Meet the Flintstones


 * "The Flintstones" redirects here. See also: Category:Rips featuring The Flintstones.

"Meet the Flintstones", also written as "(Meet) The Flintstones", is the theme song from the animated TV series The Flintstones. On the SiIvaGunner channel, it's a sub-meme of 7 GRAND DAD, and the most frequently referenced song in SiIvaGunner rips.

Origin
The Flintstones was the first animated prime time American television series produced by Hanna-Barbera. It was broadcast from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966 on ABC. The show depicted the lives of the working-class Stone Age man Fred Flintstone, his next-door neighbor and best friend Barney Rubble, and their families. The show's continuing popularity rested heavily on its juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns in the Stone Age setting. The Flintstones was the most financially successful network animated franchise for three decades, until The Simpsons debuted.

When the show first aired, the opening theme was a different song composed by Hoyt Curtin titled "Rise and Shine". The melody that would become "Meet the Flintstones" was originally written by Curtin as an underscore tune to be played during the episodes and was first broadcast in the episode "The Swimming Pool" on October 14, 1960. This tune was first released on the album Songs of The Flintstones in 1961 and was performed by the voice actors of the show and contained slightly different lyrics than the lyrics that would later be used in the show's opening. The song was eventually used for the opening and closing credits beginning on September 28, 1962 with the airing of the episode "Barney the Invisible", and would continue to be used until the show ended broadcast on April 1, 1966.

The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy
"Meet the Flintstones" has been used in most Flintstones video games, including the NES game , released in 1991. While most of the game's soundtrack was composed by Japanese composers Yasuko Yamada and Naoto Yagishita, the title screen music was an arrangement of "Meet the Flintstones". 7 GRAND DAD, being a bootleg of the aforementioned game, kept the title screen music (and all other music in the original game) intact.

SoundCloud
Shortly after Vinesauce Joel's stream where he played and reacted to 7 GRAND DAD, dj fruitsnacks created a mashup between the title screen music and the song "Levels" by Avicii. According to him, this was the first use of 7 GRAND DAD as a meme. Following that, dj fruitsnacks and a few other people on SoundCloud created more mashups using the song, but "most of them were pretty bad," according to Chaze the Chat. In response to the many sub-par 7 GRAND DAD mashups on SoundCloud, Chaze and several other people in a Discord server would create mashups and remixes of "Meet the Flintstones" that had more effort put into them to ironically poke fun at the low-quality mashups and ultimately upset their friends.

SiIvaGunner
On the SiIvaGunner channel, "Meet the Flintstones" is a sub-meme of 7 GRAND DAD, the channel's most prominent meme and a core part of the channel's identity; the logo of The Flintstones is the basis of the channel's wordmark and logo, and "Meet the Flintstones" is used in rips more frequently than any other composition by a very wide margin, with about a thousand more uses than "Snow halation". "Meet the Flintstones" is the most common way that 7 GRAND DAD is referenced in rips, followed by Joel's reaction to 7 GRAND DAD.

The song has been incorporated in rips in a wide variety of ways. It is typically inserted through a melody change of one of a rip's source tracks, but has also been inserted through sampling of versions of "Meet the Flintstones" (often the 8-bit version used in 7 GRAND DAD) and pitch-shifting of vocals or sound effects. The ubiquity of the song has resulted in the song being used in ways that are otherwise uncommon for SiIvaGunner memes: complex medley rips that otherwise contain few channel memes will often incorporate it very briefly as a form of comic relief, and for a few rips, the use of a descending major fifth (the first two notes of the melody) is the only direct reference to the song. In some cases, particularly rips of sound effects, the use of the song is followed by a laugh track.

During SilvaGunner: Rebooted, when the channel's memes were replaced by alternate universe counterparts, The Flintstones was replaced with The Simpsons and Family Guy. Thus, "Meet the Flintstones" was replaced by the aforementioned shows' opening themes.

Trivia

 * Wikipedia mentions that the song "has become a jazz standard [...] It is often played to amuse audiences as part of a medley, in what is known as 'jazz humor'."
 * This was referenced in "Jazz Cats: The Beginning - SiIvaGunner: King for Another Day Tournament".