Flintstones fans i've made my love for the franchise known in the past but the one thing that i've never done is taken a look at one of the countless spin off shows from when the show was in it's heyday. One of the things that spin off like to do is shift the focus to people who are pretty much secondary characters in the main show well the show i'm taking a look at doesn't do that because it shifts the focus to two main characters and so here is my review of the debut episode of The Pebbles And Bamm-Bamm Show called "Gridiron Girl Trouble" enjoy.
The plot of the episode is that Bamm-Bamm's pet dog Snoots follows them to high school and while there Bamm-Bamm , Pebbles and there friends have to keep Snoots hidden from a dog catcher which somehow ends up with Pebbles joining the school football team. Yeah this story is as wild and at times hard to follow as I made it look simply because the storyline with Snoots get's dropped pretty freaking quickly which is a shame because that story was pretty entertaining and the one they replaced it just isn't entertaining at all.
Starring in the episode are Sally Struthers as Pebbles Flintstone , Jay North as Bamm-Bamm Rubble and Alan Reed as Fred Flintstone. Also starring in the episode are Lennie Weinrib as Moonrock Crater , Grumpstone and Bronto , Gay Autterson as Wiggy Rockstone , Betty Rubble and Cindy Curbstone , Mitzi McCall as Penny Pillar , Mel Blanc as Barney Rubble , Zonk and Snoots and Jean Vander Pyl as Wilma Flintstone.
The acting in the episode is for me at least one of the episodes better aspects which given everything else that happens really isn't a high bar to reach. That being said Alan Reed just sounds like he's been smoking a ton of cigarettes before going into record because he doesn't like Fred at all which is a shame because he does deliver a good performance as the character as do the actors playing Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm but the script let's the actors playing Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm down since we're not given alot of time to see what these characters personalities are which was fine in The Flintstones since they were very rarely the focus of an episode it's ok when an entire series is built around them and this is something that should have been fixed.
I don't really think that this needs saying since it's kind of obvious but doing the animation for not only this episode but the entire series is Hanna-Barbera Productions. I have to say that the animation is alot better then what I thought it would be simply due to the fact that it doesn't look cheap and it doesn't have the cheap movements that Hanna-Barbera is known for that being said however the episode does have the classic Hanna-Barbera tradition of using repeating backgrounds only this time it's not as noticeable as it is in other shows.
In what I think is a wise move they have the parents of Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm appear quite alot in this episode. Which to me is a good thing just because it reassures the auidence a little bit because of the fact they are alot more familiar with those characters due to The Flintstones TV show and the fact that they don't really play a huge part in the plot is for me a good thing because it means that the focus is solely on Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm as it should be.
The one thing I wasn't really expecting them to do in this show was for them to make Pebbles look hot as hell. The above image is how she looks in this show and she looks stunning as all hell which given that her mother is Wilma I guess was always going to happen but still she look stunning just to keep with the theme of characters in this show who now look stunning as hell they made Bamm-Bamm look pretty handsome as well.
For some reason when people talk about The Flintstones TV show they never mention any of the spin off shows. Which to me is just odd since it's still those same characters played by alot of the same actors and so it's a continuation of the original show with this one being a prime example of that since they aged up Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm to the point where they are now teenagers attending high school and given that Bamm-Bamm refers to Pebbles as his girlfriend in this episode they are most likely dating as well.
Now I did some basic research and I found out that this show was actually the very first spin off of The Flintstones so we have this show to thank for starting a trend that is still going on to this very day. That trend of course being producing terrible spin off of The Flintstones and even tho this show lasted for one season of sixteen episode the show did kind of receive a continuation with various segments airing as part of The Flintstone Comedy Hour.
As I said before this show lasted for one season consisting of sixteen episode with the show lasting from September 11th 1971 with the final episode airing on January 1st 1972. The show aired on CBS which I don't air The Flintstones and so it makes no sense to me as to why they would air the spin off show , U honestly feel that it would have made more sense for this show to air on ABC since that was the home of The Flintstones during it's run.
Now then boys and girls since is a comedy that means that we have to talk about the jokes that are in this episode. To me alot of the jokes in this episode just weren't that funny which is a shame because there are some clever set ups like the gang having to hide Bamm-Bamm's pet dog Snoots around the school but the episode does nothing with those setups like how funny would it have been in the dog accidentally ended up taking the place of a teacher the possibilities for jokes with that one setup alone are endless but nope the episode doesn't take advantages of them.
Overall this episode wasn't that bad but it also wasn't that good either everything is just OK and nothing more. Which is a shame because this was the franchises first spin off show and so you'd have thought that more effort would have been put into making the show actually good but nope instead more effort went into giving Peddles her own freaking catchphrase "Yabba-dabba-doozy!" as such this episode gets a 5 out of 10 from me.
All the images that I used in this review were gathered from either the official the Flintstones fandom wiki page or Google Images. I honestly cannot say which website is better for images from this episode or this series just because even tho Google Images has more images from both the show and this episode they are the exact same quality as the ones found on the official The Flintstones fandom wiki page so use whichever website you want to use.