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Customer Reviews of Flintstones First Episodes

The First Season Is Finally on DVD!
This is an update to my last review: The Flintstones First season is now avaliable on DVD and I was very happily surprised when I found out that it finally was on DVD and I was thinking it would never happen or it would be a very long time before it got complete season DVD boxsets and though videos for The Flintstones were good it's much better on DVD!

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Hey, How About Complete DVD Sets?
The Flintstones is one of my favorite cartoons and one of the few cartoons I watched as a little child. It's nice that some of the best of the first episodes are on video but what would be even better would to have all of the episodes on DVD. I have been waiting and hoping for a long time for The Flintstones to be put on DVD and I wonder when and if it will ever happen!

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Flintstones Revisited
I recently purchased through this website a used copy of "The Flintstones-First Episodes." I always waned to own this cassette ever since I rented it from a local video shop back in the early 1990's. Even though I had seen some of the original "Flintstones" shows on television many times before (the series has been in syndicated since the mid-1960's) I really wanted to see these episodes on tape.

"The Flintstones-First Episodes" contains the first four shows broadcast beginning in late September 1960, including "The Flintstone Flyer," "Hot Lips Hannigan," "The Swimming Pool," and "Help Wanted." Watching the shows today, I am dumbstruck at how closely the plots and characterizations resemble Jackie Gleason and his fellow castmates of "The Honeymooners." I know that I was just a stupid kid of ten or eleven years old when I first viewed "The Swimming Pool" back then, but I have to admit that I never once got the Hanna Barbera gimmick of utilizing the imitated voices of famous 1950's television comedians for their cartoons (you have to be really dim to not know that Yogi Bear sounds like Art Carney but I guess that is what I was.).

A lot of information has been released over the years about the history of "The Flintstones," but I am sure that a lot of fans that weren't around in the fall of 1960 could understand the excitement the series caused. "The Flintstones" was supposed to be a prime-time cartoon series for "adults" and "The Flintstones-First Episodes" demonstrates that fact. The plots weren't complicated enough to go over the heads of the millions of kids watching, including me, but they weren't exactly about a cartoon cat chasing a mouse. It is no coincidence that many of the subsequent "Flintstones" shows over the next five years never came close to duplicating the grown-up humor of the original four. I was a huge fan of the comic strip "B.C." which appeared in "The New York Herald Tribune" in the late 1950's and early '60's and thinking that Johnny Hart's cartoon cavemen had to be a major influence on how "The Flintstones" looked and sounded.

Even more striking was the design of the cartoons themselves. Personally, I did not get to see a "Flintstones" episode in color till late 1965 so I was unable to appreciate the beauty of the character and background layouts that to me always looked like an abstract painting by Picasso. And even though some of characters seemed to radically change their appearance scene by scene, I also always liked the heavy black pen line that was used to draw them. For example, one of my favorite scenes in "The Flintstones-First Episodes" appears in "The Swimming Pool" when Barney Rubble fires off a harpoon and punctures the rubber tire that Fred is floating on. "No use wasting the lunch," Barney then says as he begins to munch away on a sandwich that was resting upon Fred's ample stomach. I really believe that the visual and vocal humor in that particular scene helped "The Flintstones" remain popular for over forty years.

Getting to watch "The Flintstones-First Episodes" once again also reminded me of the incredible merchandising that the show spawned shortly after it's debut. Many of the stone age cars, buildings, utensils, etc. that were seen in the original four episodes were soon adapted into toys, such as the Police Paddy Wagon seen in "The Swimming Pool." The famous Revco Toy Company created an amazing motorized model kit of the wagon, complete with cardboard figures of the policemen and an incarcerated Fred himself. Equally astounding, the Louis Marx Toy company took many of the structures that were seen in the backgrounds of "The Flintstones-First Episodes" and created "The Flintstones Play set" which was actually a miniature replica of "The Flintstones" home town of Bedrock. You can actually see play set's version of a snack bar in the "Help Wanted" segment of "The Flintstones-First Episodes"

I wasn't disappointed in "The Flintstones-First Episodes" in both 1990 and 2003. Even though I am usually very nostalgic for anything I experienced back when I was a kid, I believe that anyone of any age will find these shows historically significant and entertaining. As Fred and Barney said in many of "The Flintstones" first episodes, this tape really is "one of the good ones."