I don’t think it’s necessarily a blasphemous idea. There’ve been a number of incarnations of Scooby Doo, for instance. The Looney Tunes characters have had different handlers over the years. Let them give *The Flintstones *a go; why not?
My question is, will Hanna-Barbera be involved? Is somebody looking out for the integrity of the franchise? What we *don’t *want to see is: “This is worse than that time I shared a stegosaurus burger with Jennifer Anistone!” (cue non-sequitor flashback.) I think MacFarlane can be very funny, actually, but I’m not convinced he has the self-restraint to play this straight enough to make it work. We’ll see, I guess.
I always hated the Flinstones as a kid (so boring!), but I do have to admit that I’m a bit curious to see MacFarlane do something that I presume will not be able to rely on the gross-out humor he employs in his other three cartoons. While I gave up on Family Guy a long time ago, and I still don’t understand the point of The Cleveland Show, I do actually like American Dad, so I don’t think MacFarlane has completely run his course.
Holy cats, McFarlane wrote for Johnny Bravo? I never knew that. That show was made of awesome. I don’t know that Family Guy is, anymore (I haven’t watched it in some time), but Johnny Bravo was outstanding.
Yeah, OK, that came out a little stilted. What I mean is, while the animation was certainly cheap assembly-line stuff, The Flinstones nevertheless had a particular tone and look that made it The Flintstones.
I count myself as a fan of the show, and I want any new version to feel like it’s really The Flintstones, not a parody or some hip, irreverant re-imagining. I’m not sure if I can explain it further than that; it’s one of those “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of things.
Now I’ve got the vintage Flintstones “walking-around” music stuck in my head. “Da-dump! Da-dump! Da-dun-dun-dun-de-dun! Da-dump! Da-dump! Da-dutdutdutdutdutdutduh!”
Am I alone in thinking that the Simpsons and Family Guy basically were Flintstones reboots, just spiritual successors more than Flintstones 2: Electric Boogaloo? Doing Flintstones now just seems kind of…redundant.
Eh, I’m not here to defend Scooby Doo. It is what it is. My bigger point is that the various iterations (excluding the live-action films) all pretty much look and feel like Scooby Doo. Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty deserve at least the same consideration.
Both the animated films and the “What’s New Scooby Doo?” series are quite fun, although much of that is self-reference and clever subversion of the original formula. (One of my favorites: In one “What’s New” episode, the villain turns out to be someone who had never been seen or mentioned earlier in the episode, and, while the other characters speak to the villain about his scheme, Velma complains that it’s not fair that it wasn’t someone she could have guessed.)
If the Flintstones re-make is in a similar vein, I could definitely see it having some appeal.
As an aside: does the current generation of kids know Fred and Barney as anything other than the mascots for Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles cereal?
Seriously, TV audiences typically skew heavily toward female viewership, so advertisers and network executives go nuts over any program that wins male viewers, particularly young ones. Family Guy has been very successful at that, so the suits keep hoping that MacFarlane can clone that appeal over and over.
Yeah, the main thing I’m taking away from this thread is that Seth MacFarlane wrote for Johnny Bravo and Dexter’s Lab, both really fun shows. I have a new respect for him now.
I still fully expect The Flintstones to fail miserably (are there really many people who find the setting/premise at all interesting?), but if he’s written for some good shows, and some shows which had stretches of being good mixed with stretches of being awful (Family Guy and American Dad), I think he might be able to pull off a short stretch of decent Flintstones episodes before the well dries up.