The Flintstones

 Some random stills (and a gif, if it's functioning in your browser) from The Flintstones. I'm a big fan of classic animation, including but not limited to Popeye, the early Looney Tunes, Fleischer studios' Superman cartoons and Gumby, to name a few. 

The Flintstones, in its initial incarnation, can clearly be distilled down to a Honeymooners pastiche with a way-out scenario change, but clearly developed beyond that seed of inspiration. After all, The Honeymooners lasted one season and today is primarily exempt from the lexicon of the last couple of generations, unless they are MeTV aficionados; and The Flintstones are still a pop culture phenomenon. Sure, Fred Flintstone is an impression-concerned blowhard, but his heart and conscience always win out over his ego in the end, and unlike Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden, I don't think I've ever heard Fred threaten to beat Wilma. 

I find the series visually stunning with its bright, candy pop colors and the amazing textures the production designers and artists worked into the backgrounds. It doesn't hurt that the writers and producers also happened to work in all of the pop cultural earmarks of the 1960s that I find so personally appealing, in attempt to keep the audience tuning in: the surf culture, the garage pop, the renewed interest in monsters and comic book culture, Bond-esque spy adventures, etcetera. 

Since The Flintsones and The Jetsons are both Hanna-Barbera productions, they are often described as same-same 1:1 concepts, as if The Jetsons are simply The Flintstones in a sci-fi futurist setting. I don't share this view. Where Fred Flintstone is a bombastic big-mouth who often talks his way into happenstance at the expense of his pride (and the safety of those around him), he a character with range and while his adventures can be often bizarre when writers need to tailor some impetus to dress a bigger plot, or repetitive when writers were short for ideas (how many times was Fred the heir to some property, be it a creepy castle or a hillbilly hovel, that required his family and the Rubbles stay there to take ownership?), there is always fun to be had along the way. George Jetson simply comes across as a broken middle-class worker drone who hates his job, is exasperated to despair by his children, and rarely seems to stumble into any circumstance that brings him even a modicum of joy.

No thanks, kids. I'll take The Flintstones' cartoonish past over The Jetsons' bleak future any old day.