The Flintstone Comedy Show was a Saturday-Morning Cartoon on NBC that aired from 1980 to 1982. The Flintstones spin-off featured multiple segments starring different characters, including Canon Immigrant characters the Shmoo (from prior Flintstones series Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo and the comic strip Li'l Abner) and Captain Caveman.
The segments include:
- The Flintstone Family Adventures: Traditional-style adventures of Fred, Barney, Betty, and Wilma.
- The Frankenstones: The Frankenstones, a Munsters-like family of monsters that live next door to the Flintstones. Unlike other versions of the Frankenstones (from the primetime specials or previous series), Frank Frankenstone here is short-tempered and has a heated rivalry with his neighbor Fred.
- Pebbles, Dino, and Bamm-Bamm: The teens (slightly aged down in appearance from The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, but still with their same friends and cave buggy) plus Dino solve mysteries around Bedrock, akin to Scooby-Doo.
- Dino and Cavemouse: Dino chases a pesky, ravenous mouse around the house, akin to Tom and Jerry.
- Bedrock Cops: Fred and Barney are part-time Bedrock police officers, accompanied by partner/trainee the Shmoo. They spend their time either trying to capture the criminal of the episode or trying to stop the Frankenstones' ravenous, destructive pet, Rockjaw.
- Captain Caveman: Captain Caveman's adventures in Bedrock as its resident superhero. Parodying Superman, Cavey has a secret identity as "Chester," and works as a copy boy at the local newspaper The Daily Granite alongside reporters Wilma and Betty.
The Flintstone Comedy Show provides examples of:
- Bamboo Technology: As per the norm for the Flintstones, here updated for the early 80s. Home video games appear in a Frankenstones segment, while Wilma has a "beeper" in one Captain Caveman segment.
- Canon Welding: Captain Caveman is shown as Bedrock's resident superhero, before he ended up frozen in ice. Also, the Shmoo (or a version of one) apparently existed in the Stone Age.
- Rearrange the Song: The original song from The Flintstones is used for the opening, though slightly extended to include the Frankenstones' Leitmotif, with some lines of lyrics replaced with an instrumental part and "gay" replaced with "great".
- Three Shorts: Six in this case (seven if the fact that two Dino and Cavemouse segments were played per episode is considered).
The Frankenstones segments provide examples of:
- Extreme Omnivore: Rockjaw ate his way through many objects, and apparently also has an appetite for Shmoo. This makes him the source of various problems in the "Bedrock Cops" segments.
- Feuding Families: A zig-zagged variation. Aside from the occasional family competition, the Flintstones and Frankenstones got along well with each other. Fred and Frank, however, hated each other's guts, and tried (often unsuccessfully) to prevent their families from interacting with each other.
- Honor Before Reason: On one occasion, Fred and Frank had the opportunity to make a fortune in the entertainment business and quit their day jobs, but they balked the second they learned they'd have to be partners instead of solo acts.
- Mirror Character: Fred and Frank both have anger management problems, oppose their families interacting with each other, and engage in assorted wacky schemes.
The Pebbles, Dino, and Bamm-Bamm segments provide examples of:
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: In "Dino and the Giant Spiders", the Spider Woman never meant any harm to Pebbles, Dino, or Bamm-Bamm, but they fled before she could explain herself. Later, she scolds her spiders for the mischief they caused the protagonists.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Much like in its inspiration, some segments ended with the unmasking of the monster to reveal a notorious Bedrock criminal.
The Dino and Cavemouse segments provide examples of:
- Big Eater: Cavemouse steals, and eats, lots of food from the Flintstone home. Food is often the source of conflict between Dino and Cavemouse.
- Canon Foreigner: Unlike characters such as Captain Caveman and The Shmoo, who have appeared in previous works, Cavemouse is a new character primarily created for Dino and Cavemouse segments, though he appears in other segments as well.
- Friendly Enemy: There were just as many segments that ended with Dino and Cavemouse (and sometimes Fred) on good terms with each other as those where they weren't.
- We Want Our Jerk Back!: Cavemouse causes Dino to get caught by an animal catcher in "Come Home, Dino", but suffers guilt over his actions and hurries to free Dino from the animal shelter.
The Bedrock Cops segments provide examples of:
- Da Chief: Sgt. Boulder, Fred and Barney's superior, was frequently a no-nonsense guy who wasn't afraid to chew them out for failure. He often assigned the Shmoo to go with them, much to Fred's chagrin.
The Captain Caveman segments provide examples of:
- Clark Kenting: Captain Caveman himself did this to disguise himself as Chester, wearing glasses and a bowtie and raising his voice an octave.
- Damsel in Distress: Wilma and Betty were often reduced to this, usually by trying to stop the villain themselves and getting in over their heads.
- Da Editor: Lou Granite serves as the editor-in-chief of "The Daily Granite".
- Monster Clown: Clownfoot is a bank-robbing circus clown who, at his circus hideout, rigs a high-wire's bicycle that Betty and Wilma are riding to fall apart over a pit of man-eating saber-toothed tigers.
- Monster of the Week: Each segment had a different villain, whose name was the name of that segment's episode.
- Secret Identity: Cavey has one as Chester, which is in itself kind of a parody of this trope.
- Shout-Out: Mostly to the Superman mythos:
- Captain Caveman's secret identity of glasses-wearing Chester.
- Wilma's and Betty's positions as reporters akin to Lois Lane.
- The Daily Granite, a spoof of The Daily Planet.
- "Lou Granite" is likely a reference to Lou Grant of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, as well as the Lou Grant spinoff series (Lou Grant and The Flintstone Comedy Show both aired in the early 1980s, on CBS and NBC, respectively). In that spin-off, Grant was also the editor of a newspaper.
- Time Travel for Fun and Profit: The 20th-century villain Futuro's goal was robbing Bedrock of random stuff to sell in his own era as valuable "antiques."
- Transformation Sequence: Spoofed.
It was so loud that literally everyone in the city could hear it, and visually it featured explosions, rockets and an array of rainbow stars, but all that actually happened was that Chester took off his glasses and unfolded his bowtie into a cape.- Sometimes (especially in the second season) there were variations on this sequence, including Chester using a different coat rack, wearing a different outfit, and even halting the sequence in the middle because Wilma and Betty were walking past.
- Walk the Plank: Pinkbeard forces Wilma and Betty to walk the plank over a sea with many dangerous animals. When they take too long to jump, Pinkbeard's crocodile cuts off the plank. Fortunately, Captain Caveman arrives just in time.
- Weather-Control Machine: The villains Stormfront and Weathergirl steal a weather satellite to launch into orbit to amplify the range of their weather-controlling powers to cover (and conquer) the entire planet.
