Yabba dabba doo! Reruns of The Flintstones in the late 1970s were a staple of my Saturday morning cartoons as I was growing up, and though I hadn't seen any episodes in years, the wacky cast of characters remained fresh in my mine. Who could forget Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty? Not to mention that the "Meet the Flintstones" theme music is well-nigh impossible to get out of your head once you start thinking of it. (Here, let me get it stuck in your head too: "Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones. They're the modern stone age family...")

Now, there are a few facts about The Flintstones that I didn't know in my Saturday morning cartoon sessions, namely that the show began in 1960, originally aired in "prime time", and ran for six seasons, making it the longest-running prime-time cartoon series until The Simpsons. The comparison with The Simpsons is actually quite instructive. In both cases, we have a parody of the "typical U.S. family" smack in the middle of an unselfconscious middle-class suburbia, drawing its humor from the absurdities of ordinary life and ordinary relationships. The difference, of course, is that The Flintstones, in 1960, was much too early to have the bitingly critical, satirical take on U.S. society and culture that's at the core of The Simpsons. Even so, though, it's tempting to see a few jabs at the status quo slipped in among the slapstick. (Take, for instance, Betty and Wilma's caustic commentary in "Rooms for Rent" on how it was the men, not the women, who decided that "a woman's place is in the home.")

After having only seen the episodes in a random jumble, with no particular sense of what stories belonged to what season, it's interesting to see the episodes in order. "The Flintstones Flyer" gets the show's comic mainstays in the action right away: the lazy Fred Flintstone, his neighbor the inventive and ever-cheerful Barney Rubble, and of course their wives Wilma and Betty, who are always at odds with their husbands, whether they're trying to get their own way (as when they audition for a part in "The Monster from the Tar Pits"), fighting over money problems (as in "Rooms for Rent"), or putting up with the what-have-they-dreamed-up-this-time antics of their spouses (as in "The Snorkasaurus Hunter").

We also soon get a feel for the show's generally slapstick style; there are plenty of people getting whacked over the head or otherwise generally knocked around, and of course a lot of bluster from Fred whenever he gets fed up with Barney. I couldn't help but think that, while it's clearly presented in The Flintstones with complete innocence, it's this style of humor that Matt Groenig is satirizing in the ultra-violent Itchy & Scratchy cartoons of The Simpsons. That's not to say that physical humor is the only kind of laughs in The Flintstones, of course: one of the mainstays of the show is the absurdity of "modern stone age life" with the variety of wacky inventions and fill-ins for modern conveniences. There are also a few witty touches, as in "The Snorkasaurus Hunter" when Wilma and Betty are having a picnic and a line of ants march in... whistling the theme from Bridge over the River Kwai.

One key Flintstones element is absent here, because it didn't actually appear until the second season: the theme song. Nonetheless, you'll be able to hear that the theme does appear in the music of the first season episodes, if you pay attention.

The DVD

The Flintstones: Season 1 is a four-DVD set, packaged in a cardboard fold-out case. This case fits (badly) into a (poorly designed) plastic slipcase. The sturdy plastic slipcase is, in itself, a good idea: it makes the set more resistant to wear and tear. There's also a clever art design, with the images of the characters in color on the partly clear outer case overlapping the black-and-white sketches of the characters on the cardboard case... although this also forces you to put the cardboard set in backwards to how I'd naturally put it in. The real nuisance is that the cardboard section is a very tight fit into the slipcase. In an additional challenge to viewers, the spindles to hold the DVDs are of the death-grip style, forcing me to struggle mightily to pry the little suckers out of the case, while trying not to exert too much pressure... I've never actually broken a DVD in half this way, but I'd like to keep it that way.

The 28 episodes (the complete first season) are spread across the four DVDs. The first three DVDs are single-sided and contain only the episodes, while the fourth DVD is a flipper with episodes on side A and special features on side B.

Video

All 28 episodes appear in their original color, 1.33:1 aspect ratio format. (While the first season was originally broadcast in black and white, the episodes were all created in color from the very beginning.)

The image quality is very good, upgrading to "excellent" when you take into consideration that these episodes are more than forty years old. Colors are bright, bold, and vivid: exactly the way The Flintstones should look. The print is reasonably clean, with just a few print flaws appearing here and there, and certainly nothing that distracts from the episode; pleasingly, there are no visible compression artifacts in the image. The only real flaw is the continual presence of a moderate amount of grain in the image, but again this doesn't cause much of a distraction. To take an equivalent modern comparison, The Flintstones looks vastly better than, say, Season 1 of The Simpsons, even though the latter is working with much newer materials.

Audio

The original Dolby mono soundtrack is included here, and offers a respectable listening experience. When there's a lot of dialogue and noises happening at the same moment, the overall sound is noticeable as being a bit flat, but most of the time, the track offers a clean and distinct sound. The soundtrack includes a laugh track, which is rather intrusive.

French and Spanish soundtracks are also provided; these do not have laugh tracks.

Extras

Let's start with a quibble about the chapter design. Each episode is a single chapter, which wouldn't be a problem except that each episode begins with a clip taken from midway through the show, before the opening credits run. I don't like to see spoilers, so I'd like to skip this part easily, but I have to use fast-forward instead of neatly skipping it.

Apart from that, the menus are easy to navigate, with no excessive animated introductions. You can choose to play all the episodes in sequence, or you can select individual episodes to view.

The actual special features are on side B of the fourth disc, and they really don't amount to a whole lot. "All About the Flintstones" is a five-minute piece that offers a fairly general introduction to the series. "Wacky Inventions: Season 1" (6 minutes) is nothing more than a narrated clip-show highlighting the various bizarre Stone Age technologies that show up in the series. Of more interest is a minute-and-a-half clip from the lost pilot episode, "The Flagstones"; sadly, there's no context given about the pilot. Lastly, we get four early TV commercials (for Alka-Seltzer and One-a-Day Vitamins), network promo spots, and trailers for Scooby Doo, Tom & Jerry, and Looney Tunes Golden Collection.

Final thoughts

The Flintstones: The Complete First Season is a nicely presented nostalgic voyage back to one of the classics of animated television. While the episodes didn't really wow me, they're fun to watch both for their intentional humor and for the their unintended glimpse into 1960s suburban life. If you're a fan of Hanna-Barbera shows, this is a must-buy, despite the slim extras; for viewers in general, I'll give this a "recommended."