 Welcome to another video. Before I get started, check the link in the pinned comment to sign up and get a plushie of me. These are limited edition, so go check him out. See? He looks exactly like me. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Alright, stop me if you've heard this before. This video here is about a Flintstones comic, and that is a dark and edgy retelling of something made for children. Like, surely you have never heard of anything like that, right? You know, taking something for kids, but like, oh look, now it's edgy and dark and serious, and like, they're swearing in sex and violence. Yeah, that's cool, right? That's totally different. No one else has ever done that before, and obviously that's been done a lot. Remember when there was Lunatics Unleashed? That was a cartoon where they tried to do a dark and edgy Looney Tunes reboot? That was a thing. If you didn't know about that, go check it out. It's not the worst show ever, but it is. Like, it's trying so hard to be serious, and it just winds up being even goofier than the original Looney Tunes. And upon hearing me say that, okay, there was a very short run of comics that came out in 2016 that was a more adult version of the Flintstones, you might think that this is going to be something similar. Especially when I tell you that in the backstory, Fred Flintstone and his friend Barney Rubble were both soldiers in a genocidal war against a rival tribe of people because Bedrock wanted to steal their land. Or when I tell you that the Great Gazoo, you know, the little green alien that's there sometimes, and sometimes he isn't, that's a bit of deep Flintstones lore. If you're only passingly familiar with it, you might be confused by that, but no, that was the thing. But anyways, in this version, he's like a game warden almost, and he's there on Earth specifically to protect Earth from other aliens coming in that might try to invade or take advantage of it somehow. Or if I tell you that this comic series has mayoral elections where there's arguments about where the budget should go and if they should close down children's hospitals and stuff, there's an entire issue here that's about marriage legality and the legality of marriage, we'll get into that a little bit later, but it's like changing cultural norms and stuff. And there's also a bunch of really long monologues, mostly from Fred Flintstone, but occasionally from other characters about just the nature of morality and civilization and the meaning of life and stuff. And if I tell you all of that, then you will probably think that this comic series is going to be, well, it's going to be similar to like Lunatics Unleashed or Blood and Honey or one of the other things that is just taking something for kids, trying to make it dark and edgy, but just coming across as even goofier than before and even stupider and so it just doesn't really work on any level, like the only enjoyment that could come from it is purely ironic. But that's not the case here. See, the goofiness here is totally acknowledged, like the goofiness of taking something that's made for kids and that is also just like a very weird setup to begin with and trying to make it serious and trying to tell a serious story with it is straight up acknowledged. Like whenever they do something serious, there's an undercurrent of, yeah, this is a little weird and silly and so that just makes it even funnier. Like it makes it clear that, okay, the people writing this are in on the joke. And so a lot of this comic is pretty light hearted. There's a lot of jokes spread throughout. Like there's puns looking at the businesses that are in their town and everything. Like the one that sticks with me most is that there's a gay bar called Homo erectus. I'm a child, but that really makes me laugh and just, you know, things like that. There's a lot of jokes spread throughout and the serious bits are also part of the joke a lot of the time. And yet at the same time, in spite of that weird juxtaposition making it even funnier, it's just so earnest that the serious bits, like the really serious bits, do hit a bit harder than they otherwise would. So the Flintstones, if you're watching this and you're at all unfamiliar, it's a really old cartoon, an old Hannah Barber cartoon from the 60s and it's basically just about this guy whose name is Fred Flintstone and he has a wife named Wilma, he has a best friend named Barney Rubble. He lives in a town called Bedrock and it is like this weird prehistoric era town where people live alongside dinosaurs and saber tooth cats and stuff. And they live pretty close to what we do. You know, Fred Flintstone works in a quarry and his family is pretty normal, his friends and everybody are pretty normal. They go to movie theaters, go through life and stuff. But then they also have this weird stone punk technology, which obviously they didn't have back then. Again, they use animals as lawnmowers and garbage disposals. And again, they take photos and the way I've seen them do that is they have a big box which is supposed to be a camera, they press a button and then there's a little stone tablet and a bird will just etch a drawing of the scene into the stone tablet and that's supposed to be the picture. If you haven't seen the Flintstones, again, it's a very old cartoon so some of the jokes don't land quite as well as they do nowadays, but there's stuff like that which I still find very funny. And more recently they've also done some other stuff with it. Like in the 90s there were some live action movies with the Flintstones. They've done a couple other cartoons in the years since and well, that's about it. It's not really the cultural icon it used to be. And like I said, this comic, it doesn't have a whole lot of story to it, but it is basically just taking that original idea, trying to not just make it darker but make it make a little bit more sense, you know, go into a little bit more detail about how exactly this world works because again they have like mayoral elections and stuff and they talk about like, hey, here's how the government works, here's how society works, here's how we went from being hunter-gatherers to where we are now, which is actually kind of interesting even if it's not at all realistic. And then it's just doing that but also being really goofy and silly and funny throughout. Like there's this whole weird subplot about the Flintstones' appliances. You know, again, because they use like actual living animals to do a lot of their household chores. Again, they have an elephant which is a vacuum cleaner and stuff like that. And there's a whole subplot about how the appliances hate being mistreated the way they are and they kind of try to rebel and escape in some ways. And this whole thing is really funny and I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen it anywhere else in the Flintstones before. Like, yeah, you're horribly abusing living animals. Maybe they would be upset about that at some point. I don't know, but it is weird that I've never seen that before. And this subplot is funny, but it's also bizarrely dark. Like it is easily the darkest part of the entire series. And it's like sad and heartbreaking, but it's still... I don't know, it's like one of the parts of the series that stuck with me most. Like there's, for example, in this world, whenever an appliance no longer works, they take it to be recycled and recycled is where they just throw it into a big shredder and it gets cut into little pieces and becomes cubes of meat. And then that meat is just sold as food for other appliances. And that's simultaneously really dark and really funny. Like I said earlier, in the backstory, Fred Flintstone went to war. He was convinced by very obvious propaganda to sign up in a war against the tree people as they are called because the leaders of Bedrock just wanted their land. And then he goes through basic training and he goes to war and all the soldiers have these spear rifles. Which, I mean, I guess that's not the goofiest thing ever because spear guns are a real thing, but it still looks pretty silly. And then they go to war with them and by the end they just completely wipe out all the tree people. There's a complete genocide against them. And Fred understands that and feels immense guilt over it. And in the modern day, him and Barney go to like veterans group meetings and talk things over and one of their friends has very obvious PTSD and it makes sense why he would have that, but it's also played for laughs at a couple of points. Like I'm being 100% serious when I say that the best joke in this entire series is centered around the PTSD of one of their friends from committing a genocide. It's very, very strange. There's a whole sequence where a bunch of teenage aliens come to Bedrock and start partying for spring break and then they get an app on their phone which allows them to disintegrate humans and so they have to find a way to get rid of the aliens. It is canonical in this version that Fred Flintstone was raised by a gay couple named Adam and Steve because there's like a whole issue here where apparently Fred and Wilma and their friends Barney and Betty are some of the first people to actually get married like to be monogamous, you know. Pretty much everybody else is in polyamorous relationships where they just kind of have sex with a whole bunch of people all at once and they don't really commit to each other. And people are reacting to this new institution of marriage the same way they reacted to like gay people wanting to get married a couple of years ago and some people still react that way. But like it's very obviously meant to be a metaphor for that because there's people that are carrying protest signs that say stuff like God hates dads and stuff. And it just, it made me laugh really hard. But at the same time it is that there's like an earnestness to it where Fred Flintstone says, hey, maybe this won't work. I don't know, but I love my wife and I just want to live this way with her and you can all live your way. I'm not trying to force it on you. It's bizarre. It is so bizarre. Like this whole thing is actually commenting on some contemporary issues and it is again really funny and silly, but it just hits me sometimes, you know. And I don't know, like this is a short series, it's only 12 issues long. So if you want to go check it out I would recommend you do that because it's really funny and if you just don't get the humor or you're not interested in the Flintstones or anything, that's fine. It doesn't mean much to me because I'm going to continue reading this and I'm going to continue getting laughs out of it for a very long time to come. So I don't know, that's all. This is a short review. I don't even know if I call a review so much as just a recommendation, but go ahead, check out the Flintstones comic from 2016 and that's about all I have for today. So I'll see you later. Goodbye. Oh, okay. You're still, you're still watching? Well, thanks. I appreciate it. You know, I could always use more watch time. You see all these names here? These are my patrons. These are people that send me money once a month over on Patreon. If you want to get your name here and also get early access to videos and stuff, then consider donating, please. 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