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Cartoon
The Flintstone Kids

Animal
Neanderthal child
Daughter of Shaq's new breakfast sandwich




Outfit: bow / Gothic bob / pelt

Tagline: The signature Betty Rubble giggle, in a children's caplet.

Plot summary: Despite two decades of Flintstones popular history and continuity, Hanna Barbara decided in the eighties to sacrifice it's legacy to the ten million self-replicating Flintstones Kids.  Similar to the "Boy Meets World" episode where seasons of Corey and Topanga disliking each other for cootie-centric reasons are replaced with the new concept that Corey and Topanga have been in love and acting like an old married couple since they were in the womb, "The Flintstone Kids" featured the two core married couples as children getting into mischief together and solving mysteries.

Here's the problem I have.   Encyclopaedia Britannica tells me that the maximum lifespan for a Neanderthal Human is twenty years, and that number doesn't go up until it reaches twenty-eight in Classical Greece.  It's openly stated that the Flintstones characters as depicted in "The Flintstone Kids" are all ten years old, meaning that this is the middle of their lives.  It also hints that the older versions we came to love first are all at or near twenty.   It puts Fred and Barney's constant scheming into perspective when you realize they were basically doing all they could to ensure that their children would be safe after their oncoming doom.  But what's more depressing?  Watching a cave man near death, or watching a cave child waste his days on mischief with no clue that his only destiny lies diseased inside the belly of his very own put-out sabretooth tiger? (more)

User Comments: I have no idea what blue creature the McBrickers skinned for their daughter, but the future Betty Rubble, in essentially the same clothes, grew up to be one of the first animated sex icons.  There has never been a satisfying reason to explain why Betty would end up marrying a cylindrical midget with a five-o'clock shadow, but I try to watch each Flintstone Kids episode with a keen hindsight.  I've determined that either Betty is a gold-digger for an unnamed sum of Barney's belongings, or Barney was one of those creeps at the quarry waiting for Mary-Slate and Asphalt Olsen to turn 18 and just gave up, bashed the hottest teen he could find with a club, and called it a day.

I have to say, though, adolescent Betty is drawn in a way to suggest that she would grow up to look like her live-action movie actress counterpart, the ever corpulent Rosie O'Donnell.  This was, of course, back when Rosie cared about entertaining people more than she cared about trying to shoot a koosh ball into a vagina.   So maybe Barney was just a beard.  But either way it's a lot more realistic than that movie "Now & Then" that tried to convince us that the childhood equivalent of Rosie was Christina Ricci.  No Rosie, you weren't Christina Ricci when you were ten.  You were a chunky cave child in a house dress eating ribs that could crush your car.  And your little wife looks like Barney.

User Rating: 5.9/10 (2,001 votes)