at last, I turned to other matters. A few days later, I took a phone call from Ed Justin, our merchandising man in New York.

“I hear the Flintstones are having a baby.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Boy or girl?”

“It’s a boy! Fred Jr.–A chip off the old rock!”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “I’ve got the vice president of Ideal Toy here, and the only dolls they’re doing are girls. We could have had a hell of a deal if it had been a girl.”

“It is a girl,” I said. “Her name is…Pebbles. A pebble off the old rock.”

Some ideas develop after days of meetings. Others are born in the flash of a dollar sign set off by a single phone call.

Sources: A Flintstones World, SSA

Image: Screenshot of The Flintstones