...after this piece of prehistoric junk. Awful, awful TV movie. Follow-up to the forgettable one where Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm get married. Everything is by the books here in regards to TV reunions: Wilma and Betty now own a catering business. Usually when we revisit beloved sitcom characters in TV reunion movies, the women are suddenly career women now working either as real estate agents or own a catering business. No one knows why, but it is an unwritten law to which all bad TV reunion writers must adhere. Pebbles works at an ad agency. Hoo boy. And Bamm-Bamm wants to be a successful screenwriter, evidently channeling the dreams of whoever wrote this piece of junk. What's even more offensive are the voices and character design. Jean Vander Pyl was the only surviving original (main) cast member, and she's fine (though H&B had the annoying and wholly unnecessary habit of electronically "sweetening" her voice for about the last ten years of Flintstones productions she worked on.). John Stephenson returns as Mr. Slate, sounding almost exactly as he always has. Excellent. Don Messick does a quick cameo as baby Bamm-Bamm in a flashback. Nice. But - beware! - this is a Henry Corden-voiced cartoon, and as wonderful a character actor as Corden was, he was terrible as the voice of Fred, yet H&B would never admit it and recast anyone else until the amazing "The Flintstones: On the Rocks" TV movie 8 years later. Corden's bizarre take on "Yabba Dabba Doo!" ("Yappa, dappa-doo!") must have Alan Reed rolling over in his grace. Surprisingly, we've got Frank Welker as Barney & Dino. "Surprisingly" because Frank Welker is versatile and very talented and the voice director (Gordon Hunt in "I just don't care anymore" mode) has managed to find the two voices Welker cannot do to save his life. Barney's frequent, all-but-involuntary chuckling that punctuates the end of a lot of his lines makes Mr. Rubble sound like he's suffering from emphysema. Dino, too, no longer barks, evidently having had his vocal cords removed, but instead wheezes. Would it have killed the producers to pay Mel Blanc's estate some money and just drop in some old audio of Dino barking and yapping and growling from the original series? The character design is atrocious. Wilma and Betty no longer have feminine figures but instead have bodies that resemble men in drag. Fred's head and nose in particular bear very little resemblance to any of the models they used in the original series. I saw this when it originally aired and was mortified. I just caught the first 15 minutes on Boomerang this afternoon and couldn't bear to watch any more. Horrible production; typical of late H&B cartoons and cartoon movies. Avoid it at all costs.
Review of Hollyrock-a-Bye Baby
