No matter how old you are, chances are that you watched "The Flintstones" during your childhood or with your kids later on in life. Who could forget Fred Flintstone’s iconic phrase “Yabba-dabba-doo,” Fred and Wilma’s purple pet dinosaur Dino or the strangely modern wood and stone “car” the family used to pedal around Bedrock?
Though "The Flintstones" took place in the Stone Age, the storylines embedded in each episode ran concurrent with the concerns of the modern day 1960s: dissatisfaction with one’s job, the struggles of raising children and conflicts with one’s neighbors. The idea was to capture an adult audience with an animated series -- something that wasn’t successfully done on such a massive scale prior to the show’s airing.
Writer Mark Russell does not have strong nostalgia for "The Flintstones" series, which is part of the reason why he was able to stray so far from the original aesthetic in his new comic book series featuring all the same Flintstones and Rubbles family members. There are 12 issues of the series altogether, the last of which was published last summer.
Still set in the Stone Age, Fred Flintstone is a war veteran in the new series, struggling with PTSD from the “Paleolithic Wars.” A jacked version of the cartoon Fred Flintstone, Russell’s reimagining of the character “looks like he played football in high school and has kind of let himself go since then, but he’s got a lot of love and sadness in his face.”
Russell’s goal for the reboot was to create a commentary on politics, religion and cultural institutions with a dark comedic twist. For example, you won’t see Dino as a loving, caring pet in this series. Rather than integrating animals into humans’ lives and having them care for each other, Russell chose not to give names to any animals in the series, stripping any sense of their sanctity of life and assigning them inanimate roles like a vacuum cleaner (for an elephant), coat rack and garbage disposal.
"The meaning that you get from your life is not going to be what you find from your function, or from how good you are at the job you've been assigned in life," Russell says. "It's really about the strength of connections you form with your fellow appliances."
Russell also touches on themes like consumerism and grappling with one’s own existence in the series, even taking a jab at how he believes Flintstones-themed vitamins are a scam.
Russell has stated, “I think that consumerism, basically what it is is a cute dystopia. I think that most dystopias you see in literature are gray and dark and usually very conformist...Our dystopia looks more like a Taco Bell than a concentration camp.”
If you’re into darker versions of family-friendly caricatures, then this is the series for you. You can get the first issue of the comic series here.