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alt title(s): The Flintstones
The modern Stone Age family.
"WIIIIIIIILLLMAAAAAAA!!!"
The most famous and beloved of
Hanna-Barbera's cartoons that isn't
Scooby Doo, this one was set in the Stone Age—
sort of—and based about half its humor on prehistoric versions of modern technology. Usually an animal was shown rigged to perform some menial task, eg a baby mammoth used as a vacuum cleaner, a parrot used as a recording device, etc.
The other half was ordinary sitcom material, springing from the antics of boorish Fred Flintstone, who was constantly hatching inane schemes with the help of his neighbor Barney Rubble and subsequently getting them both into trouble with their wives, Wilma and Betty. Later in the series the Flinstones had a daughter, Pebbles; this inspired the Rubbles to adopt a son, the comically super-strong Bamm-Bamm. Dino and Hoppy were the respective family pet(-asaurus)es.
Despite
strenuous denials from the producers, the show is generally regarded as a blatant ripoff of
The Honeymooners - although the Flintstones are tract-home middle class, with a car and a washing machine (even if the former
was foot-powered and the latter a pelican), where the Kramdens were urban working poor.
Was the most successful prime-time animated series ever until
The Simpsons.
Like many very popular shows from the 1960s and 1970s,
The Flintstones just would not die. It survived cancellation in any number of subsequent forms, from Saturday morning cartoons featuring teenaged versions of Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles (the latter voiced by Sally Struthers) through a pair of live-action motion pictures, all the way to a breakfast cereal which is still marketed in the early 21st century (and which is the occasion for continuous
new Flintstones animation). Not to mention the vitamins...
- Adult Child (Fred, often)
- Alien Scrappy (The Great Gazoo)
- Anachronism Stew (We have dinosaurs and large mammals living at the same time, along with modern-esque technology and culture.)
- Bamboo Technology
- Big Damn Movie: The first film has ambition, loyalty, betrayal, corporate intrigue, and a climactic battle upon an elaborate makeshift Death Trap. An average episode of the TV series is basically just Wacky Hijinks.
- Broken Streak
- Brotherhood Of Funny Hats (Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes)
- Bumbling Dad (Fred, when Pebbles was born)
- By The Eyes Of The Blind (Gazoo)
- Catch Phrase ("Yabba-dabba-doo!")
- Celebrity Is Overrated
- The Celebrity Lie
- Closer To Earth (Wilma is much more mature and level-headed than Fred, who borders on Adult Child)
- Conspicuously Light Patch
- Crossover (with The Jetsons, Bewitched and others)
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Fred and Barney's "A Judo Chop Chop" chase with Dr. Sinister.
- Deadpan Snarker (Fred and Wilma, more so Wilma)
- Dream Sequence
- Drive In Theater (Featured in the opening and closing credits)
- Drunk With Power (Fred, in the first live action movie)
- Everythings Better With Dinosaurs (Because a Flintstones which only used creatures that lived during the Paleolithic wouldn't be nearly interesting, although those kinds of animals are around as well.)
- Feuding Families ("Bedrock Hillbillies")
- First Name Ultimatum (See this page's quote.)
- Foot Focus (Due to the prehistoric setting, the entire cast is constantly barefoot. Lampshaded in a Comic Book story in which shoes are invented, but fail to catch on)
- Freaky Friday (a number of times, including once where Fred and Dino swap bodies)
- Gentle Giant (Fred, at his best)
- Gilligan Cut
- Gravity Is A Harsh Mistress
- Great Gazoo (the Trope Namer)
- Happily Married
- Not So Imaginary Friend (The Great Gazoo is only visible to Fred)
- Have A Gay Old Time (the Trope Namer)
- Hold Your Hippogriffs: The premise of the whole show is to displace modern stories into a prehistoric setting, so language was obvious to follow.
- Horse Of A Different Colour (Dino is just like a dog, except he's a sauropod dinosaur; Hoppy is a kangaroo-like "hopparoo")
- Housewife
- Invisible To Normals (Gazoo is invisible to everyone but Fred and Barney, and later, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm.)
- Jumping The Shark (The introduction of the Great Gazoo, probably)
- Kangaroo Pouch Ride
- Knife Throwing Act ("Dial S for Suspicion")
- Last Day To Live (This was the plot of the prime-time special "Fred's Final Fling".)
- Laugh Track
- Limited Wardrobe
- Mistaken For Dying
- Motionless Chin
- The Movie (The Man Called Flintstone and the two Live Action Adaptations)
- No Accounting For Taste (Fred isn't a bad person per se, but he's not putting as much effort into the marriage as Wilma, who is often forced to suffer his tantrums and schemes. Subverted in one of the movies, though, where Fred had to struggle to get Wilma's favor back after a fight during a holiday trip.)
- No Celebrities Were Harmed
- No One Could Survive That (The Green Goose and his henchmen, as Fred and Barney trapped them inside the doomsday missile/rocket, which is launched into space, that Fred set it to. The screen fades to black just as the rocket is about to ascend into space.
- Obnoxious In Laws (Wilma's Mother)
- Old Shame (There were commercials for cigarettes promoted by the Flintstones.)
- On One Condition
- Overprotective Dad (Fred, in regard to Pebbles)
- Pretty In Mink (Fred is having some sort of problem, making him almost completely lethargic. Wilma buys an expensive fur coat of "genuine Siberian mammoth", knowing the cost will make Fred freak out.)
- That and their clothes are most likely all animal skins.
- Punk Punk (Stonepunk, or Dinopunk, or Cavepunk, or whatever term fits this best)
- Punny Name (Pretty much every character or locale on the show has one, based on some variant of "rock" or "stone")
- Purely Aesthetic Era
- Pygmalion Snap Back (When Wilma and Betty changed Fred and Barney)
- Recycled In Space (The Honeymooners in the stone age)
- Reset Button
- Rerun
- Schemer (both Fred and teenage Pebbles)
- Schizo Tech
- Show Within A Show (several; none particularly important or prominent — just parodies of then-current shows)
- Sleeping Single (the early seasons; although the show was the first animated show to portray a married couple sharing a bed later on)
- Somewhere A Paleontologist Is Crying (Dinosaurs never coexisted with humans: mammals that existed up through the Cretaceous were small and rodent-like. Of course, that hardly matters.)
- Sound Effect Bleep
- Special Guest (several)
- Spinoff (quite a few)
- Springtime For Hitler
- Spy Speak
- The Theme Park Version (It's early-1960s suburban America transposed into the Stone Age, with dinosaurs.
- Title Theme Tune
- Tsundere (Wilma is a type B)
- Vocal Evolution (Barney has a high nasally voice in the earliest episodes)
- Ugly Guy Hot Wife (both couples)
- Every couple to appear on the show, really. With the exception of the second generation of the leads.
- Why Do You Keep Changing Jobs (Barney)
- Wraparound Background
