Bedrock | |
---|---|
The Flintstones location | |
First appearance | "The Flintstone Flyer" September 30, 1960 |
Created by | Hanna-Barbera |
Genre | Animated sitcom |
In-universe information | |
Type | City |
Locations | Slate Rock and Gravel The Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes |
Characters | Fred Flintstone Wilma Flintstone Barney Rubble Betty Rubble Pebbles Flintstone Bamm Bamm Rubble Dino Baby Puss Hoppy |
Population | 2,500 |
Bedrock is a fictional city from the animated television series The Flintstones . It is the primary setting of The Flintstones where the main characters (the Flintstone family) and their neighbors live. [1]
Bedrock's layout is largely unspecified. The town features both suburban areas and a developed downtown with multi-story skyscrapers. Despite being portrayed with a population of 2,500 in the opening credits of the first two seasons, it has a freeway system prone to traffic jams in many episodes. Additionally, the original series shows that Bedrock has a subway system.
In the original series of "The Flintstones," the street where the Flintstones and the Rubbles live has been called several names, such as "Cobblestone Lane," "Cobblestone Road," "Stone Cave Road," "Grease Pit Terrace," "Gravelpit Terrace," and "Rocky Way." The Flintstones' neighbors included the Gruesomes, who lived in Tombstone Manor. In later spin-offs, the Frankenstones were introduced as another set of monster-themed neighbors.
The portrayal of Bedrock's climate varies throughout the series. While the presence of palm trees and cycads suggests a warm climate, there are episodes and movies set at Christmastime that depict snowy scenes. [2] In different portrayals, the areas around Bedrock vary significantly. Sometimes they are shown as desert-like, while other times they appear as tropical or subtropical jungles. For instance, in the opening scenes of the animated movie "The Man Called Flintstone," the outskirts are depicted as a lush jungle.
The residents of Bedrock are portrayed as friendly and quirky. They have a strong community spirit and often take part in charities and parades. Bedrock features several service organizations, the most famous being the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes, which includes Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble as members. [3]
A police department is located in the city, where the main characters Fred and Barney are sometimes employed as part-time police officers. [4]
Bedrock also has a volunteer fire department that members use as a social club. [5] The capability of its fire department wavers throughout different episodes, with several episodes featuring a more traditional full-time firefighting service.
There is also a military presence near Bedrock; Fred and Barney get stationed at Camp Millstone Army Base after being mistakenly inducted into the army. [6]
Bedrock's city government plays a role in The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show , episode "Mayor May Not," in which Pebbles becomes the city's temporary student mayor for a week. [7]
Regarding health care, Bedrock has the Bedrock Rockapedic Hospital, where Pebbles Flintstone was born. [8] [9]
For a fictional town of its size, Bedrock has a high number of media outlets. Several radio stations (one of which has the call letters BDRX [10] ), television stations and newspapers have been depicted. One TV station is an affiliate of ABC (the Abbadabba Broadcasting Company). [11] Later spin-offs have the people of Bedrock also enjoying a cable and satellite television service. [12]
Television programs produced in Bedrock include the cooking program The Happy Housewife Show (which for a time starred Wilma) [13] and the teen dance program Shinrock. [11] Other depicted programs of Bedrock citizens, though not produced there, include such fare as Peek-a-Boo Camera [14] ', Hum-Along-With-Herman and variety program The Ed Sulleystone Show . [15]
One of Bedrock's fictional newspapers is The Daily Granite, edited by Lou Granite. For a time, The Daily Granite employed Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble as reporters. [4] Another newspaper is The Daily Slab.
There are also two recording companies located in Bedrock: The Keen Teen Record Company [16] and the Flippo Record Company. [17]
Bedrock is depicted as only having one high school, Bedrock High School, which is the alma mater of Fred Flintstone, his wife, Wilma, [18] and later his daughter, Pebbles. [19]
Universities shown in or near Bedrock include Prinstone University. Prinstone's arch-rival school is Shale University, and both universities are members of the Poison Ivy League. [20]
In the Flintstones, Bedrock is also not far from the Oceanrock Aquarium, the home of Dripper the Sealasaurus. [21]
Businesses in Bedrock include bowling alleys, pool halls (including Boulder Dan's, which Fred and Barney almost bought [22] ), health clubs, hotels, supermarkets (including Safestone's [23] ), the Cobblestone Caterers catering service (as the owner proclaimed, "We're the only caterer in town!" [24] ), a costume store, and an amusement park. [16]
Several fictional department stores service Bedrock; among them are Macyrock's (where Fred once worked as a department store Santa Claus during the Christmas season [2] ) and Gimbelstone's (where Pebbles briefly worked as a teenager). [25]
Bedrock also features the Pyrite Advertising Agency, where Pebbles works as an adult. [26]
In the first-season episode "The Tycoon" (in which Fred switches places with his double, J.P. Gotrocks), Bedrock is introduced by a narrator as having "a butcher, a baker and a pizza pie maker."
In the episode "The Long, Long, Long Weekend," which originally aired on January 21, 1966, Slate Rock and Gravel Company is shown as still being in business after two million years, with Mr. Slate depicted as the company's founder. In the future, the company is run by his descendant, George Slate the Eighty Thousandth. However, in Fred's dream sequence "Rip Van Flintstone," it was mentioned as having been out of business for twenty years.
In one instance, sauropod dinosaurs are seen being used as cranes at the town's most well-known employer, Slate Rock and Gravel (also known as Rockhead and Quarry Cave Construction Company in the series' earlier episodes).
Bedrock is depicted as having a drive-in movie theater where films such as The Monster (as seen on the marquee in the original series' opening and closing credits) and Tar Wars (produced by Gorge Lucas, as seen in the 1994 live-action movie) would play. Other features include the amphitheater the Bedrock Bowl [27] and several nightclubs, ranging from middle-class to high-end exclusive clubs for the city's wealthy residents. The 1994 live-action movie featured the exclusive nightclub Cavern on the Green featuring its house band, The B.C. 52s. At the other end of the scale was The Poiple Dinosaur, a dive located by the wharf that was known for attracting seedy, criminal types. [28]
Bedrock features plenty of fictional dining options including a drive-in restaurant serving brontosaurus ribs (as seen in the original series' closing credits), as well as several diners. [13]
The two live-action films also showed Bedrock with fast-food outlets including RocDonald's [29] and Bronto King. [30]
Bedrock also has several upscale restaurants including the Rockadero, [31] Maison-LaRock, and Le Chateau Rockinbleau.
Baseball, boxing, and football are all watched in Bedrock. The episode Big League Freddie shows a baseball team named the Boulder City Giants, whose home stadium is Candlestone Park. The 1981 prime-time unique Wind-Up Wilma also shows Bedrock has a baseball team called the Bedrock Dodgers.
Bedrock also features a professional football team, the Bedrock Brontos. Their rival team is the Rock Bay Pachyderms. [26]
Boxing matches are also popular in Bedrock; a season three episode features Fred and Barney trying to see a match featuring boxer Floyd Patterstone. [32]
The Stone Age setting allowed for gags and wordplay involving rocks and minerals.
San Antonio becomes "Sand-and-Stony-o"; the country to the south of Bedrock's land is called "Mexirock" (Mexico). Travel to "Hollyrock", a parody of Hollywood, and Sun Valley becomes "Stone Valley", run by "Conrad Hailstone" (Conrad Hilton).
Bedrock store names include:
The last names "Flintstone" and "Rubble", as well as other common Bedrock surnames such as "Shale" and "Quartz", are in line with these puns, as are the names of Bedrock's celebrities:
In some cases, the celebrity featured also provided the voice: characters Samantha and Darrin from Bewitched were voiced by Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York. Examples from the above list include Ann-Margret, Curtis, Darren, and the Beau Brummels. Other celebrities, such as "Ed Sulleystone" and "Alvin Brickrock", were rendered by impersonators.
Some of Bedrock's sports heroes include:
Ace reporter "Daisy Kilgranite" (Dorothy Kilgallen) was a friend of Wilma.
Monster names include:
Bedrock is the county seat of fictional Cobblestone County and is described in the first-season episode, "The Tycoon," as being 200 feet below sea level. Presumably, the nearby town of Red Rock was located in Cobblestone County as well. [33] However, no further information was ever given for any of these locations besides being set in a prehistoric version of the United States. Near Bedrock lies Granitetown, given in one episode as the one-time childhood hometown of Barney Rubble and Fred's boss, Mr. Slate. [34]
Bedrock in one episode is shown as being a two-day drive from Rock Vegas, [35] and in another episode, several hours' drive from Indianrockolis, which suggests that Bedrock might be located in what is today the Midwestern United States. [36]
Travel to Hollyrock, the prehistoric entertainment capital of the country, usually involves an "airplane" flight—the "plane" in this case often shown as either a giant pterodactyl, with the passenger compartment being a hollowed-out log strapped to the pterodactyl's back, [37] or a wooden plane with smaller pterodactyls on each wing as the "engines." [38]
The season three episode "The Buffalo Convention" shows Fred and Barney going to a lodge convention in Frantic City.
The season two episode "The Rock Vegas Caper" shows the Flintstones and the Rubbles, while driving to Rock Vegas, passing the Grand Canyon; However, in prehistoric times the "canyon" is little more than a small stream. Fred, however, notes it "might be a big thing someday."
The season one episode "The Monster from the Tar Pit" shows Mr. Sandstone of the movie studio Miracle Pictures talking to one of his directors about staging his movie in a real town. When asked where Sandstone walks to a flat earth globe, closes his eyes, points to an area of the map that appears to be in modern-day Northern Iowa or Southern Minnesota, and chooses Bedrock.
It has also been suggested that Bedrock is fairly close to the ocean or the Great Lakes, as the city has a yacht club, [39] plus the Flintstones and Rubbles have taken several trips to the beach. [40]
The episode "Shinrock-A-Go-Go" which originally aired on December 3, 1965, featured a dream sequence from Fred with an animated caricature of President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the United States Capitol in a prehistoric version of Washington DC.
Several small tourist attractions and/or camper parks have been built in honor of Bedrock. The most famous and one of the oldest is Bedrock City in Custer, South Dakota, which opened in 1966 and closed in 2015. Another Bedrock City in Valle, Arizona which opened in 1972 and continues to operate. Two Canadian Bedrock Cities, both in British Columbia, were closed and/or demolished in the late 1990s. One in Kelowna, British Columbia was closed in 1998, demolished, and changed into the Landmark Grand 10 multiplex theatre and a strip mall. The second one located in Bridal Falls, British Columbia (near Chilliwack) was closed in 1994 and was changed into a dinosaur theme park called Dinotown, [41] [42] [43] in turn shut down on September 6, 2010. [44] [45] Another Flintstones-themed park in Canada was Calaway Park near Calgary, Alberta. It is still in operation, although the Hanna-Barbera licensing was dropped several years ago.
The reason for the closure of the two Canadian theme parks was due to licensing. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the licensing for any intellectual properties of Hanna-Barbera changed hands numerous times before they ended up in the possession of Time Warner. [45] [46]
In the late 1970s, plans were developed for a Flintstone Fun Park to be located in suburban Jackson, Mississippi [47] but never got past the initial planning stage.
For the Flintstones feature film (1994), a street in Bedrock was built adjacent to Vasquez Rocks in California. It was open for a short time to visitors before being demolished. [48]
In 2018, the City of Helsinki proposed adding English as the 3rd official language [49] after Finnish and Swedish. This led to the local area of Kallio, which translates to "bedrock" in English, to be colloquially known as the namesake of the fictional city in The Flintstones. This has been exacerbated by the cultural ambiance in the area that is home to non-conformist bohemian souls, [50] including artists and vagrants, some of whom are living in conditions very similar to the ones depicted in the prehistoric animated series.
The Flintstones is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, which takes place in a romanticized Stone Age setting and follows the titular family, the Flintstones, and their next-door neighbors, the Rubbles. It was originally broadcast on ABC from September 30, 1960, to April 1, 1966, and was the first animated series with a prime-time slot on television.
Pebbles Flintstone-Rubble is a fictional character in the Flintstones franchise. The red-haired daughter of Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Pebbles was born near the end of the third season. She is most famous in her infant form on The Flintstones, but has also appeared at various other ages, including as a teenager on the early 1970s spin-off The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show and as an adult in three television films. She spent most of her time with Bamm-Bamm Rubble, her childhood best friend whom she eventually marries.
The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show is an American animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions that originally aired for one season on CBS Saturday morning from September 11, 1971, to January 1, 1972. With an ensemble voice cast of Sally Struthers, Jay North, Mitzi McCall, Gay Hartwig, Carl Esser and Lennie Weinrib, the show follows teenage Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble as they encounter problems growing up in the fictional town of Bedrock. The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show is the first spin-off series of The Flintstones. For the 1972–73 season, the show was revamped as The Flintstone Comedy Hour, with more time given to the original Flintstones cast alongside both reruns and newly produced segments of Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm.
The Flintstones is a 1994 American family comedy film directed by Brian Levant and written by Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza based on the 1960–1966 animated television series of the same name by Hanna-Barbera. The film stars John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Rick Moranis as Barney Rubble, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma Flintstone, and Rosie O'Donnell as Betty Rubble, along with Kyle MacLachlan as Cliff Vandercave, a villainous executive-vice president of Fred's company, Halle Berry as Sharon Stone, his seductive secretary, and Elizabeth Taylor as Pearl Slaghoople, Wilma's mother. The B-52's performed their version of the cartoon's theme song, playing cavemen versions of themselves as the BC-52's.
Fred Flintstone is the main character of the animated sitcom The Flintstones, which aired during prime-time on ABC during the original series' run from 1960 to 1966. Fred is the husband of Wilma Flintstone and father of Pebbles Flintstone and together the family live in their homely cave in the town of Bedrock. His best friend is his next door neighbor, Barney, who has a wife named Betty.
I Yabba-Dabba Do! is a 1993 American animated made-for-television film based on the 1960s animated series, The Flintstones and is a continuation of the series’ spin-off, The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show. It premiered on ABC on February 7, 1993.
Jean Thurston Vander Pyl was an American voice actress. Although her career spanned many decades, she is best known as the voice of Wilma Flintstone for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Flintstones. In addition to Wilma Flintstone, she also provided the voices of Pebbles Flintstone; Rosie the robot maid on The Jetsons; Goldie, Lola Glamour, Nurse LaRue, and other characters in Top Cat; Winsome Witch on The Secret Squirrel Show; and Ogee on The Magilla Gorilla Show.
Wilma Flintstone is a fictional character in the television animated series The Flintstones. Wilma is the red-headed woman married to caveman Fred Flintstone, daughter of Pearl Slaghoople, and mother of Pebbles Flintstone. Her best friend is her next door neighbor, Betty Rubble.
Barney Rubble is a fictional character who appears in the television animated series The Flintstones. He is the diminutive, blond-haired caveman husband of Betty Rubble and adoptive father of Bamm-Bamm Rubble. His best friend is his next door neighbor, Fred Flintstone.
Betty Rubble is a fictional character in the television animated series The Flintstones and its spin-offs and live-action motion pictures. She is the black-haired wife of caveman Barney Rubble and the adoptive mother of Bamm-Bamm Rubble. Her best friend is her next-door neighbor Wilma Flintstone.
The New Fred and Barney Show is an American animated television series revival and spin-off of The Flintstones produced by Hanna-Barbera that aired on NBC from February 3 to October 20, 1979. The series marked the first time Henry Corden performed the voice of Fred Flintstone for a regular series.
Dino is a fictional character featured in the Hanna-Barbera animated television series The Flintstones, and its spin-offs and feature films. He is a pet dinosaur of the series' main characters, Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Dino debuted in the opening credits of the pilot episode of The Flintstones, but is not mentioned by name until the first season's fourth episode, "No Help Wanted". Dino was voiced by voiceover actor Mel Blanc from 1960 to 1989 and in 1994 and 2000.
The Flintstone Comedy Show is an American animated television series revival and spin-off of The Flintstones produced by Hanna-Barbera that aired on NBC from November 22, 1980, to October 24, 1981. Outside North America, the show was released under title of Flintstone Frolics.
Hollyrock-a-Bye Baby is a 1993 American animated made-for-television film based on the 1960s series classic, The Flintstones. It first aired on ABC on December 5, 1993. It is the sequel to I Yabba-Dabba Do! and is followed by A Flintstone Family Christmas, which aired less than two weeks later on the same network.
Fred Flintstone and Friends is an American animated anthology wheel series and a spin-off of The Flintstones produced by Hanna-Barbera and Columbia Pictures Television that aired in daily first-run syndication from September 12, 1977, to September 1, 1978. The series was packaged by Columbia Pictures Television during the 1977–78 television season and was available for barter syndication through Claster Television through the mid-1980s.
The Flintstones: Little Big League is a 1978 animated television special featuring characters from The Flintstones franchise. It was produced by the Australian division of Hanna-Barbera and aired on NBC on April 6, 1978. It was an hour-long primetime special, as part of The Flintstone Primetime Specials.
A Flintstone Family Christmas is a 1993 animated Christmas television special featuring characters from The Flintstones franchise. It was produced by Hanna-Barbera and aired on ABC on December 18, 1993. The special was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 1994 for Outstanding Animated Program. This is the only appearance of Stoney and the final appearance of Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm in their adult forms as well as their children, Chip and Roxy. Hanna-Barbera continued doing the series but with the original timeline.
Bamm-Bamm Rubble is a fictional character in the Flintstones franchise, the adopted son of Barney and Betty Rubble. He is most famous in his toddler form on the animated series, but has also appeared at various other ages, including as a teenager on the early 1970s spin-off The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show and as an adult in three television films. Cartoonist Gene Hazelton contributed to the original model sheets for the character, and he has said that he based Bamm-Bamm's design on his own son, Wes.
The Flintstone Comedy Hour is an American animated television series and a spin-off of The Flintstones and The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, produced by Hanna-Barbera, which aired on CBS from September 9, 1972, to September 1, 1973. It was re-titled The Flintstone Comedy Show for a second season of reruns as a half-hour show from September 8, 1973, to January 26, 1974.
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