'The Flintstones' Could Become An Animated Series For Adults, But Not From Seth MacFarlane This Time
We're about to meet The Flintstones all over again.
Warner Bros. Animation is teaming up with Elizabeth Banks and her Brownstone Productions banner to develop a new iteration of the classic animated family sitcom, and just like the original run of the series, it will be a primetime animated series geared towards adults. However, The Flintstones reboot is said to be based on an original idea, seemingly bringing something new to the table.
The Flintstones is lumped in with a lot of classic Saturday morning cartoons, but when it debuted back in 1960, it was a primetime show on ABC that was meant to be a spoof of The Honeymooners geared towards adults. The show even had a laughtrack to go over the animated antics of Fred, Wilma, their baby Pebbles, and their pet dinosaur Dino. So having a series reboot that tries to do the same thing doesn't really go against the grain of what The Flintstones is at its core.
Unfortunately, as of now, there's no indication in Variety's report as to how The Flintstones reboot will be different from the classic iteration of the show or where the idea came from. In fact, we're not sure what kind of "original idea" will update the modern stone age family for today's audiences, though one possibility is seeing the prehistoric family brought into contemporary times. Maybe The Flintstones ended up frozen in the past and they're discovered in today's society and have to figure out how to adjust. That's just speculation on our part, but that would certainly shake up the formula a bit.
The Flintstones has a long history of different projects trying to bring back the Hanna-Barbera characters over the years. Shows like The New Fred and Barney Show tried to have Fred and his neighbor pal Barney Rubble spark interest in the series again while The Pebbles an Bamm-Bamm Show tried to have a series surrounding the Flintstone and Rubble kids.
Most recently, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was trying to take a crack at rebooting The Flintstones in 2011 with his own comedic style, but that never ended up getting off the ground. Beyond that, the most famous update of The Flintstones is probably the live-action film adaptation starring John Goodman as Fred Flintstone. Unfortunately, it's best known for being an expensive critical disaster.
Warner Bros. Animation is really making a push to bring back a lot of their classic characters in a big way. There's a new big screen iteration of Scooby-Doo on the way, and there were rumblings of The Flintstones and Tom and Jerry getting new movies as well. We're not sure if this new series iteration of The Flintstones puts any development of a movie on hold, but we're bound to find out sometime soon.