In 1994, Universal hoped dinosaurs and Steven Spielberg would hit big again.
The previous year, Jurassic Park dominated the box office and pop culture. So it only stood to reason that audiences would be primed for more prehistoric adventures – this time with a bit less CGI and a lot more puns.
And, they were right. On Memorial Day weekend, The Flintstones became a page right out of box-office history, rocketing past Spielberg’s own Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to claim the highest grosses for that holiday weekend. It ultimately made $130 million in the U.S. and another $211 million worldwide, becoming the fifth-highest grosser of the year. Fred and Barney were everywhere – on McDonald’s glasses, in video games and in songs by Weird Al.
But when’s the last time you heard anyone talk about The Flintstones movie?
Brian Levant’s comedy – which had been in the works for about a decade and was originally going to be a Richard Donner film (ironically, his Maverick was released a week prior) – might not have been the best film of summer 1994, but we all know quality doesn’t always correlate with box office success. The Flintstones had 30 years of nostalgia behind it – it was based on a sitcom so iconic that reruns were still in rotation and its characters graced vitamins and cereal boxes (they still do). And with Spielberg onboard as an executive producer and a budget of $46 million (big for a comedy), it was the most heavily hyped film of the season.
I know I was taken in. Like many kids, I watched Flintstones reruns in syndication after school. I was an avid Cocoa Pebbles consumer. Hannah-Barbera characters were staples at the theme park our family visited each summer. Plus, I still had that residual dinosaur love going on from Jurassic Park. I begged my parents to take me to see this opening weekend; I know I saw it at least once or twice more when it hit our local second-run theater. I watched the VHS enough that I could predict a surprising number of lines of dialogue when I recently rewatched it. My best friend and I even dressed up as Fred and Barney for Halloween in 1993 (I was Barney and didn’t even need a mask).
Yet 30 years later, even as Fred and Barney still kick around somewhere in pop culture, the only major cultural footprint of The Flintstones movie seems to be that it brought back the McRib. It’s largely regarded as one of the worst summer hits of the ‘90s and is often on a list of the worst TV-to-movie adaptations.
Here’s the thing: I think that reputation is half right. The Flintstones is not a good movie. But I also think it’s maybe the best possible adaptation its source material could hope for.
Welcome to Bedrock
I’ll be honest, during the first 30 minutes of this revisit – my first time watching the film in probably close to 30 years – I wondered if history had been unkind to The Flintstones. Because that first act is really a fairly perfect approximation of the sitcom.
While there was some dispute from the creators, the show is best remembered as an animated riff on The Honeymooners, with Fred as the blowhard husband, Wilma the long-suffering and more intelligent member of the couple, and Barney and Betty as their best friends. The plots were pure sitcom fodder — Fred was usually trying to pull off a scheme without Wilma’s knowledge or enduring some trouble at work — just taking place millions of years earlier. The show is best known for its catchphrases — “Yabba Dabba Doo,” of course — and its plethora of prehistoric puns. And that’s what the movie provides.
The film’s first scene is its high point, a live-action retelling of the show’s opening credits. Fred (John Goodman) clocks off from work at the quarry, slides down a brachiosaur’s tail, picks up Wilma (Elizabeth Perkins), baby Pebbles, Barney (Rick Moranis) and Betty (Rosie O’ Donnell) and heads to a movie (produced by Univershell pictures, of course). It’s frame-for-frame a re-creation of those classic opening moments, with the iconic theme song playing over it. It’s bouncy, funny and note-perfect.
And from there, the movie begins with typical sitcom premises. Fred loaned Barney and Betty the money to adopt a baby without Wilma’s knowledge. Wilma’s mother (Elizabeth Perkins) is coming for a visit. Barney switches aptitude tests with Fred at the quarry, leading Mr. Slate to think that Fred is perfect executive material. The film sets the premises up and meanders through them, making sure to also hit classic Flintstones points like the Order of Water Buffaloes, Fred’s twinkle-toes bowling style and, of course, cars pushed by feet.
I wouldn’t call any of this good or groundbreaking, but it captures the tone of the TV series pretty accurately. The domestic shenanigans are basically just a clothesline on which to hang countless puns and visual gags, most stemming from the furry and reptilian creatures that serve as the characters’ appliances in these pre-electric days (the mastodon dishwasher and boar garbage disposal get the most screen time). The film’s reality is pure cartoon; when he’s ecstatic, Fred jumps and hovers in the air, and every hit on the head is accompanied by a “bonk!” on the soundtrack. It ain’t art, but it’s perfectly fine.
One thing that stands out 30 years later is the perfect casting of each of these characters. I still don’t think there’s a better choice for the lunkheaded but lovable Fred than Goodman, and although he apparently disliked making the film, he doesn’t half-ass it. He’s funny and energetic, and Goodman’s likability goes a very long way. Likewise, Moranis perfectly captures the goofy but loyal Barney, right down to his laugh; O’ Donnell’s facial reactions and giggle are a great Betty impression. Perkins has the thankless job of being the stereotypical killjoy wife, but she does what she can with a one-note role. These are fun actors doing solid work.
As cinema has become utterly dependent on visual technology, I find a great deal of nostalgia and joy in watching older movies that had no choice but to use practical sets and effects. The Flintstones is one of the last big-budget practical effects movies. Yes, CGI was used in some places – most shots of Dino running around the house are computer-generated – but the vast majority of the sets and creatures in the movie are purely practical, with the animatronics provided by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
And whatever flaws the film has – we’ll get there – it is a ton of fun just to stare at. There are many, many inserts of dinosaurs doing menial labor (like the pterodactyl whose job is to suck off bottle caps and then say “this job sucks”), and the animatronics have a tactile nature that holds up better than most digital effects of that time would. The Henson team outdid itself, making creatures look perfectly cartoony and in line with the designs of the TV show. The sprawling Bedrock sets must have been a wonder to walk through; the film takes time to crane over ceilings and track down streets to capture it all. The movie looks fantastic; it also looks really expensive.
And for the first 30 minutes, it’s a lot of fun. No, the jokes aren’t spectacularly funny, but there’s an amiable charm, and the visual wit and artistry go a long way.
But 90 minutes is a long time for a sitcom; and it feels even longer for a movie that can’t find anything else to do with its premise.
My enjoyment went extinct
I understand that The Flintstones as a TV show is iconic. I also think it’s a show where you can just watch one episode and think, “okay, I’m good. I get it.” The show ran on a gimmick – domestic sitcom with cavemen – and its stock in trade was prehistoric puns. If there had been only one episode of the show ever produced, you would still get the full experience.
Which might be why, once The Flintstones movie passes that half-hour mark, it quickly loses momentum. The wordplay goes from being playful – Steven Spielrock, the BC-52s – to downright assaultive. The longer that domestic squabbles go on, the more cringe-worthy and antiquated its gender roles become (Fred constantly sees himself “the king” and makes multiple jokes about killing his mother-in-law). The film can’t decide whether it wants to flirt with some mild adult innuendo or be filled wall-to-wall with slapstick gags for the kids, so it does it all, at full volume.
Its biggest problem is that a 90-minute runtime in a big-screen movie requires a plot more complex than “Fred told Wilma a lie and has to wriggle out of it.” And so, the film makes the strange choice to take this movie – a PG movie largely aimed at kids – about how Fred is made the patsy in an embezzlement scam run by a slimy exec (Kyle MacLachlan). And just in case there needed to be more conflict tossed in, the exec is scheming with a sultry secretary (Halle Berry), who coos and purrs and lounges on his desk in a scant loincloth.
I don’t know which of the three credited screenwriters — or the 32-35 writers (!!) estimated to have worked on the movie – decided that having a cartoon hero pulled into a money laundering scheme was a great way to kick off the summer. And I don’t know who thought it would be ideal to hinge much of the film’s humor on Fred being tempted to cheat on his wife (to be fair, MacLachlan and Berry are both perfectly fine in their roles). But it’s a jarring tonal contrast with the sweet family movie that it starts off as and way too convoluted to keep up the amiable pace of the film’s opening act.
It’s also boring. The film’s first half-hour works because it’s constantly revealing gags and widening the film’s scope; even when the jokes don’t land, there’s still joy in watching the visual ingenuity on display. Levant is not a director of classics – Beethoven, Jingle All the Way and Problem Child 2 are about as middlebrow as movies get. But he has a genuine affection for the material, and the film is more engaging and vibrant when it doesn’t have to worry about plot mechanics and can just treat the Bedrock set as its own personal playground. A film that was more rooted in Bedrock or the Flintstone family, or an adventure that allowed the film to go even bigger and wider, would have been more exciting and fun, even if it wasn’t technically better. Why does a movie about The Flintstones spend so much time in offices? Why is there an entire section when a man famous for shouting “Yabba Dabba Doo” is on the run for fraud? If the dynamic between Fred and Barney is the heart of the IP – and Goodman and Moranis have fun chemistry together – why spend so much of the movie with them at odds?
It’s baffling at first and the longer the film goes on, it becomes exhausting and dull. It’s a one-joke movie, and that joke is fairly amusing at best when the movie starts and absolutely insufferable by the time the credits roll (once again over a faithful re-creation of the show’s end credits). The cast does its best and the film is never not a joy to look at, but this movie would have worked best as a 10-minute sketch instead of being stretched out to full length.
It seems the cast agreed. Goodman was signed to a sequel but famously begged Spielberg to release him from the contract. A prequel, Viva Rock Vegas, starred The Full Monty’s Mark Addy and a lesser Baldwin in 2000, but it was largely ignored. There’ve been attempts to reboot the series; one by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was rejected a few years back and, just last year, Elizabeth Banks announced she was going to voice a grown-up Pebbles in Bedrock, a sequel TV series, but there hasn’t been much news on it since. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of Fred, Barney and the gang; after all, in an age of IP-worshiping pop culture and cinematic universes, the concept of bringing them and The Jetsons together again is probably too enticing for execs.
But I don’t know. If this cast and 35 freakin’ writers couldn’t make the material work, maybe it’s a franchise that’s best left to go down in history.
Previous Summer of ‘94 entries: