I’ve been working on this theory for a long time — it may very well be the equivalent of my Masters Thesis. Sure, I’m a community college dropout, but that doesn’t make my intellectual ideas any less valid. And when any so-called intellectual sees what I’ve come up with, he’s going to crap his tweed pants, you mark my words on that. The essence of my argument is this: The Flintstones is a pop culture Rosetta Stone.
I’m not arguing that it was at all good (I’m not making a terribly controversial statement when I say that any cartoon of the “turn an existing celebrity/TV property into a caveman/animal show with a laugh track” is total crap), but somehow, some way… everybody, in all walks of life, seems to get a Flintstones reference.
Of course, the show has been on the air since the mid-60s, and we’ve all seen it at some time or another in our lives. But you could say the same about I Love Lucy, or The Beverly Hillbillies, or even The Honeymooners, which was the largely inexplicable wellspring from which The Flintstones originated. For some reason, more than any of those other programs, this one seems to be the key to making the long-sought-after universal reference that everyone will understand, definitively proving that pop culture jokes are not inherently exclusionary.
And this brings me to the heart of my theory: I believe The Flintstones is more than just a shared entertainment experience. I think that the show’s creators were tapping into some collective consciousness, and were presenting an authentic image of prehistoric times with their silly little cartoon show. That’s why such a nonsensical idea seemed to make so much sense in the otherwise sensible mid-1960s. And it’s why we all ate it up, and have continued eating it up for the last forty years.
Here’s my thought: maybe our cave-dwelling ancestors actually did live side-by-side with dinosaurs, which they used both to do their heavy lifting and as domesticated companions. Maybe they did use birds and elephants as household appliances, and drove primitive cars with their feet. Maybe we had primitive TV and radio technology back then, and we lost it in some great cataclysm, only to regain it in a more recognizable modern form centuries later.
And maybe those Chariots of the Gods nutcases are right, and extraterrestrials did visit prehistoric earth, in the guise of tiny, vaguely effeminate green dudes who, for some reason, preferred the company of working class dum-dums. Okay, there may be no direct archaeological evidence for any of this, but that never stopped, say, the creationists.
For some reason, in spite of a total lack of hard evidence, this all just feels right to me. I know it’s an uphill battle trying to prove it definitively, but I’m willing to put in that time and effort. Or, as our Stone Age ancestors might have put it, “it’s a living.”