The Flintstones (1960-1966), the everyday tale of prehistoric folk, was one of the most popular of the many animated television shows produced by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, creators of Tom and Jerry. An animated sitcom (it was modelled on the popular The Honeymooners (1955-1956) starring Jackie Gleason), over the course of six seasons, it followed the lives of Fred Flintstone (voiced by Alan Reed), his wife Wilma (Jean Vander Pyl) and their neighbours Barney (Mel Blanc) and Betty Rubble (Bea Beanderet, later Gerry Johnson). They were later joined by offspring – Pebbles Flintstone (Vander Pyl) and the adopted Bamm-Bamm Rubble (Don Messick) – The Flintstones was the first American sitcom to touch, albeit briefly, on the heartache of infertility. The show featured witty machinery and household gadgets refashioned as dinosaur-powered devices, deliberate anachronisms and all the trappings of the suburban sitcom transplanted to the stone age town of Bedrock.

At first enjoyed by parents as much as their children (it was originally broadcast at 8:30 on Friday nights), the tone of the show became notably more juvenile in later seasons and audiences began to dwindle and the show was eventually cancelled. But having scored a hit with their first theatrical spin-off from one of their programmes, Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! (1964), Hanna and Barbera decided on one last roll of the prehistoric dice and unleashed the Flintstones and the Rubbles on the big screen.

The Man Called Flintstone went into production straight after the sixth and final season had ended production and in a surprising move that still seems slightly baffling, did what so many big-screen sitcom spin-offs do, removing the characters from their usual surroundings and sending them off exotic climes. It also plugged into the super spy phenomenon triggered by the James Bond and, to a lesser degree, the Derek Flint films with Fred being mistaken for Rock Slag (Paul Frees), a secret agent lookalike who is pursued by bad guy minions Ali (Messick) and Bobo (Frees). Fred is inevitably mistaken for the injured and hospitalised Slag and recruited by Chief Boulder of the Secret Service (Harvey Korman) to take the agent’s place on a mission to Paris in search of criminal mastermind the Green Goose (Frees again). With family and neighbours in tow, Fred – believing that the Green Goose is an actual bird – travels to Eurock, stopping off in Paris before moving on to Rome, helped by another agent, Triple X (the overworked Frees yet again). The race is on to find the Green Goose before he can use his “inter-rockinental missile” to destroy the world.

With a big screen budget to play with Hanna and Barbera (who directed as well as produced, leaving the writing chores to series old hands Harvey Bullock and Ray Allen) were able to make the animation a bit more fluid (though not by much) than the very limited version seen on the small screen. They felt emboldened by the extra resources to create chase scenes, and have the families jet off to prehistoric versions of major European cities (don’t try to think about the logic behind all this, it won’t do you any good). Maintaining continuity with the series – and just about everything Hanna-Barbera ever produced – all of the action comes accompanied by the familiar exaggerated boings, bangs and crashes that make up the company’s stock sound effects library.

A degree of nostalgia will probably be needed to enjoy The Man Called Flintstone fully. If you were charmed by its humour and characters as a child you’ll probably enjoy this though as is so often the way, dragging the proceedings out from the 25 minutes of the television series to the film’s 88 minutes means there’s an awful lot of padding and the going can get a bit dull towards the end. If you’re one of those who never found it funny it’ll be hard work throughout. It’s unlikely that anyone would have been impressed by the litany of songs that peppers the action. They’re immediately forgettable, a bad bunch made all the more annoying by that fact that the film disposes of the television show’s far catchier and more famous theme song.

It’s all a bit flimsy really. The plot never amounts to very much and while the array of animal and bird-powered gadgets and appliances is extensive and inventive we’d seen many of them before during the previous six years. There’s a nice moment when Fred first meets master of disguise Triple X and he briefly turns into the vampire “Rockula” and “Frankenrock” – they’d all meet up for real in the television special The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone (1979). But it’s too long (cutting those terrible songs would have helped no end), not a little dull and whatever charms the television version had were wearing very thin by this stage.

It wasn’t the end of the Flintstones though by a very long way. They were AWOL for several years before turning up in The Flintstones on Ice (1973), a live action extravaganza and A Flintstone Christmas (1977), the first of sixteen made-for-television films that would run through to 2001’s The Flintstones: On the Rocks. Two live-action films followed, The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000), before a direct-to-video special, The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown!, was released in 2015, 55 years after the show was first broadcast. The series had been the longest running network animated television until The Simpsons (1989-) stole its crown, but adding all their appearances together no other animated (or live-action come to that) sitcom family has enjoyed the staying power of The Flintstones.