By David Hinckley
Hearing that Seth MacFarlane has signed to create a new version of “The Flintstones” is like opening your front door and seeing Charlie Sheen standing there in his tux, waiting to take your daughter to the prom.
You can’t say for sure that bad things are going to happen. You just know they could.
“The Flintstones” is one of the great American cartoons – a long-running TV series that turned Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners” into a wonderful animated story with a personality of its own.
Fred Flintstone was Gleason’s Ralph Kramden, with Wilma Flintstone as his shapely wife. Barney and Betty Rubble were their best-pal neighbors and cohorts in mirth and merriment.
“The Flintstones” was also as clean as an organic Golden Delicious apple bobbing in fresh spring water at a health food fair. Like “The Honeymooners,” “The Flintstones” found its humor in work, home, driving, vacationing, shopping, school, money, schemes and all the regular nuts and bolts of life.
Naughty words? Innuendo? Didn’t use ’em, didn’t need ’em.
That’s not how Seth MacFarlane rolls.
Seth MacFarlane writes animation for grownups. He’s the brains behind much of Fox’s edgy Sunday night animation bloc, specifically “The Cleveland Show,” “Family Guy” and “American Dad.”
He’s good. He’s very good. He’s also very funny, and he maintains “funny” by pushing the envelope.
Actually, he doesn’t just push the envelope. He climbs behind the wheel of a bulldozer and shoves that envelope to the edge of the nearest cliff.
Speaking about his current Fox shows a few weeks ago, MacFarlane said his philosophy is that if you have an idea so outrageous it could potentially ruin the show, you have almost an obligation to follow it.
That isn’t a bad approach. It keeps his shows fresh.
But “The Flintstones” are not “American Dad.” “The Flintstones” is not a show where the Dad character would say, “Why don’t you just take a page from that b—- Hilary Clinton and let it go?”
Or where a newspaper headline would read, “Israel Pulls out of Gaza; Gaza Not Pregnant.”
That’s funny. It’s just not “The Flintstones,” any more than it would be Mickey Mouse, Smokey the Bear or Spongebob Squarepants.
Now the official announcement of the deal between MacFarlane and Fox, it should be stressed, included no specifics of what he will do with “The Flintstones.” It only indicated he plans to make a modern version and that it will debut in 2013.
It’s encouraging that MacFarlane says he loves the Flintstones and Fred Flintstone was the first character he ever drew. There is no reason to disbelieve this, and every reason to take some hope from it, particularly because MacFarlane has routinely shown respect and reverence for animation of the past.
So maybe he’ll “work clean” this time, the way the most raucous standup comedians have a G-rated routine they deliver to appropriate audiences.
But like all of us, MacFarlane is his own leopard, with his own spots, and he may feel like the whole envelope of the modern animation world has moved far enough so that Fred, Wilma, Barney and company need at least the kind of banter routinely heard in modern-day sitcoms to feel like part of the modern animation world.
If he feels that way, he could be right. Maybe sex jokes and satiric socio-political banter are the only way to get the younger modern audience, the folks who didn’t grow up with Fred’s corny jokes and the 5 o’clock dinosaur whistle.
Maybe most of the audience today thinks “Flintstones” is just a vitamin.
But it would be sad if “The Flintstones” returned as a sex-driven sitcom, even a clever one. That’s never who the Flintstones were and that’s not something they should become.
