Kristen Johnston as Wilma Slaghoople and Jane Krakowski as Betty O’Shale
the flinstones in viva rock vegas

Director Brian Levant is anything but casual when it comes to The Flintstones. He owns one of the world’s largest private collections of Flintstones memorabilia, consisting of well over a thousand items. He can tell you the date that the first episode of the stone-age cartoon series appeared on American television (September 17, 1960) because he was watching it. He directed the first Flintstones movie - a job which he describes as “one of the best experiences of my life”. And there was never much doubt that he would do the second, this summer’s The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. “Brian is ‘Mr Flintstone’,” says producer Bruce Cohen. “He knows more about the lore of Bedrock and the TV show than anyone alive today.” Levant’s beloved TV show almost didn’t happen, however. Back in the late fifties, when Joe Barbera first started pitching the idea, not a single American TV executive seemed interested in his 300 storyboards depicting the lives of two stone-age couples living at 345 Stone Cave Road, Bedrock. Barbera and his partner, Bill Hanna, had all the details worked out: the Flintstone household would look like any American suburban home, except everything would be made out of stone or bone or bits of volcanic rock. The family would have a pet dinosaur and a car that looked just like the average family station wagon, except that it would be made of stone, have sections of tree-trunk for wheels and be foot-powered. All this was initially too offbeat for the TV networks. American television still seemed to be run by the descendants of those Hollywood executives who jotted ‘Slightly balding, can’t sing, dances a little’ on the memo about Fred Astaire’s screen test. Perhaps they were the sons and daughters of the people who told Walt Disney that female moviegoers would run a mile from a cartoon about a mouse? Fortunately for us, there was finally a change of mind after Barbera had been pitching the concept to one network programmer after another for eight solid weeks. The rest is history. The Flintstones was the first prime-time animated series, the first animated situation comedy and the first programme-length cartoon. Four decades later, it still airs weekly on the Cartoon Network. Somewhere during the seven years that the original series ran on ABC, meanwhile, Fred and Wilma and their ever-present best friends Barney and Betty took a trip to a desert oasis called Rock Vegas, home of the stars, where they rubbed shoulders with the likes of Ann-Margrock. Entertainment was provided by Frank Stoneatra and Stony Bennett. “Rock Vegas has a huge place in Bedrock lore, says Cohen. “It was a place they talked about often in the original television series.” And, in a nod to that series, the soundtrack of the new movie features Ann-Margret singing ‘Viva Rock Vegas’, a version of the title song of the 1964 movie in which she starred opposite Elvis Presley. The rest, however, is all new. For starters, Viva Rock Vegas is not a sequel to the 1994 hit: it’s a prequel. “Brian thought it would be great to show them all meeting for the first time,” says Cohen, “and to go back to Fred and Barney, the oldest of pals since time began, and have them meet Wilma and Betty for the first time. We had the makings of a true romantic comedy!”