TVSquad

This is a rather interesting video. It's a stop-motion depiction of The Flintstones, from the 2001 Cartoon Network movie Flintstones on the Rocks. Specifically, it's a dream sequence that features Fred Flintstone bowling and saving another woman (not Wilma). All the Flintstones sounds are here, all made to look like one of those holiday specials we see every year. Love the music too.

[via Boing Boing]

It's time for another TV list! Everybody loves lists, right? This one has AOL picking the best TV shows of the 1960s.

As usual, it's a list that will get the debate going. Shows that without a doubt deserve to be on the list: The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Star Trek, The Andy Griffith Show, I Spy, and Bewitched.

Shows that without a doubt don't belong on the list: The Flying Nun, Hogan's Heroes, and The Mod Squad. Sure, I enjoyed those shows when I was younger, but I really don't think they belong in the "best" category (I'll let you debate another show on the list, Batman - great or just "campy" great?)

The "Cash For Clunkers" program ends tonight at 8PM, which is probably a good thing because we won't have to hear the term "Cash For Clunkers" anymore. But what about TV cars? Which famous television autos are in such bad shape they should be traded in? TV Tango has a fun list that includes the Beverly Hillbillies car and Columbo's old Peugeot.

It's a clever list, and includes the new vanity plates each car would have.

SciFiWire has a list of 10 Saturday morning TV series that inspired movies and the list seems to be, to say the least, a bit skewed. To begin, the title is misleading. Most of the examples they use rose to fame as something else before they were even shown on television. And once shown, they weren't necessarily on Saturday mornings.

Popeye started as a comic strip and then cartoon shorts shown at theaters. The Addams Family started as a comic strip in The New Yorker then a somewhat unique sitcom.

I got the Flintstones complete series DVD set for Christmas, and I've been thinking about getting the complete set for The Jetsons too. The two shows are compatible. Not only were they made by the same people (Hanna-Barbera), but The Jetsons always seemed like a space age version of The Flintstones. The Jetsons had video telephones, The Flintstones had washing machines run by elephants.

FailOften.net has a fun piece about the technology of The Jetsons and how it predicted (or in some cases didn't) predict the world of 2009. One thing they got right was that video phone/video chat. The above pic shows a screen which is probably bigger than the computer screen you have in your home, but it's basically accurate. I particularly like that the animators remembered to include a camera on top of the screen. That could have easily been a bit of detail that could have been overlooked.

Before we get to this month's videos, two observations about Christmas commercials that are currently running.

The new Lexus ad where the guy remembers being a kid and getting a new Atari for Christmas and how that used to be his best gift ever until his wife said to hell with the economy I'm going to buy my husband a ridiculously audacious gift: is that Roger from Swingtown?

Second, the candle commercial where the woman buys a candle that smells like gingerbread men and then tries to trick her friends into thinking that it's not the candle but it's the gingerbread men that she just cooked even though she bought them at the store: why does she leave the candle approximately one inch from the gingerbread men? Does she think her friends wouldn't notice it?

Anyway, on to the classics...

This news has part of me saying "great, this should be fun!" and the other part of me saying, "oh God, please don't have Mr. Slate making a sex tape with Wilma."

Marco Pennette is writing a Broadway musical version of The Flintstones, and this version is supposed to involve modern-day topics such as marriage problems, adoption, and the environment. Now, this could be good, in a Brady Bunch Movie sort of way, if they really play it for laughs. It could be horrible if they don't.

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

Wow, if you bought all of the complete series sets being released this week you'd have a great start for your TV DVD collection: NewsRadio, The Flintstones, The 4400, Sanford and Son, and several others. The NewsRadio set doesn't have anything that wasn't in the individual sets, but it's a great buy if you don't have all of the seasons. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 set (the one with the collectible Crow and lobby cards) might already be sold out, so I'd check on that. I used to watch Zoom back in the 70s, though I can't imagine buying the DVD set.

I don't think I've ever seen The Doris Day Show, but it looks like something I might have to have.

• The 4400 - Complete Series
• Cathouse - Complete Series
• Dark Shadows - Vol. 6: Episodes 179-209
• The Donna Reed Show - Season 1
• The Doris Day Show - Christmas Memories
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman - Complete Series
• The Flintstones - Complete Series
• Girlfriends - Season 5
• Good Times - Complete Series
• The Little Rascals - Complete Collection
• The L Word - Season 5
• Millennium - Complete Series
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 - 20th Anniversary Set
• NewsRadio - Complete Series
• Sanford and Son - Complete Series
• Sister, Sister - Season 1
• War and Remembrance - Season 1
• Zoom - Back to the 70s

There aren't a lot of TV shows that I can watch with my kids and enjoy them. They love crap on the Disney Channel and I love The Daily Show. While we both love Spongebob, I can only see the same episode so many times.

One show that seems to hold up for all of us is The Flintstones. The kids especially like the later episodes with Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm.

I haven't seen an episode of The Flintstones in many years. It was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid, and I watched them as an adult, too, but it's just one of those shows that I haven't gone back to in the past five or ten years. I've been thinking about buying the season DVD sets (there are six seasons), but now it looks like I'm going to hold off on that because there's a complete series set coming later this year!

Warner is coming out with this cool-looking set that will house all six seasons in a special box that looks like a TV set (albeit one made of rocks with rock knobs). The DVDs themselves will slide into holders that are book-shaped and contain all of the info about what's on each DVD.

No word yet on extras, but the individual sets for each season contain extras such as rare, unseen footage, original storyboards, documentaries (including a guide to raising a child in the Stone Age), promo spots, and the original pilot (The Flagstones).

This seems to be a very active week for celebrity deaths, and it's sad to report that Carol Burnett Show veteran Harvey Korman has died at age 81. He died of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm at his UCLA Medical Center.

Besides The Carol Burnett Show, where Korman teamed for a ton of great sketches with Tim Conway (often cracking each other up), Korman appeared in many other shows since the early 60s, including ER, Ellen, Perry Mason, Route 66, The Red Skelton Show, Dennis the Menace, Hazel, Jack Benny, Gidget, The Lucy Show, The Munsters, The Wild, Wild West, F Troop, and many others. He was a regular on the sitcom Mama's Family and did the voice of The Great Gazoo on The Flintstones. Movies that Korman appeared in include History of the World, Part 1, High Anxiety, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Blazing Saddles, Son of Flubber, Gypsy, and others.

Do you ever get the feeling that all of the great classic stars and performers are dying and it's going to be a very different world in a couple of years? Rather depressing.

Let's talk about cereal commercials (again).

I thought of all of the cereal commercials we've had over the years after seeing the latest ads for Fiber One. Yes, to answer your question, that is Kate and Allie's Fred Koehler playing the store clerk who calls the manager over after the customer has a question about the lack of twigs in his cereal (that's Koehler with Johnathon Schaech). At first I thought to myself, "why is he doing cereal commercials instead of TV shows and movies?," but then I figured, hey, we all have to pay the bills, and Fiber One cereal is good! I just saw a sequel to the ad that features new Fiber One/Yoplait Yogurt and in it you see Kathryn Joosten, a great actress who played Mrs. Landingham on The West Wing and Mrs. McCluskey on Desperate Housewives and...well, a million other roles. So it's actually very cool to see them doing this stuff along with their many other roles.

AOL Television has compiled a list of the 50 Best TV Comedies -- Ever, this week revealing numbers 50-41. Inspired by what they did, I've decided to list my favorite sitcom sidekicks, those funny foils that oftentimes make the star shine even brighter than you might have thought. Coming up with just a ten-pack hasn't been so easy. Many times, I'd look at a show and think, "No, it's more of an ensemble. There isn't one sidekick." Falling into that category were B.J. and Trapper John on M*A*S*H. Neither were Hawkeye's sidekick, really (any more than Radar was). Same thing with Friends -- they were all each other's sidekicks. Also, on The Odd Couple, Oscar and Felix were equal; neither was a sidekick. Ditto Two and a Half Men and Laverne & Shirley. Also, because it's my list, I decided not to include married couples -- sorry Rob and Laura, Ricky and Lucy, Archie and Edith.

Whew, after all that, here, in alphabetical order, are the ten I love -- within my own parameters! Feel free to comment with your choices, if your favorite isn't on my list.

Allan Melvin had so many roles on so many TV shows over the years that it's hard to know where to begin, but I guess the most logical spot would be The Brady Bunch, where he played Sam The Butcher, the guy Alice dated. He was also a regular on The Phil Silvers Show, played Archie Bunker's friend Barney on All in the Family, and also played Rob's army buddy on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He appeared on dozens of other shows over the years, from the Andy Griffith Show (he always played a crook - that's him on the right in the pic) and Gomer Pyle, USMC to Kung Fu and The Banana Splits (he was Drooper).

You would probably also recognize his voice in many cartoons, including Magilla Gorilla, The Flintstones, The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour, The Smurfs, Spider-Man and Friends, Foofur, Ducktales, Talespin, and others.

He died of cancer in Los Angeles.

The first ingredient in a successful TCA party is to have it near the hotel where the tour is taking place. After sitting in panels and conducting interviews all day long, a shuttle bus ride to a faraway restaurant isn't really enticing.

So kudos to NBC for making a smart move by having its all-star gala on the roof of the Beverly Hilton's parking lot. It's an elevator ride away and the area is wide open. The party music isn't so loud that it's going to drown out any interviews. Nice.

Swag alert: guests received mini handheld fans upon arriving, but they weren't really needed because there was a nice evening breeze in the air.