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If you heard that an updated version of The Flintstones, using modern animation and humor, was in the works, you’d be excited, right? What if we told you, though, that HBO Max is dropping such a thing with little fanfare, three years after its only season was made. Red flags go up, right? Read on for more…
YABBA DABBA DINOSAURS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Bamm-Bamm Rubble (Ely Henry), Pebbles Flintstone (Jessica DiCicco) and Dino (Eric Bauza) are on a boat, looking like they’re fishing.
The Gist: When Bamm-Bamm gets a “bite,” we see that the fishing line is actually hooked to a car, with Bamm-Bamm’s dad Barney (Kevin Michael Richardson) and Pebbles’ dad Fred (Jeff Bergman) trying to get it going via foot power. They’re going to Craggs Lake for a fishing trip but soon find themselves among so many people at the camp site and in the lake that Fred constantly argues with someone who claims he took his spot.
The kids and Dino escape to the woods, where Bamm-Bamm smacks a fruit down from a tree, and Pebbles thinks she made a scientific discovery. Soon they’re in the middle of a battle between some large, not too bright dinos and some flying, much smarter, velociraptor types. As you might expect, Bamm-Bamm sides with the lunkheads and Pebbles with the erudite creatures.
Meanwhile, after Barney’s scorpion bait runs off with the rest of the worms they were going to use, Barney and Fred get into a dispute. Barney, who somehow wants to go ice fishing, drills a hole in the boat with a red bird, then the two of them start sinking. Who’s going to save them, especially when their kids are at each other’s throats over which creature gets to eat the fruit in the forest?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs is basically The Flinstones fed through the weird modern-day cartoon filter that produced stuff like Jellystone!
Our Take: We watched the first three 12-minute episodes of Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs, and while we fundamentally recognize the characters as ones that have been presented on the various incarnations of The Flinstones over the past 60 years, any resemblance to that show, or even any of its spinoffs over the decades, is only coincidental.
The series, developed by Mark Marek and Marly Halpern-Graser and based on the Hanna-Barbera classic characters, tries to delve into the weird and wacky, the oddball and the strange, instead of giving people a story that is even close to something resembling The Flintstones.
There are attempts at making the show, even with its less traditional animation, have the look and feel of the classic series. A laugh track is thrown in during some scenes but not used in others, for instance. But it feels like the writers are taking the most extreme parts of each character — and we’re including Wilma (Tress MacNeille) and Betty (Grey Griffin) — and making that the character. Fred is argumentative, Barney isn’t too bright, Bamm-Bamm is strong but dim, Pebbles is smart like her mother but aggressive. The characters had more shading to them than that, even in the less-than-deep ’70s reboots of the show. This one just makes them all slapstick machines.
There was one good joke among the three episodes: Pebbles finds what she calls a Chameleosaurus, who can change into any form she finds. When she changes into Bamm-Bamm, we see her destroying the Rubble home and going “Bam! Bam!”, just like baby Bamm-Bamm did in the original series. “I don’t talk like that!” said the somewhat older Bamm-Bamm, even though we know he’s wrong. That generated a pretty good laugh. But one laugh in three episodes wasn’t what we were aiming for here.
What Age Group Is This For?: The show is rated TV-Y7, and we’re not even sure 7 year-olds will understand just what the heck is going on. But we’ll say 7 and above.
Parting Shot: While everyone floats on the fruit from the forest to get off the lake, Bamm-Bamm starts eating his and sinking. “He doesn’t make good choices,” Pebbles says about her friend.
Sleeper Star: Bergman and MacNeille do a fine job of imitating Alan Reed and Jean Vander Pyl, the original Fred and Wilma. And we’ll just leave it at that.
Most Pilot-y Line: Ok, we won’t. Kevin Michael Richardson is a talented voice artist, but he makes Barney sound like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy. Early versions of Mel Blanc’s Barney had a high-pitched voice, too, but there was a reason why Blanc eventually deepened Barney’s voice. It was entirely less irritating to the ear.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs was actually made in 2018, and is only reaching streaming airwaves now (it aired on Boomerang UK in 2020); from what we’ve read, a second season was never ordered. Once you watch an episode or two, you’ll know why.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
