The Modern Modern Stone Age Family

The Flintstones Volume 1 by Mark Russell. Art by Steve Pugh
Graphic Novel Review by Kerey McKenna

The Flintstones: just by saying the name the theme song of this classic cartoon is now running through your head. You are welcome.

A brief recap in case you have been living...under a rock: Premiering 1960, it took the basic premise of The Honeymooners—the hijinks of two lunkheaded blue collar guys and their wives—and staged it in a pre-history that somehow looks like the suburban prosperity of contemporary America. This Hanna-Barbera Classic went on to become the longest running cartoon on American television, until being unseated by another lunkheaded working class schmo and his family.

Besides all the rock puns and machines powered by animals, a core concept of The Flintstones is the American nuclear family and that way of life having a certain inevitability and permanence. It formed a conceptual bookend with another Hanna-Barbera classic, The Jetsons, which assured us that the American nuclear family (white, male breadwinner, stay-at-home wife, kids, pets, and labor saving devices) had always been and would always be.

Even after the Flintstones left the air as a weekly series, they continued on in animated movies, live-action films, a merchandising empire, and from time to time, comic books—comics that sought to completely replicate the style and sensibilities of the original.

But now DC Comics is re-inventing the wheel with a new take on The Flintstones.

The key characters, premise, and gimmicks are all left intact: Fred, Wilma, Pebbles, Barney, Betty, BamBam, and Dino are denizens of a prehistoric town of Bedrock that bears uncanny similarities to modern America. The character designs, while leaning a bit to more naturally proportioned bodies, are instantly recognizable as the characters we knew from the Saturday morning cartoons. There are still plenty of visual gags and puns built around a prehistoric version of our society; Fred can take a call on his shell phone, grab a coffee at the local Starbricks, and then go bowling with an armadillo as a ball. But the humor is, well for lack of a better term, more evolved.

Yes, in an angle that will either make or break this book for the reader, this new Flintstones series takes a sharp turn from domestic farce and slapstick comedy to a sort of dramedy reflecting upon the complexity and absurdity of modern life and institutions. In this first volume of The Flintstones (the first six issues of the run), the conflict doesn’t come from the tensions between a loutish husband and a nagging wife, but rather between people and the society they find themselves in.

Perhaps it is just my philosophy degree talking, but I see a lot of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in this new take on the Flintstones. The series, like Rousseau, posits that at some point in the primordial past mankind had the option of living in the absolute freedom of the wild, but has opted to trade that freedom for creature comforts and higher pursuits. The Flintstones comic goes a step further, building upon a running gag of the cartoons, positing that the animals that power the appliances have consciously opted into the system of domestication, trade, and specialization into a specific skill. As the bird working as a can opener says, “It’s a living.” [I was going to post a panel from the comic where a sabretooth tiger glumly chooses domestication over starvation but I couldn’t find it. It’s a missing link.] No, Rousseau wasn’t the only, or even the first, thinker to opine that society is the result of collective action and agreement...but he did so with a certain wistful nostalgia for that lost Eden of the freedom of a simpler life.

Our hero Fred is frustrated that the society in which he finds himself is always driving him to buy solutions for problems that he didn’t even realize he had. Now that he has a house instead of a cave, that house must have a lawn, and because consensus rules that a lawn be trimmed and have grass, not weeds, he has to go out and buy a weed-whacker (i.e. a goat). The societal contract now has so many sub-clauses that much of modern life is now done “because.” That's what's expected, and nobody can give a reason why beyond two steps.

In addition to banality and absurdity, the civilized world brings wonders, but is also built upon struggle, violence, and some would argue atrocities made all the more horrible by their moral hypocrisy. In what is sure to be a more controversial move, the series re-casts “The Order of the Water Buffalo” —a riff on the Freemasons and Elks—into a veterans group. We discover that when they were younger Fred, Barney and their fellow veterans, thinking they were defending their families, were actually used as pawns to seize land and resources from the neighboring peaceful tribe, “The Tree People,” so that Bedrock could expand and modernize.

In the first issue, Fred plays host to a group of Neanderthal men who have come out of the wilderness, Rousseau's “State of Nature”, to suss out if this whole “civilization thing” is worth a shot. After working a day in the rock quarry, listening to war stories from Fred’s veterans group, and being wined and dined at a restaurant, the Neanderthals eventually shrug their shoulders conclude that “Civilization is just trying to get somebody else to do your work and kill for you,” and return to the hard, but honest, struggle of the primordial forest.

The Flintstones, like Rousseau, isn’t actually making the argument that mankind would be better off in the trees, but rather that our society is a conscious construct in the attempt to make a better life and sometimes inequities and absurdities happen and that should be acknowledged.

In another episode, the institution of monogamous marriage is explored. As a bit of social commentary, the premise is laid out that in the Stone Age world of The Flintstones, monogamy between two individuals is a relatively new societal development, in contrast to more traditional arrangements like polyamory and a harem of one man and many wives. The book completely sidesteps any low-hanging fruit of drama here. Fred is not tempted by a bevy of buxom cave beauties, nor is Wilma considering trading up for a smarter and/or stronger physical specimen. And while they recognize some of the logical arguments in favor of a two-parent nuclear family, those societal pressures aren’t the reason Fred and Wilma are together. Their marriage is set in stone because of a genuine belief that they would rather live together then struggle alone. Marriage, like Bedrock, isn’t without its sacrifices and absurdities but it is worth fighting for (just as Fred, Barney, and their army buddies do later when they take up arms against a legitimate hostile invasion). So in the end Fred and Wilma, Betty and Barney, and their friends Adam and Steve decide marriage is worth fighting for. Yes, Adam and Steve. They’re having a gay old time.

So final thoughts on Volume 1 of The Flintstones?

Yes, it does away with a lot of the feel of “classic” Flintstones domestic comedy and slapstick, but the torch for primetime cartoon clod was passed a long time ago.

Yes, it’s a darker and grittier reworking of a classic series. Frankly a lot of the attempts at that editorial mandate get mixed reviews at best. Archie is now a teen drama on the CW, taking its cues on sex and violence from Twin Peaks and Pretty Little Liars. As for comics, my first review here for Nerds who Read was a reworking of Sabrina the Teenage Witch as 60’s occult horror. Scooby Do is now an action series set after the apocalypse.

No. Really.

Ruh, roh.

And DC Comics bungled the darker and edgier versions of their own iconic superheroes, chiefly Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, so badly that the re-designs are being walked back substantially in the comics and much of geekdom will be surprised if Justice League doesn't fall flat on its face.

So it’s quite understandable that you may shy away from darker and grittier reworkings. Fortunately, in the case of The Flintstones, there are many iterations of the classic version to fall back on. In doing background research for this review, I was actually surprised how many. Critic Bob “Movie Bob” Chipman has a great two part retrospective on just the iterations of the cartoon alone (Part 1 and Part 2). I was also surprised to learn this is actually only the 2nd attempt in recent memory to add a more adult edge to the well worn premise. So for anybody who wants to see the Flintstones in classic form, there are decades of material out there to enjoy. Heck, if you are really craving a straight adaptation you could even seek out the two live adaptations of the series that took great pains to translate the rhythms, aesthetics and sensibilities of the cartoon.

But I happened to get a kick out of this new spin on the series. If you can accept that an outlandishly cartoon world can also try to be adult and maudlin (aka Netflix series BoJack Horseman), you’ll find The Flintstones is definitely one of the better ones. I would say it’s worth a look.

Now one more time, just for good measure…

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 13, 2017. Learn more at www.watchcityfestival.com.