What is "The Flintstone Syndrome" Anyway?

It may be the most unusual newspaper article about The Flintstones.

It was the cover story in the “TV Week” section of the Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1962.

A chap named Robert Anderson humorously talks about the series, but I really don’t get his point. Let’s set aside he’s enumerating all these gadgets on the show as if they’re brand new, when the series had been on the air for two seasons (it reads like something out of a Screen Gems press release instead of someone who has critiqued the show). He’s conjured up something called “The Flintstone Syndrome” but can’t seem to make up his mind what it is.

The headline calls it one thing, but then doesn’t refer to the example at all in the body of the story. Then it’s described as something else at the top of the story, and something else again at the bottom. The “how can this happen” version at the end makes the most sense and the story could have been pretty funny based on it. Like how do those signals get into Fred’s television set? And how do the cars keep moving for endless blocks (endless thanks to those repeating backgrounds by Monte and Art Lozzi we all love). And what is a “rock pickin’ minute”? Who picks rocks for a minute?

Oh, well. I’m sure Joe and Bill appreciated the free, almost three pages of publicity in a major newspaper.

You’re Watching TV? But the set’s off? You’re probably a victim of ...
THE FLINTSTONE SYNDROME
By ROBERT ANDERSON

A FRIEND of mine has a recurring dream [that's a rerun without a switch in sponsor] in which he is an archaeologist. He is following a native guide into the depths of a cave in the French Alps. It takes days, because he must dust each pebble along the way with a small paint brush. He grows weak with hunger; his guide goes mad and tries to eat an indigestible Brand X frozen dinner. Then—Eureka! He sees what is unmistakably a prehistoric scrawl on a square stone. He dusts it painstakingly with his stub of a paint brush until the legend appears: Welcome to Bedrock, pop. 2,500.
The dream ends there and the poor devil spends the rest of the night pacing the floor, wondering what would have happened next if he had not awakened. This is what psychologists might label The Flintstone syndrome. It comes from watching a certain cartoon series on channel 7 at 7:30 p.m. Fridays. It is rare, however, because millions follow the show and get nothing more serious than a case of hiccups from laughing.

Yet it’s easy to see how The Flintstones, created by cartoonists Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, might slink in and sort of set up housekeeping in one’s subconscious. Of all the highly successful Hanna and Barbera cartoons [Tom and Jerry, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, etc., etc., etc., etc.], the Flintstones, which will start its third year on TV next fall, goes farthest toward creating a little world of its own.
ITS chief characters, Fred and Wilma Flintstone and their neighbors Barney and Betty Rubble, live in the Stone Age suburb of Bedrock. Fred is a likeable loudmouth, very like Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners; Barney might pass for a neolithic Art Carney.
The enchanting twist is that they have Stone Age versions of all the modern conveniences.
The pickup for the hi-fi is a bird with a needle-sharp beak. The lawnmower is a grass-gobbling lizard in a harness. There are stone slab newspapers, stone TV sets, stone pianos, and “electric” shavers of clamshell with a buzzing bee inside.

They have movies [made in Hollyrock, where the big stars are Cary Granite and Rock Pile], Stonehenge drive-in restaurants and pterodactyl air liners. Flintstone plots parody modern fads and fancies in good humor. One time Fred wants to be an astronaut [blasting off from a catapult], another he’s a rock ‘n’ roll singer.
In one memorable episode, Wilma was “discovered” by Hollyrock and was going to become a big movie star. Fred, with typical bluster, insisted on being her manager. He quit his job after telling his boss off and began promoting. As usual, he ruined her chances and wound up eating a mammoth portion of humble pie. SUCH goings on have made the show so popular with adults and youngsters alike and it may last until the next ice age.
It’s great fun so long as you don’t start taking it seriously, so long as you don’t begin worrying about what makes those steam-roller automobiles run, or start trying to build a peddle-powered wooden helicopter like Fred’s. Once you do, you’ve developed the Flintstone syndrome—and you could wind up with rocks in the head.