I wish I could forget...

  Is there anything you wish you could forget?  There’s a famous horror movie, Night of the Living Dead, which I haven’t seen myself, but one critic warned, “Afterward you may wish you could forget the whole experience.”

I wish I could forget The Flintstones.  That was an animated Stone Age sitcom from the early 1960s, which has had a very long afterlife in syndicated reruns.  It was produced  on a low budget by Hanna-Barbera Studios, and the animation was terrible!  The sort of thing where a car would drive along and pass by the same three or four buildings again and again, as if it were going around in a circle…

The writing was terrible too.  The main characters, of course, were knockoffs of the characters on Jackie Gleason’s far superior show The Honeymooners.  Ever see Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert?  That’s the one where they wanted to go to a Shriners-type convention but their wives wouldn’t let them, so they pretended to be sick and go somewhere else for recuperation, but their wives found out the truth… Anyway, The Flintstones redid that story again and again!  In one story the wives found out from a talking parrot who kept saying words like “convention”; in another the husbands were caught on a Stone Age version of Candid Camera. (The running joke was that everything in the 1960 world had a Stone Age equivalent…) There was another episode that redid Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero, complete with the unconvincing happy ending.

One story I remember in particular had Wilma becoming a hand model (like George on that Seinfeld episode), and they wanted to put her in a TV commercial, but only showing her hand.  Fred got in a prideful huff and wouldn’t let her do it, because the story would have no point otherwise.  In the end, Betty made the commercial instead, and they saw the commercial on stone age TV, and they showed Betty’s face as well as her hand!  Terrible, terrible writing.

And TV cartoons at the time weren’t all as bad as that.  Rocky and Bullwinkle had the same marginal animation, but the writing was nice and sharp!  I’ve rewatched the show on video in recent years, and it holds up pretty well.  I like the relationship between the sinister spies Boris and Natasha, and how Natasha ended up doing all the work!  My favourite part was Bullwinkle as Mr. Know-It-All, who’d do subjects like “How to get into a movie theatre without buying a ticket.” (This was before cartoon characters had to be good role models…)

I’m ashamed that there was a time when I liked The Flintstones and actually wanted to watch it.  When we look back at our childhood, we notice that we had no taste back then!