The Great Gazoo: The Flintstones' Alien from Zetox, the Doomsday Button and the Dum-Dums

The Great Gazoo appeared on October 29, 1965, in a sixth-season episode of The Flintstones named after him, and stayed for the rest of the show's run. He is a few inches tall, green, with a large head inside a bubble helmet, a tiny body in a green uniform and a pair of antennae, and he floats; he was voiced by Harvey Korman, then of The Danny Kaye Show, with the clipped superiority of a butler who has been assigned to a family beneath him. Gazoo's saucer crashes in Bedrock, Fred and Barney find him, and he explains that he has been exiled from his planet, Zetox, for inventing a doomsday button, and that he is bound to serve the first creatures he encountered, whom he addresses, then and always, as dum-dums.

The premise let the writers do anything. Gazoo can freeze time, make objects appear, transport Fred across the world and duplicate him, and the episodes he is in are the show's most fantastical: Fred and Barney sent to the future, or shrunk, or given a magic car. He is visible only to those who believe in him, which the show fixed as Fred, Barney, the two toddlers and the family dinosaur, so that Wilma and Betty spend his episodes watching their husbands argue with air. Hanna-Barbera had used the device before, on The Jetsons and elsewhere, and would use it again; it is the sitcom's oldest way of adding a supernatural regular without changing the address.

Zetox is never seen and barely described, and Gazoo's account of it is the account of a snob: a world of great science and great manners, from which the Stone Age is a humiliating demotion. The doomsday button is the show's single dark idea. Gazoo built a machine that would end the universe, not to use it but because he could, and his people, who seem to have taken the point that such a thing should not exist, sent its inventor to a planet where he could do no harm; the episode plays this as a joke about a scientist who is too clever, and a 1965 audience, four years after the Cuban missile crisis, could take the joke without help.

The character's powers made him a wish-granter, and the show's Gazoo plots are wish plots: Fred wants something, Gazoo supplies it, the supply is worse than the want. It is the plot of every genie story, and the alien is a genie in a helmet; the difference from Mork, Alf and the sitcom aliens who followed is that Gazoo is never a member of the family, only a consultant, and the episodes end with him vanishing, exasperated, until the next time. Korman's delivery is why he lasted. The disdain was funny, and it gave a stone-age sitcom a character who could look down on it from inside.

Gazoo has been blamed for the end of the show since the show ended. The Flintstones had been the first animated series in prime time when it premiered in September 1960, and by its sixth season the audience had thinned and the writers had added Pebbles, Bamm-Bamm and, as a last device, an alien; the series finished on April 1, 1966. The character has become shorthand, in discussions of television, for the late addition that signals a series has run out of ideas, and the term is used for characters on shows that never had an alien at all. The fairer reading is that he was a symptom rather than a cause: a domestic comedy about a quarry worker that had, in its last season, to reach for magic.

He has been kept alive, carefully. Gazoo appears in the 1970s and 1980s spin-offs, in the 2000 film The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, voiced by Alan Cumming and given a new backstory as an observer sent to study human mating, and in the comics and games that have recycled the franchise since. Every revival has had to decide what to do with him and most have decided on very little. He remains, sixty years on, the most familiar alien in the Stone Age.

A small green alien in a saucer, teaching Stone Age men to use technology they do not understand: that is the ancient astronaut theory, three years early. Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? was published in 1968, and the argument that visitors from space had guided early humans, built their monuments and been remembered as gods was in the air before it, in the writings of Robert Charroux and in a 1961 paper by Carl Sagan that took the idea seriously enough to calculate the odds. The Flintstones was parodying a domestic comedy, not proposing archaeology, but its final season put the image on screen a season before the paperback made it a theory, and the ancient astronaut theory article follows what happened to the image after that.

The autumn of 1965 was also a season of real saucers. On September 3 a policeman and a teenager in Exeter, New Hampshire, reported a large, lit object over a field, a case that made the national press and later a book; on December 9, five weeks after Gazoo's debut, a fireball crossed six states and something, or nothing, came down in the woods at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, where the Army sealed the site and the argument has never stopped. Gazoo's saucer crashing in Bedrock was a Hanna-Barbera gag, and the crash story was already the lore's main plot. Marvin the Martian, seventeen years earlier, was the cartoon alien Gazoo most resembles, a tiny figure in a helmet with a superior manner and a weapon that could end the world; the glossary covers the theory the Stone Age alien anticipated.