The Flintstones

Collector's Edition


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Details At A Glance

General
Extras
Category Family Theatrical Trailer(s) Yes, 1 - 1.33:1, non 16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0
Rating Other Trailer(s) Yes, 1 - Teaser Trailer, 1.33:1, non 16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0
Year Released 1994 Commentary Tracks Yes, 1 - Brian Levant (Director)
Running Time 86:51 minutes Other Extras Biographies - Cast and Crew
Featurette - Discovering Bedrock (41:26) 
Featurette - Opening Sequence Comparisons (0:57) 
Gallery - Concept Sketches
Gallery - Photo
Production Notes
Web Links
RSDL/Flipper RSDL (59:04)
Cast & Crew
Start Up Movie
Region 2,4 Director Brian Levant
Studio
Distributor

Columbia TriStar Home Video
Starring John Goodman 
Rick Moranis 
Elizabeth Perkins 
Rosie O'Donnell 
Kyle MacLachlan
Halle Berry
Elizabeth Taylor
Case Transparent Amaray
RRP $34.95 Music David Newman

 
 
Video
Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame None MPEG None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio 1.78:1 Dolby Digital 5.1
16 x 9 Enhancement Yes Soundtrack Languages English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s)
German (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s) 
French (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s) 
Italian (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s) 
Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s) 
Czech (Dolby Digital 2.0, 192 Kb/s)
Polish (Dolby Digital 2.0, 192 Kb/s) 
English Audio Commentary (Dolby Digital 1.0, 96 Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio 1.85:1
Miscellaneous
Macrovision Yes Smoking Yes
Subtitles English
French
Portuguese
Danish
Finnish
Swedish
Norwegian
German
Dutch
Annoying Product Placement Yes, sort of
Action In or
After Credits
No

Plot Synopsis

    The Flintstones is one of the most beloved cartoons ever to grace television and remains one of the very best things to come from the famed Hanna Barbera studios. But like a number of other efforts in the 1990s, Hollywood showed no fear in trying to transform the cartoon into live action, with varying degrees of success. Whilst the film is a very valiant attempt to make the leap, and it sure helped having such an enthusiastic collection of people working on the project, I have never found this an exceptionally satisfying effort, and returning to it again on DVD has done little to change my opinion.

    Plot is not especially relevant to this film for the simple reason that trying to bring two dimensional cartoon characters and situations into a three dimensional live action world provides a certain restrictiveness to what can be done with the story. Really, for any such effort to work, it must remain fairly well rooted in the two dimensional cartoon world. The broad plot however is that Fred Flintstone (John Goodman) and Barney Rubble (Rick Moranis) are mates working at the local quarry, when a scheming executive in Cliff Vandercave (Kyle MacLachlan) hatches a plan to select a patsy vice-president from the quarry to take the can for his embezzlement of company funds. Naturally Fred would not get a chance for such advancement except Barney gives him the opportunity by switching their exam papers, and Fred thus ends up in a management position. The position is highlighted by one very sexy secretary, Miss Sharon Stone (Halle Berry) which does cause some minor hiccup with Wilma (Elizabeth Perkins). The misdeeds of Fred as vice-president result in all his quarry mates being less than gainfully employed and the relationship with the Rubbles being strained to breaking point.

    No Shakespeare In Love here I am afraid, but the plot remains firmly rooted in the cartoon tradition and as long as you approach it as an extended, live action cartoon, you should have no worries here. The main problem for me is the characters. Whilst John Goodman is a very convincing Fred Flintstone, and Elizabeth Perkins is the embodiment of Wilma, the Rubbles were not quite so well cast. Rick Moranis is reasonable as Barney but Rosie O'Donnell simply fails to convince me that this is Betty Rubble at all. Sorry, but I see this as the very weak link in the casting. Then you have the great efforts gone to to provide a convincing live action version of the cartoon props. Whilst in general these have been done quite well, at times they do strain the relationship with the cartoon too much. There is just a lack of "naturalness" to the results, which may sound odd given that we are talking a live action cartoon here, but some of the effects just did not flow as naturally as I would have expected: I suppose they are simply too cartoonish in context to translate well to live action. Brian Levant certainly has a fair degree of enthusiasm for the task, being something of a Flintstones freak, and does his best but perhaps the conceptualization of the effort was simply too slim for it to convince me.

    All of which is not to say that at some level this does work, but I feel that the effort is flawed and that this is not a film that I would return to for entertainment on a frequent basis. However it was good to see Elizabeth Taylor on screen in the minor role of Pearl Slaghoople (Wilma's mother) and brief cameos by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and CGI gurus will no doubt be intrigued by the CGI work - especially that for the creation of Dino. The undoubted highlight though is a very sexy Halle Berry strutting her stuff as Fred's secretary.

Transfer Quality

Video

    Okay, Universal and Widescreen - must be pretty good on the laws of averages? Well in general it is, although whilst watching the video transfer I simply could not shake the view that there was something not quite right here, but not really knowing exactly what it is. Most frustrating.

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and it is 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was generally sharp and clear throughout. The shadow detail was very good, with a nice degree of depth to the transfer that highlighted a lot of the very subtle nuances created in the sets, without which the film would still have been watchable but not quite so interesting. Some of the night-time detail was especially noteworthy. There did not appear to be any low level noise problems in the transfer. I felt however that the transfer could have been a little sharper at times.

    The colours were very nicely rendered throughout the movie, although the palette was generally of slightly drab colour tones. It is nonetheless quite a vibrant transfer, although again I felt that it could perhaps have been a little more vibrant. If you are looking for plenty of gaudy, flashy colours here, you will be disappointed.

    There were no MPEG artefacts noted in the transfer. There were no significant film-to-video artefacts noted in the transfer. There were slightly more film artefacts noted than I would have expected, although these were never really intrusive at all.

    This disc is an RSDL disc, with the layer change coming at 59:04. This not a particularly great layer change and is quite noticeable and mildly disruptive to the film.

Audio

    This soundtrack is a much better effort in my view.

    There are eight audio tracks on the DVD: English Dolby Digital 5.1, German Dolby Digital 5.1, French Dolby Digital 5.1, Italian Dolby Digital 5.1, Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1, Czech Dolby Digital 2.0, Polish Dolby Digital 2.0 and an English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0. You should note that the Polish soundtrack appears to be nothing more than a reading of the script in Polish over the English soundtrack, and if you want to boggle your mind a little you really need to listen to Fred Flintstone in say French or Spanish - the whole nuance of who Fred Flintstone is completely lost in my view! I listened to the default English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack and to the English Audio Commentary track, as well as sampling all the other soundtracks.

    Dialogue was always clear and easy to understand.

    There were no real audio sync problems with this disc, although a couple of times, especially earlier on in the film, I felt that the sync was a little marginal. This may have been due to some slightly poorer ADR work than we would normally expect:

    The score by David Newman is not especially remarkable, but then again it has to work within the confines of what the cartoon would work with. It must have been effective as you always seem to have the feel of the cartoon with the music. Notable for an appearance are the BC-52s - better known to most as the B-52s - who added a bit of zest with a song or two.

    This is actually quite a nicely detailed soundtrack with some nice use of the surround channels. There was some lovely detail in the rear channels at times, but not as consistently as I would have expected. The sound picture is convincing enough and you were nicely involved in the sound, although perhaps needing a little more ambience at times.

    The bass channel was used quite effectively to give some projection to the sound picture, most notably the opening sequence of the film which quite positively booms as a rock slide cascades down the picture.

Extras

    As is usual for a Universal Collector's Edition, there is an excellent selection of extras on this disc.

Menu

Audio Commentary - Brian Levant (Director)

    This is presented in Dolby Digital 1.0. As it started off, I thought this was going to be a long, boring affair as there were plenty of ums and arrs, and he was trying to say too much about everything on the screen. After a while though he started to settle down a little and the commentary became a little more interesting, although if you have already watched the featurette, a lot of what is said is quite redundant. It is a reasonable commentary track overall, but not the best I have heard.

Featurette - Discovering Bedrock (41:26)

    This is a quite an interesting look at the making of the film, including extended interviews with Brian Levant and producer Bruce Cohen, as well as most of the main cast, that quite well documents the problems of bringing a cartoon to the (live action) big screen. Well worth a look.

Featurette - Opening Sequence Comparison (0:57)

    Well this may be quite brief, but this is a very good use of split screen to show the opening sequences to both the cartoon and the film concurrently. Whilst the film has remained quite faithful to the cartoon, there are a few minor variances, but this really does show how split screen can be used effectively.

Gallery - Photos

    Whilst they are unfortunately unannotated, there is a very large number of them - I lost count but reckon the final total must be over 100. Quite what the value of them is I do not know, especially without annotation to give them some context, but mildly interesting nonetheless.

Gallery - Concept Sketches

    With everything having to be built for the film, since nothing was available off the shelf, the Art Department had a field day coming up with all sorts of stuff for the film. This is a collection of 36 sketches showing how many designs came into existence. Whilst they too are unfortunately unannotated, this is nonetheless an interesting addition to the package.

Teaser Trailer (0:58)

    An interesting teaser in that there is just the words to the theme song with a rock bouncing along in an amusingly sing-along fashion.

Theatrical Trailer (1:44)

Production Notes

Biographies - Cast and Crew

Web Links

    Sorry - no DVD-ROM drive so cannot comment upon them.

R4 vs R1

    The Flintstones is available in two forms in Region 1 - a bare-bones DTS encoded version, and a Dolby Digital Collector's Edition, similar to the Region 4 release. There would appear to be no significant difference between the two Collector's Editions, therefore the preference would be the Region 4 release owing to the inherent superiority of the PAL system.

Summary

    The Flintstones is not the greatest film ever made, and I found it a little lacking in sparkle. However, it is not a bad family movie and worth at least a rental consideration during the long summer holidays, if only to keep the kids happy for ninety minutes.

    Video quality is pretty good.

    Audio quality is very good.

    Extras are very good.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris
4th December 1999

Review Equipment
   
DVD Pioneer DV-515; S-video output
Display Sony Trinitron Wega 84cm. Calibrated with the NTSC DVD version of Video Essentials.
Audio Decoder Built in
Amplification Yamaha RXV-795. Calibrated with the NTSC DVD version of Video Essentials.
Speakers Energy Speakers: centre EXLC; left and right EXLR; and subwoofer ES-12XL