Yes, unfortunately. Or even the Looney Tunes. Elmer Fuddstone hunting Bugs Bunnysaurus. Or Marvrock the Martian threatening to blow up the earth.
i think it’ll score a solid 5.5/10 on the funnymeter. it won’t be groundbreaking or particularly clever but figuring out what the stoneage equivalent of 21st century tech alone will get them through 3 seasons. shopping malls, airbags, ipods and cell phones in anachronistic dinosaur form? i’d rather watch that than 2 and a half men (with or without sheen).
Whose baby is that? What’s your angle?
I’ll buy that.
[QUOTE=Student Driver]
Seth can’t push the edges too much without losing the kid audience …
[/QUOTE]
So then — probably no episode with “Bitch Fred” and “Bitch Barney”?
Pity. I might have watched that one.
Will this be another Flintstone Flop?
[makes square sign with fingers]
But MLP has not been continuously in the marketplace on a single line of products for years; the toys themselves have been out of production for years at a time, and they’ve certainly not been used as mascots for consumables for any length of time. It’s the unusual nature of the Flintstones’ being product mascots for a single item for decades that I was referring to. (In the case of the cereals, over 45 years!). You can reboot Transformers and My Little Pony a lot easier because of their discontinuity in the marketplace, and because substantial amounts of their profits aren’t coming from them being established consumables mascots.
Except for the fact that…they ARE.
Hasbro will lose a hell of a lot more money if people suddenly think My Little Pony or Transformers aren’t suitable for kids than anyone will is people think Flintstones are.
Bayer? ‘Ok, let’s get some different kid friendly shapes. How much will we have to pay for Dora the Explorer?’
Post? ‘OK, take Fred off the box…they’re still pebble shaped.’
Time Warner? ‘Oh, we’re still getting money from them? goes back to counting the money from Batman’
Also, there is zero discontinuity in Transformers presence in the marketplace coinciding with any of the new series in the media. It is, in fact, it’s the desire to avoid discontinuity that drove at least one of the new series. (Robots in Disguise, specifically. Hasbro and Takara hadn’t finished working out Armada, yet, so Hasbro just repackaged a formerly Japan-exclusive line to fill the gap.)
1990-1993, the period between G1 and G2 is the only break in North America (Europe and Japan kept on cruising in that gap). And that didn’t come with a reboot - the G2 cartoon was just G1 repackaged. G2 segued directly into Beast Wars, segued directly into Beast Machines, segued directly into Robots in Disguise, segued directly into the Unicron Saga, segued directly into the movies and Animated, then there was a break in the TV and movies, but the toys, comics, and video games kept on coming, and now there’s Prime and a new movie.
MLP had a larger gaps - I’m not entirely clear on what the gap between G1 and G2 is - I wasn’t collecting them at the time, and Wiki’s description of the timeline is confusing - the break may be anything from 2 years to 7…but G2, G3, and G4 (that would be Friendship is Magic) all followed closely on each other’s heels.
And, again…these are some of Hasbro’s flagship toy lines (GI Joe is the third leg of Hasbro’s table, and, again, no real discontinuity with the toys, plenty of discontinuity with the media) - if people stopped buying them, Hasbro would have real trouble. Bayer, Post, and Time Warner over Flintstones, not so much.
To modify my above statements, about making The Flintstones more palatable to today’s adults with wittier writing, I’d just like to point out that It Doesn’t Always Work. The comic strip Nancy tried that, several years ago, in a short-lived experiment. She soon went back to bland, un-hip kid’s cartoons. Then she disappeared.
On the other hand, Little lulu became a new series of cartoons about a decade back where she opened as a stand-up comedian (!) a la Seinfeld, at least at the beginning of each episode. And the Sabrina the Teenage Witch comic re-invented itself many times over, as a live-action TV series, an animated series, and then the comic book became manga-style.
I don’t have the hate for Seth McFarlane that some people seem to have, but his shows are generally not as funny to me as they once were, for what that’s worth. It’s hard to sum up a criticism, beside the obvious that jokes about bodily functions scarcely count as jokes, but one criticism I would not level is that the premise of American Family Cleveland isn’t nearly foccacta enough.
On the other hand, I’m sure the Flinstones wouldn’t be funny to me now. In fact, I’m sure it ever was. But if I were to encapsulate why not it probably wouldn’t be that it wasn’t random or acerbic enough.
I recently saw another attempt to revive Looney Tunes, which made what I consider the classic mistake – trying to make a sitcom out of it. It may well be that the people in charge have some idea what made the originals funny, but damned if I can find any evidence. They had Bugs and Daffy living in a spacious, modern house watching a large-screen television. They never said what Bugs did for a living, but Daffy was clearly a bum sleeping on Bugs’ couch. The episode explored their relationship. Of course, what was funny about the old cartoons had a lot to do with improbable violence. Now that parents groups have put the kibosh on that, there’s a huge vacuum at the core of the franchise. They seemed to have escaped that sucking void with The Warner Brothers Show, but apparently the lessons of that don’t seem to have stuck.
As much as I’ve appreciated the deconstruction of the Hanna-Barbera genre, despite my chagrin about the fact that Scooby-doo, the only show on television in which the skeptic is always right, got turned into a show about real spooks merely for the joy of subversion, I think that territory has been covered by the time you’ve been through Space Ghost, Harvey Birdman and The Venture Brothers. Yet, I expect that most of the jokes in a new Flintstones that aren’t actually about bodily functions will amount to throwaway gags about how stupid the premise is to begin with.
And yet, I’m not convinced it will be less tolerable than the original.
[dinosauer under the sink]
Eh, it’s a living.
[/dinosauer under the sink]
Johnny Angel:
They had some of that in the feature-length cartoon movies, but abandoned that relatively quickly. Most of the later ones and “What’s New Scooby Doo?” return to the rationalist formula.