The Flintstones

The Flintstones
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Flintstones is an animated, prime-time American television sitcom that screened from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966, on ABC. Produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, The Flintstones was about a working class Stone Age man's life with his family and his next-door neighbor and best friend. It has since been re-released on both DVD and VHS. The show celebrated its 50th anniversary on September 30, 2010.
The show's popularity rested heavily on its juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns in the Stone Age setting.[4][5] It has been announced that Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show) will produce a revival of The Flintstones for the Fox network. Development is set to begin in fall 2011 and the first episode is scheduled to air in 2013.

Overview
The show is set in the Stone Age town of Bedrock. (In some of the earlier episodes, it was also referred to as "Rockville"). In this fantasy version of the past, dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, and other long-extinct animals co-exist with cavemen. Like their mid-20th century peers, these cavemen listen to records, live in split-level homes, and eat out at restaurants, yet their technology is made entirely from pre-industrial materials and largely powered through the use of various animals. For example, the cars are made out of stone, wood, and animal skins, and powered by the passengers' feet (as in the theme song, "Through the courtesy of Fred's two feet").

Technology
Often the "prehistoric" analogue to a modern machine uses an animal.[8] For example, when a character takes photographs with an instant camera, inside of the camera box, a bird carves the picture on a stone tablet with its bill. In a running gag, the animal powering such technology would frequently break the fourth wall, look directly into the camera at the audience and offer a mild complaint about their job. Other commonly seen gadgets in the series include a baby woolly mammoth used as a vacuum cleaner; an adult woolly mammoth acting as a shower by spraying water with its trunk; elevators raised and lowered by ropes around brontosauruses' necks; "automatic" windows powered by monkeys on the outside; birds acting as "car horns," sounded by the driver pulling on their tails or squeezing their bodies; an "electric" razor made from a clam shell, vibrating from a honey-bee inside; a washing machine shown by a pelican with a beakful of soapy water; and a woodpecker whose beak is used to play a gramophone record....READ MORE

ChalkZone

ChalkZone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ChalkZone is an American animated television series that aired on Nickelodeon. It was created by Bill Burnett and Larry Huber, and produced by Frederator Studios for the Nickelodeon TV channel (executive producers: Bill Burnett, Larry Huber, Fred Seibert). It is distributed outside the United States by Canadian animation company, Nelvana Limited.




Premise
The main character, an elementary school student named Rudy Tabootie (E.G. Daily), has been gifted with a magically endowed piece of chalk that allows access to the ChalkZone, an alternate dimension where everything and everyone that's ever been drawn in chalk and erased takes form as the living and/or tangible. The show concentrated on the adventures of Rudy, his sidekick Snap (Candi Milo), and classmate Penny Sanchez (Hynden Walch) within the zone.

History/Production
ChalkZone was produced by Frederator Studios for the Nickelodeon cable channel. By some—not its creators—the series can be seen as homage to the 1974 cartoon Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. But ChalkZone went much farther, positing a world where everything that had ever been drawn in chalk by anyone came to life in the alternative chalk universe, endowed with the soul and personality its creator had intended for it. Thus ChalkZone took such alternate universe stories as Through the Looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz one step further. Where Alice and Dorothy were merely confronted by creatures and situations they had no control over, ChalkZone's hero, Rudy Tabootie had to confront the fact that there were consequences for what he brought into the world and how they interacted with the creations of others. ...READ MORE