Bedrock's Unsolved Mysteries

19. Are they talking sequel?

Duh. As producer Cohen puts it, "You can't help but have that come up." Even so, he insists Team Flintstone is carving no new contracts in stone until "after the movie's been out for a while. And it's not a matter of how big a hit it is. It's whether there's enough new and exciting that we could bring to it."

Cohen and Levant may be game for a sequel, but the man who most likely holds the cards is John Goodman, who says, "I've been working in the business for 20 years now, and I'd hate to get typed into one thing." From the start, the popular star of Roseanne has seemed skittish about sacrificing his career to a cartoon. As for The Flintstones II, "It makes me nervous even talking about it," he's been reported as saying. "I'd have to see if the first one works." Without Goodman in the elemental role of Fred, a follow-up might get frozen in amber.

20. What does it all mean?

"One of the things The Flintstones seems to be about is labor — the whole question of what work is and where it comes from," says Sasha Torres, assistant professor of modern culture and media at Brown University. Because of that, Torres says, it's a good idea to see The Flintstones and Hanna-Barbera's space-age counterpart, The Jetsons, as a pair. "They're both solidly mid-'60s representations of what it's like for Dad to go to work," she offers. "George Jetson works at the sprockets factory, and Fred Flintstone's out with the dinosaur moving rocks around. They're about the fantasy that work has always been the way it was in the mid-'60s-and always will be."

Then why are we returning to The Flintstones now, in the '90s? "Poised as we are on the exit ramp to the information highway," says Torres, "there are really a lot of questions about what technology is going to mean for us. So it doesn't seem surprising that we would get this fanciful return to everyday life in the Stone Age — a simpler time."

Then again, there's Joseph Barbera's reading of the phenomenon: "It's a situation comedy, and all the stories are familiar," he says. "So that's easy to handle and easy to digest, and it's not over anybody's head."

(Additional reporting by Cindy Pearlman and Patricia Sellers)