Flintstone Theming

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Flintstone Theming is when a single pervasive concept that is basic to the show is used repeatedly for as many jokes as it can possibly yield, especially with character names. Some shows shoot for the moon and try to make a pun out of everything.

World Building is sometimes hard. Coming up with an endless string of bad puns based on the concept of your show, on the other hand, is usually pretty easy. At least at first. It gets progressively harder to come up with decent, original puns the longer and longer your show is on the air and the more puns you’ve already used up.

Compare Hold Your Hippogriffs. See also Mister Sandman Sequence, which is similar - only abusing Popular History instead of the English language.

Examples of Flintstone Theming include:

Anime and Manga

• Shinryaku Ika Musume's main character constantly spouts aquatic puns like "What the gill!" or "Let's get kraken! (cracking)" in the English dub.

Comic Books

• The adventures of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew were set in Follywood, Califurnia, in the United Species of America. And it didn’t stop there.
• Marvel Apes and its simian-themed naming.

Literature

• In Rudolph The Nasally-Empowered Reindeer, a story in James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Holiday Stories, some older reindeer scold Rudolph for "rocking the kayak." (Because they're in the Arctic.)
• In How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Who-ville does this with the word "who". For example, their Christmas feasts involve "Who-pudding" and "Who-roast-beast".
• There's a reason Harry Potter is the Trope Namer for Hold Your Hippogriffs.

Live Action TV

• The "new" version of The Mickey Mouse Club (the one from the late 1980s and early '90s) lampshaded this trope in a reunion special that brought back Annette Funicello and several other alumni from the original 1950s series. A black-and-white vintage skit "shows" that the Mouseketeers became so universally popular when the show first aired that everyone was putting a "Mouseke-" in front of every third or fourth word. Typical dialog:

Mother: Finish your Mouseke-peas. Daughter: Mouseke-yuck!

• • Then, of course, there was the chant of "Meeska, mooska, Mouseketeer!" Given that the original show premiered during the height of the Cold War, the Slavic sound of those first two words results in a bit of Fridge Humor.
• Countless humor sites on the Web have tried to predict how things would go if the dreaded Borg ever assimilated us Earthlings. They always have long lists of common catchphrases into which words like "quadrant," "implants," and "irrelevant" have been shoehorned, as well as the word "burger" being respelled "borger."
• Wizards of Waverly Place uses "wiz" as a prefix a lot. Lampshaded in one episode where Mason calls an echo a "wiz-echo". Alex tells him it's just an echo and that they don't just put "wiz" in front of everything, right before Jerry screams "the wiz-mergency wiz-light is on!"

Radio

• Subverted in one episode of I'm Sorry Ill Read That Again: at the beginning of a sea-based sketch, John Cleese irritatedly recites all the fish puns he can think of right at the start, to get them out of the way. "And that concludes the fish jokes. Thank cod!"
• Kip Addotta's "Wet Dream" also goes for the fish puns; it often gets played on the Doctor Demento show.

Video Games

• The Fallout series manages to pull double duty on this. Everything from before the war is either Atomic- this, Nuka-that or some kind of 50s pop culture reference; while about half of anything more recent is a Mad Max reference.
• Plants vs. Zombies uses as many plant puns as it possibly can. It starts with the relatively mild "Pea Shooter" and goes on from there.

Web Comics

• Explained (and used) in this comic.

Western Animation

• The Flintstones is the Trope Namer, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever seen an episode. Between the Stone Age equivalents of modern technology and the rock-and-stone puns tossed out at a rate of four or five per minute, these jokes are basically the only thing that make the show not The Honeymooners.
  • An episode of Robot Chicken lampshaded the fact that the rock-based puns sometimes just didn’t work well.
  • And, of course, The Jetsons did the same with "futuristic" and/or planetary themed puns.
• Futurama either parodies this or just uses it brilliantly by twisting the Planet of Hats concept into providing a different one of these almost every episode (using up every possible joke about shellfish along the way).
• Spongebob SquarePants oscillates randomly between "everything is replaced with its loose underwater equivalent" and completely ignoring its setting, depending on whatever makes the joke at hand work.
• The Abra-Catastrophe Fairly Oddparents special landed Timmy Turner in a world where the human race had been replaced by sentient apes. The primate-related puns flowed like water.
  • Timmy then lampshades this by expressing his desire to "wish for a world without puns".
• Fish Police, a cop show set underwater, where all the characters were fish, seemed to exist solely to make loads and loads of fish-related puns.
  • And then there's Sharky And George, a cop show set underwater, where all the characters were fish, which also seemed to exist solely to make loads and loads of fish-related puns.
• The characters in Miss Spiders Sunny Patch Friends replaced the –body suffix with –buggy (anybuggy, somebuggy, busybuggy, and so on).
• The Geronimo Stilton series lives and breathes puns related to rodents and cheese.
• My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic has this in spades. The main cast is called the mane cast by fans, there are towns and cities such as Canterlot, Manehattan, Appleloosa (like the breed Appaloosa), they say things like "everypony" and "nopony"... Naturally, Fan Nicknames continue the trend (Stalliongrad, Trottingham, San Franciscolt, etc.)
  • Trottingham eventually became canon as the birthplace of Pipsqeak, one of the series' minor characters.
• Birdz, with an entirely avian (except one) cast, was up to its beak in bird puns. These usually manifested themselves in the names of celebrities (e.g. "Whippoorwill Smith"), but also in the setting of Birdland and the occasional "anybird".
• Monster High uses "ghoul" as a substitute for everything possible (though most usually "girl").