Published in 1965, The Flintstones: Christmas in Bedrock is a fun-filled romp through a good old-fashioned Santa-is-in-peril-only-YOU-can-save-Christmas storyline.
In this case, the “YOU” is good old Fred Flintstone who, after a trip out into the forest to get a Christmas tree – forgot the axe? Don’t worry! Bamm-Bamm has a pretty innovative way of getting the tree out of the ground – decides to get a second job at a department so he can afford to give Wilma and Pebbles the gifts they deserve.
While he proves to be pretty bad at being a storeman, he excels at being the store Santa, a gig that gets him noticed by the Big Man in red himself and which sees him setting off for the North Pole and then around the world to ensure every boy and girl gets the most special of Christmases, regardless of how well Santa is or isn’t.
In many ways, it’s a fairly conventional story, typical of Hanna-Barbera cartoons which were, and are, enormous fun to watch but not exactly boundary pushing like, say, Looney Tunes, but it feels like exactly the big warm hug you need when you come into the festive season.
Leaving aside the fact that the Flintstones’s era predates the story of Jesus’s birth by a good few thousand years – never let facts stand in the way of a festively uplifting story – what makes The Flintstones: Christmas in Bedrock work so well is not simply that we get Fred in vintage form, but that we are taken on exactly the kind of restorative story we need to feel good about the world.
When life is pressing down upon us, and we feel like we can’t live out our expansive dreams of how we expect and want Christmas to be, the allure of a story where we can play a pivotal role in making the festive season roll out exactly as desired is a potent one.
While Fred thinks his way of rescuing Christmas is to get a job to pay for the material demands of the season, what really emerges in The Flintstones: Christmas in Bedrock is that he needs to put aside his own needs and help out Santa so the kids of the world get the Christmas they need.
Again, very much in keeping with the conventional spirit of the season but it works a treat in the comic with the sheer joy of Fred, who when he’s not being cranky and a tad misogynistic, is actually a loving and warmhearted guy, when he realises what a huge difference he’s made to Christmas, and how his selflessness gets rewarded in some pretty wonderful ways when he’s not even expecting that to happen.
There’s joy to the world everywhere and Fred is swept up into it and so are we, and so by the time you arrive at the final panels where Fred and Wilma and Pebbles, Barney and Betty and Bamm-Bamm, and yes, of course, Dino, are all gathered around the Christmas tree with gaily-coloured wreathes and presents around them and wishing “To all of you from all of us … Merry Christmas!”, you feel much better about the world which is exactly what a Christmas should do, right?
