THE FLINTSTONES MEET ROCKULA AND FRANKENSTONE (1979), THE FLINTSTONE'S NEW NEIGHBORS (1980)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Though I enjoyed the 1960s FLINTSTONES show, its brand of "cornball caveman antics" don't grab me much these days. That said, there was a definite level of craftsmanship in the show that pretty much disappeared in a lot of Hanna-Barbera's 1970s output, with the possible nadir being another comic-caveman romp, CAPTAIN CAVEMAN AND THE TEEN ANGELS. Yet in that same period, the company put out this 1979 TV special, which was something of a return to good form. ROCKULA AND FRANKENSTONE apparently earned positive ratings back in 1979, given that Hanna-Barbera issued four more Flintstones specials and a subsequent FLINTSTONE COMEDY SHOW (which just so happened to feature the odious CAPTAIN CAVEMAN as one of its segments).
The 1979 FRANKENSTONE special doesn't play the monsters quite as straight as that standout in monster-mashdom, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. Nevertheless, the titular fiends aren't nearly as derivative as dozens of other swipes of the Universal Classic Monsters, and their motivations, while comical, are relatively consistent.

Thanks to the largesse of a game show patterned on "Let's Make a Deal," Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, and their respective wives Wilma and Betty win a free trip to the legendary castle of Count Rockula in the usual Transylvania knock-off. (There's no mention of either of their kids, who are conveniently missing.) For some reason the castle's being used to host a large costume-party for a lot of locals, and although the foursome come across a creepy-looking "Igor" at the start, he turns out to be an ordinary fellow. However, the locals tell the visitors a fairly complicated story about the castle's former owner, a vampire who had an ongoing feud with a clan of werewolves. To protect himself against these lupine enemies, Rockula created an artificial man, Frankenstone, but never managed to activate the creature.

While the party goes on, a chance bolt of lightning activates the long dormant Frankenstone (Ted Cassidy, in one of his last roles). The monster then revives Rockula (John Stephenson), who's been sleeping all these centuries for no stated reason. The two monsters expel all of the party guests, but Rockula mistakes Wilma for his long-vanished bride, and tries to convince her to marry him (though Hanna-Barbera never even suggests that he might persuade her by chowing down on her veins). Rockula finally concedes that Wilma's not his bride, but then gets the idea that he can still marry her, if he makes her a widow.

Almost all of the story takes place with the cavepeople running around the castle in time-approved "let's get outta here" fashion, but there are a few cute jokes. Barney dons a werewolf mask and temporarily scares away Rockula, who still has some wolf-issues, and Wilma, for no particular reason, wraps herself in mummy-bandages and mistakenly clobbers the masked Barney. It's certainly not as funny as the laugh track suggests, but the story does allow for more interpersonal comedy between the protagonists and their creepy opponents. The denouement even gives Rockula the ultimate reason to cease pursuing Wilma: the Terror of a Domineering Housewife. Cassidy reads Frankenstone's lines rather after the fashion of Glenn Strange, which is certainly preferable to yet another Karloff impersonation-- and though facially Rockula looks like a long-nosed Sid Caesar, at least that counteracts the way Stephenson voices the vampire with a Lugosi accent thicker than that of Adam Sandler.

Rockula apparently went back to the old crypt, but Hanna-Barbera re-used their Frankenstone design for the first of four TV-specials, "The Flintstone's New Neighbors." The new version of Frankenstone (this time by John Stephenson, doing a tiresome Boris voice) is the paterfamilias to a family of monsters who move in next door to Fred. Fred resents his weird new neighbors, including a wife with Bride-of-Frankenstein hair, a short Franken-tyke, and a teenaged daughter who looks like Munch's famous "The Scream" painting. Barney is more tolerant, and the friends fall out until the Frankenstones prove themselves to be good people.

This 30-minute special was a backdoor pilot to the cartoon-series "The Frankenstones," which also showed up as a segment of the FLINTSTONE COMEDY SHOW. For the record, the family also had a pet octopus and a monstrous maid, never fully seen on camera here but represented by a long hairy arm.