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Somehow I wound up putting a bunch of Flintstones on in the background for a while recently. I'm not gonna say that it was great, but it was better than I expected. I guess interesting to think about it as what it was doing as a pioneer of specifically TV animation, and also in a lot of ways a window into the1950s like how Popeye cartoons were a window into the 30s, although I enjoyed Popeye more. I wanna post my thoughts here:
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Feb 14, 2023 02:20
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SlothfulCobra posted:Famously Flintstones was aired in "Prime Time", and while Yogi was sponsored by cereal companies, Flintstones was sponsored by cigarettes. I never get tired of this fun fact. I swear I've showed that ad on Youtube to various friends like 50 times over the years and it never gets old seeing them react to it because it's just so wild.
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Feb 14, 2023 02:57
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySD67dCGxwc
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Feb 14, 2023 03:01
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You can very clearly see the I Love Lucy DNA in the Flintstones via the "two married families as the main focus" bit, though obviously Fred/Wilma/Barney/Betty isn't one-to-one with Lucy/Ricky/Ethel/...Fred
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Feb 14, 2023 03:03
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Junpei posted:You can very clearly see the I Love Lucy DNA in the Flintstones via the "two married families as the main focus" bit, though obviously Fred/Wilma/Barney/Betty isn't one-to-one with Lucy/Ricky/Ethel/...Fred I thought Flintstones was always supposed to be more of a nod to The Honeymooners (right down to having a loudmouthed lead with a no nonsense wife and a somewhat doofy neighbor/friend)? Larryb fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 03:07
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You know what fair, I know less about Honeymooners than ILL, to be fair.
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Feb 14, 2023 03:16
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It's Honeymooners, from the character relationships to the voices to the way they spend all their time down at the lodge wearing funny hats. It's actually one of the less subtle Hanna-Barbera parodies, which is saying something. Roger Meyers Jr. posted:Okay, maybe my dad did steal Itchy. So what? Animation is built on plagiarism. If it weren't for someone plagiarizing the Honeymooners we wouldn't have the Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sergeant Bilko, there'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney. Your honor, you take away our right to steal ideas, where are they gonna come from?
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Feb 14, 2023 03:35
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Honeymooners was a show about space exploration right?
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Feb 14, 2023 03:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:[*]I noticed this with some of Looney Tunes, but it's a lot more obvious with Flintstones: Near as I can tell, Hannah Barbera, like Warner Brothers, Disney, and the rest of the classic film industry, was based in California, but the entire voice cast for the main characters and seemingly most of the side characters comes from around New York City. I'm really not sure how that all works, how the NYC to California pipeline worked. I do know that general pop culture accents for early TV and movies was very New York dominated, as opposed to the dominance of California accents these days and there were some decades in between when pop culture was trying harder to be midwestern for broadest appeal, I just don't know how it all worked. The reason NY dominated VA work is because of radio (and before that, vaudeville!). Fred's VA was Alan Reed, and if you look through that Wiki article you can see he had a ton of bit parts in popular broadcast shows (Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Life of Riley, The Shadow). Radio actors already had experience emoting through the airwaves, using voice as a performance tool, etc. It makes sense you would pull from people experienced with that style as the industry builds up. (Famously, the voice of Scrooge McDuck was Allan Young, who had a long radio and TV career). Accent-wise there's some speculation that the non-rhoticism of Golden Era Radio was compounded by audio equipment/playback of the day. Dunno how much BS that is, honestly. The shift into Westerns and Cop Drama/Hard Boiled stuff helped transition away from the stuffy Mid-Atlantic accent, but it was also a result of post-WW2 cultural shifts. Once you get into regular TV stuff, then California becomes more and more of a cultural influence, as it has to do as much with changes in technology and demographics as it does with cultural changes. Also, it's not like California had much in the way of an entertainment community outside of Hollywood. NYC was full of ex-vaudeville people, theatre people, radio people, graduates from Theatre schools, etc.
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Feb 14, 2023 03:52
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FilthyImp posted:(Famously, the voice of Scrooge McDuck was Allan Young, who had a long radio and TV career). It was a delight to run into his voice, so to speak, in the adventure game Curse of Monkey Island basically doing Scrooge's voice.
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Feb 14, 2023 04:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:I had been wondering a lot what the point of the whole premise of the Flintstones was, and I think they just wanted something fantastical to make the show more visually interesting. They can throw in a bunch of joke names and gags about modern appliances, but it's rare that the fantastical setting is actually relevant to the show's plot. All the plots are very grounded in contemporary things After all, they are the modern stone-age family.
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Feb 14, 2023 09:11
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I caught up with the two episodes of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and loved it, though I accidentally left my detailed impressions in the MCU thread so instead i will just have to leave this fine clip https://files.catbox.moe/69aux4.webm
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Feb 16, 2023 07:31
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I feel like money playing big parts in the Flintstones makes a lot of sense considering it's a show by and for post-war Americans during the baby boom, on one hand you got the Depression in living memory and on the other you got the era where living beyond your means was pretty much a national sport. (for white people) Fred and Barney's relationship also probably comes off as an artifact from that era before boomer homophobia destroyed the idea of close male friendships. I feel like the relatively grounded setting despite animation, and yet the use of the animated medium to easily do plots and premises that would be much more difficult and expensive to do in live-action, is something that sets up a lot of animated sitcoms for later, The Simpsons of course coming to mind for many reasons but also King of the Hill. I wouldn't be surprised if they did come up with a lot more plots that used the supposedly prehistoric/fantastic setting, and actively chose not to because they had enough to work with having it basically be reskinned contemporary life. Funny thing is even the more outlandish plots and premises instead have more sci-fi or even more magical fantasy trappings... and I can't imagine the irony was lost on the writers when they made The Man Called Flintstone, which being a riff on Moonraker means it has a stone age space program. It's just one of those things that works all the better because they don't bring attention to it outside of puns- even that infamous comic makes the social satire work by blending and contrasting modern trappings and attitudes with the Stone Age aesthetics and setting, and presenting social conventions as being recently or currently invented. The Jetsons on the other hand does have a lot more plots and premises that actually use the sci-fi setting iirc. Though it probably doesn't help that sci-fi plots are a lot more 'standard' for even otherwise grounded animated shows. Speaking of, the premise of George Jetson's job being literally to go to the office, sit in a chair and push a button all day, and the real challenge is dealing with his short-fused boss firing him on a whim, looks... different through modern sensibilities.
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Feb 16, 2023 10:31
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The Jetsons also only lasted 24 episodes.
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Feb 16, 2023 15:30
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I AM GRANDO posted:The Jetsons also only lasted 24 episodes. Wikipedia tells me that they made an additional 51 in the early 80's. Still, it's kind of wild to think that a show that influential only lasted a single season in it's first run.
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Feb 16, 2023 15:42
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Out of curiosity, was the Jetsons also modeled after some old show and/or comedian like a lot of Hanna-Barbera properties were?
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Feb 16, 2023 17:07
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Yeah there's a weird thing where the Jetsons is sort of astroturfed like it's an equivalent of the Flintstones, but it was never really anywhere near as popular; I don't think it was even prime time, and its height was during the 80s. So it was a weird culturally/socially nostalgic thing despite being technologically in the far future. I think the later seasons of the Flintstones are a lot heavier on the talking animal appliance gags and may have more fantastical plots, but they don't actually use the prehistoric aspects of the setting. They have the alien Gazoo muck around in Bedrock. Fred's car needs keys and gas. There was also an episode plot where Fred and Barney were pressganged into being test subjects for a rocket to the moon, but it failed. While Fred and Barney's friendship is interesting, I wouldn't hold it up as something exceptionally strong, since while the series is conscientious about marital relations, Fred and Barney turn on eachother at a moment's notice and do it regularly. I guess one of the more unique things is their whole carpool situation. The Rubbles and Flintstones have one car each (sometimes they just have the one between the four of them, it's not consistent), and Fred and Barney take one to work while the girls have the other (but usually don't even go out anyways, so it's not a big deal when Barney's car doesn't exist). I don't know if that's representative of cars at the time being more rare and expensive, but these days it's common for families to have a car for each adult. Larryb posted:Out of curiosity, was the Jetsons also modeled after some old show and/or comedian like a lot of Hanna-Barbera properties were? I feel like the dynamic of a single family sitcom with multiple kids is so common it's hard to differentiate much between them or give one credit for it. Maybe there's some other series with a maid? SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 17:33
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this is almost too dumb to post but Rosie the Robot and Harley Quinn have in common "Mr. J"
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Feb 16, 2023 18:05
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Larryb posted:Out of curiosity, was the Jetsons also modeled after some old show and/or comedian like a lot of Hanna-Barbera properties were? The Jetsons, even in its time, was summed up as being "The Honeymooners In Space", yes.
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Feb 16, 2023 18:49
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nine-gear crow posted:The Jetsons, even in its time, was summed up as being "The Honeymooners In Space", yes. Huh, it doesn't really seem as blatant as the Flintstones was to me at least (for example, I don't remember George having any major reoccurring friends he spent time with)
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Feb 16, 2023 19:19
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Larryb posted:Out of curiosity, was the Jetsons also modeled after some old show and/or comedian like a lot of Hanna-Barbera properties were? I’m pretty Sure the Jetsons was just HB doing The Flintstones again more than anything.
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Feb 17, 2023 00:46
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So apparently the first six (6) episodes of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur are on Disney+ which currently puts it a week or two ahead of the Disney Channel release schedule. I don't know how they choose when to release things but I look forward to watching them!
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Feb 17, 2023 04:29
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I don't think Jetsons was much like the Flintstones beyond being a sitcom in an alternate time period. From what little I remember about it, I think it was even better at splitting focus between characters as opposed to Fred dominating the Flintstones. Poking through Hanna Barbera's catalog, I think Where's Huddles is the only one that seems o follow a similar dynamic since it features a couple married couples and their neighborhood. As opposed to all the nuclear family sitcoms they did like Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, The Roman Holidays, or even the Partridge Family 2200 AD (which apparently was originally meant to be a 70s Jetsons revival). Looking at the list of Hannah Barbera shows is remarkable, because there's just so many of them that are just so...not good. Not often outright bad, just usually incredibly forgettable (Roman Holidays is actively bad though). It looks like Where's Huddles is notable for being the first HB cartoon with a black character in the main cast, and then looking up the Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan I was amazed that it looks like they got mostly asian americans to do the voicework (many japanese-american instead of chinese, but it's more of an effort than you'd expect). Not what I'd expect from 1972 and with a character with a bit of a dubious history of yellowface like Charlie Chan. Looked up a clip of the show though, and it's bad. Not like racist-bad, but cheaper animation than HB is usually bad.
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Feb 17, 2023 07:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:all the nuclear family sitcoms they did like Wait Till Your Father Gets Home just like any channel where a syndicated episode of M.A.S.H. might start playing, except this was arguably a cartoon and on the channel where Powerpuff Girls was so the betrayal was somehow more severe
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Feb 17, 2023 07:46
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To this day the very mention of Wait Til Your Father Gets Home is enough to make me feel reflexive disappointment and/or dread God that show was awful
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Feb 17, 2023 08:22
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Feb 17, 2023 08:26
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I know people from New Jersey. They are usually the fist to tell you that Jersey absolutely sucks.
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Feb 17, 2023 09:10
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Captain Oblivious posted:To this day the very mention of Wait Til Your Father Gets Home is enough to make me feel reflexive disappointment and/or dread When Family Guy first came out, I thought it was a remake of that show, and nobody understood what I was even referring to.
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Feb 17, 2023 09:27
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Learning about Hanna Barbera's history is weird, because there's so many cartoons that get so weird, and most of them are just so bad. I didn't look up any clips of episodes of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, but I'm already annoyed at the show for how much its theme song sticks in my head. I did watch a full episode of Where's Huddles, and it was surprisingly okay with a kinda unique visual style for the bulky and gangly football players compared to the rest of HB's stuff. Moon Girl and Devil Dino was specifically saying "no disrespect to Jersey" which made me confused since refusing to disrespect Jersey seems very un-New York-y. Aside from Jersey's innate dumpiness, it's natural for locales to develop fierce rivalries with close neighbors, and of NYC's neighbors, upstate and Lon gIsland are technically also New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania don't border the city itself closely enough, CT's kinda small, sparse and fairly wealthy, while New Jersey is a pretty big state with the bulk of its population right up at the border with NYC as basically part of the city despite being administratively separate, so all the people of New York City would be in regular close contact with Jerseyites. It's a natural geographical rival, but NYC being the most powerful city in the world with its massive dominance in the media, it's a very uneven rivalry. It was also kinda confusing to me how the cartoon depicted their little neighborhood in Manhattan being a small tight-knit community, which I just can't really get my head around the idea of everybody knowing eachother's names in the densest part of the biggest city in the country.
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Feb 17, 2023 19:45
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SlothfulCobra posted:It was also kinda confusing to me how the cartoon depicted their little neighborhood in Manhattan being a small tight-knit community, which I just can't really get my head around the idea of everybody knowing eachother's names in the densest part of the biggest city in the country.
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Feb 17, 2023 20:04
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SlothfulCobra posted:Learning about Hanna Barbera's history is weird, because there's so many cartoons that get so weird, and most of them are just so bad. A ton of our history as a state, dating back to the colonial period, has boiled down to "being between NYC and Philadelphia" and getting disrespected by both.
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Feb 17, 2023 21:09
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Apparently the third and final season of Hulu Animaniacs is out now (and is only 10 episodes long), anybody have a chance to check it out yet?
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Feb 17, 2023 21:15
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As someone who grew up watching The Jetsons, The Flintstones, and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home on CN in the 90s, I am deeply loving the HB history talk in here. Also the Partridge Family 2200 opening was just annoying. HB just couldn't make a show without having a talking animal after Scooby showed up. I think they REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to capture that lightning again. Larryb posted:Apparently the third and final season of Hulu Animaniacs is out now (and is only 10 episodes long), anybody have a chance to check it out yet? I just checked Hulu, it is up. I haven't finished Season 2 though.
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Feb 17, 2023 21:31
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SlothfulCobra posted:It was also kinda confusing to me how the cartoon depicted their little neighborhood in Manhattan being a small tight-knit community, which I just can't really get my head around the idea of everybody knowing eachother's names in the densest part of the biggest city in the country. You'd be surprised! Density breeds familiarity, too, when everyone stops at the same bodegas and rides the same trains at the same times. No private cars shutting people out of each other's lives. And for ethnic enclaves this is even more true.
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Feb 18, 2023 00:16
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Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is fun and it's worth a watch.
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Feb 18, 2023 00:35
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Neeksy posted:When Family Guy first came out, I thought it was a remake of that show, and nobody understood what I was even referring to. Holy poo poo, I think you were right? I've never heard of this show and all I could think while watching that clip was the same thing. IS IT?
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Feb 18, 2023 03:13
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nothing was wrong with wait till your father gets home. It wasnt a kids cartoon but a animated sitcom and I watched it back in the 1990s as well. the worst was this show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXkjw1YviKE nostalgia for an america that didnt exist
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Feb 18, 2023 11:32
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Just finished the last season of Hulu Animaniacs, it’s basically more of the same stuff we had in the previous two though they did bring Slappy back for a segment during the final episode.
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Feb 18, 2023 14:25
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Ups_rail posted:nothing was wrong with wait till your father gets home. It wasnt a kids cartoon but a animated sitcom and I watched it back in the 1990s as well. That’s all nostalgia. In the 50s/60s old men like Walt Disney, Ray Bradbury, and even the usually forward-thinking Rod Serling expressed the idea that post-war prosperity and modern big cities all stunk compared to the turn-of-the-century small towns they grew up in. Today’s conservatives idolize the 1950s as the height of American culture. It’s all about what’s right on the edge of living memory.
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Feb 18, 2023 15:59
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Zoomers are going around doing 90s throwback days as part of spirit week, wishing they could go back to a time when they didn't have their peers stupid intimate thoughts and moments beamed to them 24/7, amazed at a time when people thought the future was going to be good. Lol
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Feb 18, 2023 16:23
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