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| Meet the Flintstones (from the album Lemon Fish Tweezer)
Fred...
FLINTSTONES... meet the Flintstones... I had kind of a bad experience with The Flintstones when I was very young. Such a terrible experience with The Flintstones that only watched the show once and then I could never stand to watch it again. Let me tell you about it. The Flintstones premiered on television back in 1960, when I was seven years old. It was kind of an unhappy time in my life. My father was in the hospital, dying of multiple sclerosis. My mother was in a psychiatric ward receiving electroshock therapy. (She was never really the same after that.) I had no other family to speak of beyond my parents. No brothers. No sisters. No friendly adults to watch out for me. But I did have... a wicked uncle. He put me in a military academy. A year-round, military boarding school. No vacations, no going home on weekends. Not a pleasant place. I was there for second, third and fourth grade.
No television in military school. No movies. Not much fun. My roommate, though, he got to go home on weekends so that his family could pretend that they were a normal "Leave It to Beaver" type American family. He got to watch TV and go to the movies when he went home. He'd always tell me about what he saw. "Henry! I saw the most incredible movie! The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms! It was about this giant dinosaur. The army had a big fight with it in an amusement park. It smashed a roller coaster! I don't know how they did the special effects. But it looked real! A real dinosaur!" So he told me the whole story of the movie - as kids do. It sounded great! My kind of movie! You know, a few years later I got a chance to see The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms and it was even better than I had imagined. After another weekend at home my roommate came back to the military school and said: "Henry! I saw the first episode of this new TV series called The Flintstones! It's great! It's all about a family of cavemen who live in this town called Bedrock. They live in houses made of boulders and there are dinosaurs all over the place! They drive stone automobiles that are dinosaur powered! Fred Flintstone, he's the hero, works in a construction site where they use a brontosaurus for a crane! The Flintstones even have a dinosaur for a pet. His name is Dino and he's just like a dog!" Wow... A dinosaur for a pet. No pets in military school. And certainly no dinosaurs. Well, for the next seven or eight weeks my roommate would come back to the barracks after each weekend at his home and tell me the story of all the Flintstones episodes that he had seen. Especially he'd tell me about every dinosaur and all of the dinosaur-powered machines. This sure sounded like my kind of TV show. Suddenly I had a chance to see The Flintstones myself. My father was feeling a little better and his doctors decided to let him spend one last weekend in the house that I grew up in. And I was allowed to come home from military school be with him. I really loved my father a lot and it was great to see him again! I think it was about the last time that I did see him. He died a few months later. We had a wonderful time that weekend. We did all sorts of things together. After dinner one night I explained to him that I really wanted to watch this new TV program about some cavemen called The Flintstones. I'd heard that it was full of really cool dinosaurs. I realized that it was on at eight o'clock, a half-hour past my bed time, but couldn't we make a special exception and stay up and watch it? He said it was OK! So we got ready to watch The Flintstones. We made some popcorn. My father rolled his wheel chair over in front of the big old RCA television set. I climbed up into his lap. He picked up the remote control and turned on The Flintstones! The Flintstones came on and The Flintstones was not at all what I had expected. Oh no. To actually see The Flintstones was a terrible, terrible shock. For my roommate had neglected to tell me one essential fact about The Flintstones. He had never told me that The Flintstones... ......WAS A CARTOON. Dino copyright Hanna-Barbera Studios, 2001.
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Site content Henry Kaiser and Michael Piper, 1997-2003 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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What was life like there? A lot of marching around the parade ground with a toy rifle. Shining your shoes. Getting your room in the barracks ready for inspection. You'd better make your bed really tight. When Captain Dutton came around for inspection he'd bounce his silver dollar off your bed. If it didn't bounce high enough: 25 demerits. No dessert for a week. Major Nichols puts on his white cotton glove. He runs it along the door sill at the top of the door. If you hadn't pulled that little chair over to the door to stand on, and stretched up real tall to dust off that sill - there'd be dirt on Major Nichols' glove. 50 demerits. No dessert for 2 weeks.