The FIintstones by Mark Russell

“We set fire to their trees. When the smoke cleared, there were dead Tree People everywhere! We participated in a genocide, Barney.”

 

Flintstones, meet the Flintstones. They’re the modern stone age family. From the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of history.

Sometimes I like to sit and think about the failed gritty reboots of times past. Power Rangers, Snow White, Superman, The Wonder Twins. In all forms of media there’s an inescapable pull that calls to young, hacky writers and says, “What if Big Bird, but a serial killer?” And those ideas generally yield about as much fruit as you might expect. Six episodes, two issues, one movie, largely forgotten except by the memelords and die-hards. And yet, the gritty reboot never really dies--right now we’re on the verge of Velma, a reimagining of Scooby Doo where Fred has a tiny penis and a dark secret. So maybe this was a good time to read Mark Russell’s Flintstones, and see how, once in a while, turning something light and fantastical into something a bit more grounded and world-weary can actually work, at least for a while.

Everyone knows the Flintstones, and everyone will find plenty here that they recognize. All the major characters show up--Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Pebbles, Bam Bam--and quite a few of the secondary characters make an appearance too--Mr Rubble, The Great Gazoo, Dino. There’s even a running subplot about the secret lives of the prehistoric animals used as appliances. If you’ve ever wondered how that elephant feels about being a vacuum cleaner, or if the armadillo likes being a bowling ball, well, you can finally learn.

The storyline, which is lightly serialized but largely episodic, follows the town of Bedrock from its pre-bedrock era through its small city phase. And these progression points are largely what drives the individual storylines. We see the citizens move from a hunter-gatherer society to a consumerist one (malaise sets in as Fred collects more “crap” than he can ever use), from a powerless tribe to a pseudo-imperialist city-state, from animists to monotheists, from collectivists to capitalists. And Russell is none too optimistic about the progression.

If you’ve ever heard of this book at all, it’s likely you know it from the panel where Fred tells Barney they participated in a genocide, and it’s true. Driven by a warlike chief, the Bedrock soldiers are propagandized to fear the tree people, until even the kind-hearted Fred is taken in. We see the war in snapshots until the final battle, a Desden-like massacre, where Fred realizes he’s been lied to after he finds a doll on the “battlefield”. “What kind of army brings children to a war?” he asks Barney. Bam Bam, by the way, is adopted in this one--his parents were killed in the massacre and Barney finds him hidden in a tree. Barney doesn’t get a lot of development, though we do learn that he has slow sperm, but Fred and Wilma emerge as fully-formed characters, as does Pebbles who may be the world’s first atheist.

Religion is, in fact, a major theme of this retelling. One of the primary time markers is who the cave people are worshiping at any given time. They start with Morp, an emissary of animism, move on to worshiping an elephant and finally, to worshiping an invisible god named Gerald, renamed G-d on the final page because Gerald is too long for the church sign. While none of the social commentary is likely to sway anyone too much, it’s fascinating to see how Russell is able to work in trenchant (and dark) issues into the Flintstones’ universe without completely breaking it.

In fact, the most striking thing about Russell’s reboot is how funny it is. We meet Adam and Steve coming out of the local gay bar, Homo Erectus. Dino is recast as a narc, hated by the appliance animals. Fred gets caught up in an MLM. The town goes into panic mode when their Dr Sargon (who is visually, if not characteristically, modeled on Carl Sagan) miscalculates an asteroid’s path because mating moths keep messing up his abacus calculations, and ends up taped to a cave wall. The local pastor fights for monogamy (which the villagers protest with signs reading “God Hates Dads”) until Adam and Steve want to marry, after which he isn’t so sure (“I guess I have a lot to think about... but I probably won’t”) And there are any number of anachronistic puns along the way.

Finally, this reboot works because it’s 12 issues long. I could’ve read another 12 perhaps, but maybe the biggest lessons are that people shouldn’t handle reboots unless they have real affection for the original material, and that, by nature, these things can only be good for so long. They tend to lean heavily on familiarity with the source material, and there are only so many inversions one can take before the eye-rolling starts. But Russell nails it here.