5 Dinosaur Jobs That Prove God Doesn't Exist In The Flintstones Universe
If reincarnation is real, there’s a whole lot of animals I wouldn’t mind being. Besides the obvious fact that you could end up as something sick like a great white shark or one of those capybaras that chill in hot springs all day, there’s also just the general plus of never paying rent. The peace that must come with a small brain that performs only basic functions seems absolutely divine. No work, no small talk, no Zoloft, just a general desire to eat and sleep in a decent quantity.
Unfortunately, for one very specific category of animal, they have been brought unwillingly into the rat race that is daily human life. I am speaking of the scores of animals who spend their lives in servitude of the Flintstones and friends. To give an animal a job is already a deeply cruel act, even when it’s an easy one. But within that cruelty, the job foisted upon certain members of the fictional prehistoric kingdom is especially unpleasant. For some, it may be a living, but for others, it’s a curse.
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Here are the five worst animal jobs on the Flintstones…
Vacuum
Hanna Barbera
First of all, you have to imagine the sheer amount of dust present in a stone-age settlement. Between shifting rocks and a complete lack of shoes, socks,or doors, a Bedrock home’s floor is already covered in a layer of schmutz and gravel that would choke a Dyson. Instead, this horrible job is the responsibility of a tiny, trunked elephant. This is made worse by a couple of other things: First, the fact that it pretty much exclusively involves his trunk means the little guy is basically doing hundreds of lines of dirt every day of his life. Second, the tiny size of what is usually a large animal would suggest that this is a child. Despicable!
Loofah
Hanna Barbera
The plight of this little exfoliating hedgehog is truly horrific. First, there’s the general physical discomfort of basically going through a bit of bubbly waterboarding every day. It’s made clear to us that the hedgehog doesn’t enjoy this, as he tearfully pleads to a sharp-toothed laugh track that the soap bubbles get in his eyes. This hedgehog also must live out the reality of what I call the Sponge Paradox: Is a used sponge itself clean? On one hand, you’re continually cleaning things with it, which would suggest that it’s clean. On the other, that sponge has touched every filthy thing you’ve ever washed with it. Luckily, a sponge has no brain to ponder this. A tiny hedgehog loofah does.
Shower
Hanna Barbera
The one solace our hedgehog friend can hold onto is the fact that he is not actively being burned alive — a fate that the mammoth who serves as Fred’s shower is not as lucky to avoid. They’ve even roped a little monkey into the equation, forcing him to carry out their atrocities of inconvenience. I understand the virtues of a hot shower, but at what price? Adding insult to injury is how much this heating system proves that the Flintstones et al have no idea how animals work. A fire under an mammoth’s belly would not warm the water in its trunk, and even if the water was stored there, it would likely already be at a toasty mammal’s internal body temperature. I don’t want to seem overly critical, but the whole idea is preposterous.
TV Antenna
Hanna Barbera
God bless this poor little bunny, forced to constantly balance himself atop the television like it’s a tiny Abu Ghraib. The muscle pain? The cramps? Simply unimaginable. Even the most generous interpretation of his day-to-day duties is an incredibly high-level yoga routine involving holding long poses until failure. Tack onto the physical pain, too, the mental pain of providing television programs that, by necessity of position, you are never able to watch. The best you can hope for is pretending a mystery show is a suspenseful radio play. Everything about this rabbit’s life should be investigated by the Hague.
Gas Pump
Hanna Barbera
I don’t know precisely what the fuck mammoths and elephants ever did to everyone back then, but based on their treatment, you would think they had tried some sort of unsuccessful coup. First, their children are forced to snort up rocks and debris from under the disgusting feat of their captors, then their bodies are burned in order to cleanse the filthy nude bodies of the same.
That said, either one is still better than the fate of the Mammoth Gas Pump. Filling a job that could almost entirely be accomplished with a big barrel of some sort and a single pipe, this sorrow-filled animal instead spends every day sitting with a belly full of poison, gas fumes leaking from its nostrils and tear ducts, stomach lining turning to shit, only to fill the gas tanks of a car that RUNS ON FEET ANYWAYS. Not to mention that if anyone rubs two sticks together too close to this poor creature, suddenly everything’s red and blue and mammoth all over.
