The Magnet 48: Project Zam!

A Flintstones cereal commercial parody interpretation

In late August, I was browsing the r/ObscureMedia subreddit, and I came across a TV commercial for Pebbles Cereal. I posted the video to Boing Boing with the following comment:

Fred and Barney are inexplicably sharing a bunk bed in a house with two kids. They seem to have traveled in time to the 1980s and entered the real world. How did they end up living in this house? Where are Betty and Wilma? Where are the kids’ parents? We get no explanation.

But does it matter? Because the boxes of Fruity Pebbles are filled with wondrous things, like genuine ballpoint pens. Perhaps it’s better not to ask questions.

The Flintstones was one of my favorite cartoons growing up, so I couldn’t help imagining a scenario that would explain why Fred and Barney would be living in a house in the 20th century with a couple of American children. The following 6,000-word parody is my attempt to solve the mystery.

(My apologies if you don’t like The Flintstones or aren’t familiar with the show. I probably won’t devote another double-issue of The Magnet to a Flintstones parody for at least a year.)

“Gazoo is a mirror, reflecting life’s vicissitudes, vagaries, ritual magic, and dreary reality.”
— Joanna Lee, inventor of the Great Gazoo and writer of many episodes of The Flintstones.

Denver, Colorado June 13, 1981 A.D.

“Fred, look at this. We’re on TV!” 

Barney was sitting on the soft couch in the family room. He disliked the way his body sank deeply into the soft pads, swallowing him. He missed the wood and stone slab couch from his previous life. 

Fred got up from the kitchen table, where he’d been reading the funnies in the flimsy news-slab, which Beth and Timmy called a “newspaper.” He couldn’t remember the comics in The Daily Granite, but he was sure they were funnier than the ones in The Rocky Mountain News.

“What is it, Barn?” 

“I’m watching a show called The Honeymooners, and it’s about us!”

“That’s nuts!” said Fred, sinking into the weird squishy couch to join his buddy. 

“That fat guy in the uniform is you, and the guy with the funny hat is me.”

“Nah,” said Fred. “For one thing, I’m not fat. And second of all, you aren’t as handsome as the guy in the funny hat. This isn’t a show about us. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“But Fred, the fat guy, he talks just like you, and he bosses me around like you.”

“Barn, I’m telling you, you got it wrong. Why would anyone make a show about us?”

Barney was about to argue when Timmy and Beth came into the room. “Fred and Barney! Pebbles for breakfast!” the children sang in unison. They were in pajamas made from the skins of animals Barney didn’t know. Everything was so confusing. Why were they living in a house with these kids, who didn’t seem to have parents? How long had he and Fred been sharing a bunk bed? And why couldn’t he remember much about his life before? The only thing he clearly remembered was that he and Fred were bosom buddies. He was sure of that.

Fred and Barney got up, followed the children into the kitchen, and sat down at the breakfast table, which was piled high with boxes of Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles cereal.

At first, it had been fun living in this house. He and Fred didn’t have to work, and no one complained if they put their feet on the table. For the first few days, Fred was so excited about eating cereal that he slid down the banister when the kids announced breakfast. But as time wore on, the routine became dreary, and Barney started to question their new life. Why did the kids make them open so many boxes of cereal every day? And why was it the only food in the house? He was sick of the flavor. Barney dreamed of a juicy bronto burger and a frosty mug of Cactus Coola. 

Three times a day, these kids made Barney and Fred go through the same drill of opening hundreds of boxes, pulling out the toy picture pens, and writing “PEBBLES” on a piece of paper. Barney was tired of it and he felt sorry for Fred because the word “pebbles” made him sad for some reason. This morning was no different. Fred grabbed a box, and he quietly moaned, “pebbles… pebbles…”

“What’s the matter, Freddie?” said Barney.

“Nothing. I’m fine.” Fred replied, trying to hide a tear running down his cheek. He shrugged his shoulders and cleared his throat.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Freddie?” Barney said.

“Sure, Barn.”

They began opening boxes of Pebbles, plunging their meaty paws into the cereal to hunt for the toy surprise inside. Fred’s fingers latched onto something hard and he pulled out a pen with a disc at the top. The disc had a smiling pet dinosaur and was made of the same kind of hard wax as the thousands of picture pens he and Barney had been pulling out of boxes since they ended up in this place. Besides the dinosaur, there were pens with pictures of Fred and Barney on them, too. The children stared intently at Fred and Barney. “Write ‘PEBBLES’ on the pad of paper, Fred,” ordered Beth.

“He already knows what to do, kid,” said Barney. “Lay off him.” Beth’s rigid smile vanished for a brief instant, replaced by a malicious sneer, but she caught herself and smiled again. “You’re right,” said Beth. “I’m sorry. It’s just that Timmy and I love picture pens so much! We want to add as many as possible to our collection.”

“But why do we gotta write with every picture pen before we toss them into one o’ them boxes?” Fred jerked his head in the direction of a half dozen large cartons against the wall, each overflowing with picture pens. “Our hands hurt!”

“The instructions say so,” said Beth.

“What instructions? I don’t see any instructions,” said Fred.

“Oh,” replied Beth, “I must’ve lost the instructions. I’ll find them later.”

Barney was getting fed up with opening boxes at every meal. He and Fred were both depressed. This wasn’t their house. It wasn’t their town. Was it even their planet?

Zetox, February 3, 2000 A.D.

Shagelbextyzinkus and Rip van Zonk floated in a yellow cylindrical room in a housing pod located on the outskirts of Favabaloo, the primary colony of Zetox, a dense planetoid circling a dying star in the GN-z11 galaxy.

Shagelbextyzinkus held the doomsday device in her delicate green hand. It resembled a pen with a disc attached. The disc had Gazoo’s face on it.

“I’m going to try one more time,” said Shagelbextyzinkus. She used the pen to write the word “PEBBLES” on the pad of paper. Nothing happened.

“If only the Great Gazoo were here,” she said to her fellow doomsday cultist, van Zonk, “he’d be able to help.” 

But Gazoo wasn’t there. He was on a planet called Earth, 32 billion light-years and 12,000 solar-years away from Shagelbextyzinkus and Rip van Zonk.

Gazoo, the former head master scientist of Zetox, had been banished to prehistoric Earth when the Zetoxian governing council discovered he’d made the doomsday device. The council locked the device in a cold fusion vault and banished Gazoo as far away and long ago as their technology would allow, which was the planet Earth, 10,000 B.C.

The two diminutive green humanoids, Gazoo’s top lieutenants, had finally succeeded in retrieving the device from the Zetoxian governing council’s vault. But they hadn’t been able to activate it because when Gazoo made the device, he’d embedded a sensor in it that made it impossible for anyone but Gazoo himself to activate it by writing the code word. 

“Let’s try transporting the doomsday device to Gazoo again,” said van Zonk. 

“That’s a waste of time!” said Shagelbextyzinkus, smacking van Zonk’s helmet with her palm, sending him spinning across the room and bouncing off the round wall. “The governing council put an impenetrable spacetime barrier around planet Earth that makes it impossible to go back earlier than 1981. Gazoo is stuck in the year 10,000 BC, unable to travel to 1981. The doomsday device can’t be activated without him! The Great Zam won’t happen unless he writes the trigger word. The situation is hopeless!”

“We can’t give up,” said van Zonk. “You know Gazoo would want us to at least try.”  

Before Shagelbextyzinkus could answer, a white light appeared in the center of the room. It was accompanied by a whining noise, followed by a high-pitched beehive-like buzz. A fuzzy visage of Gazoo floated in the middle of the room. The cultists stopped hovering and fell to their knees, holding their hands in prayer. 

“Hello, dum-dums,” said the shimmering apparition of Gazoo.

“Worshipful Destroyer of the Universe!” cried out the cowering cultists.

“I’m expending a vast amount of limited resources to talk to you, so stop sniveling and listen before I run out of quantum energy,” said Gazoo. His image warbled and his voice was hard to make out against the hissing background noise.

“I sense you two idiots have recovered the doomsday device. Very impressive, considering how stupid the two of you are. Now, here is the plan. You two numbskulls will secure safe living quarters in 1981 in Denver, which is the primary colony of an area called Colorado on Earth. You will teleport the device into the domicile. You will then transport yourselves there and change your appearance to resemble human children. Do you understand so far?”

“Yes, Great Gazoo,” the cultists said.

“Good. After you’ve been situated, alert me with a transtemporal beacon. When I get the signal, I will teleport two primitive humans with wiped memories from 10,000 BC to meet you there. I’ve encoded their junk DNA with an activation trigger so either of them can initiate the doomsday countdown by writing the code word. Here is a holographic scan of them.”  

A projected image of two cave dwellers wearing animal furs appeared next to Gazoo. The larger of the two had black hair, while the smaller specimen had yellow hair and simple black dots for eyes. A small purple dinosaur stood next to the cavemen.

“Give either one of these subhumans the doomsday device and instruct them to write the trigger word and then Zam! Everyone and everything in the universe will go in one multi glorious instantaneous disintegration.”

“As you command!” said Shagelbextyzinkus. “The Great Gazoo speaks!”

“Is the small dinosaur coming with the hominids?” asked van Zonk.

“No, it just happened to be standing next to them when I scanned them. That is not important! Please, concentrate!” shouted Gazoo, “To repeat: scan Denver, choose a secure location, send the device there, then send yourselves and wait for me to teleport the cavemen.”

The holographic image of Gazoo began to dim slowly.

“Gazoo,” said Shagelbextyzinkus, “you’re fading!”

“You have my instructions, dum-dums,” said the flickering projection of Gazoo. “If you don’t mess things up, we will achieve our dream of collapsing the universe in an instant — ZAM!”

Gazoo’s image dissolved into nothingness. Shagelbextyzinkus and van Zonk bowed their heads in silence for a few moments.

Shagelbextyzinkus rose to her feet and began to speak.

“Van Zonk, I will use my superior remote viewing ability to find an empty domicile in which to house the stone-age humans and us,” she said.

“But I have a higher remote-viewing rating than you,” objected van Zonk. “Shouldn’t I be the one who —“

“Don’t argue!” Shagelbextyzinkus cut van Zonk off. “It’s my plan, and I’m in charge!”

“But if we —”

“I said no argument!”

“Fine,” sulked van Zonk, and he flew dejectedly out of the room and through the cylindrical corridor. 

Shagelbextyzinkus floated up and out of the exit hatch and into the sky above Favabaloo. She hovered over the vast, humming metropolis and drank in the cotton-candy view of the colorful buildings. It was an enormous source of joy for her to know that every living creature in the galaxy would die when the universe was destroyed, including herself. The thought brought her unbridled happiness. 

She sipped the sweet, warm, pink air like a fine wine, then went to work. She focused her thoughts, channeling them into her helmet’s antennae. She let her consciousness flow through the stubby transmitters, freeing her mind’s eye to guide her to a place where the doomsday device could be safely hidden on Earth. She located an unoccupied house in a suburb of Denver called Cherry Creek. This will do, she thought. But can I simply transport the doomsday device onto a kitchen countertop? Would it be safe there? Too risky. She would need a way to hide the device. She scanned a dozen occupied domiciles in Denver and observed that many of them contained cardboard boxes of food labeled as breakfast cereal. Hit with a flash of inspiration, Shagelbextyzinkus fabricated a cereal box, naming it “Fruity Pebbles,” illustrating it with photos of the two cavemen. She teleported the doomsday device into the box and sent the box into a cupboard of the domicile with a snap of her fingers.

Shagelbextyzinkus awoke from her trance, drifted over to the portal shaft, and entered the green comfort cube to recharge her quantum energy. But before going to sleep, she decided to celebrate a job well done. She floated down to the nezaruan cage on the comfort cube’s floor, lifted the lid, and selected an especially fat specimen. The gray and green mottled bug emitted a faint shriek when she pulled it from the patch of periwinkle moss it had been gorging on. Shagelbextyzinkus ignored the nezaruan’s fury and positioned its needle-like proboscis against her temple. The insectoid beast reflexively injected a large dose of exotic neuropeptides into Shagelbextyzinkus’s bloodstream. She felt a rush of euphoria, a warm yet icy sensation in her extremities. Her mind raced. A pleasant numbness spread throughout her body.

“This feels so good,” said Shagelbextyzinkus out loud.

Her eyes glazed over. She fell to the floor, convulsing in a fit of laughter. She lost control of her body and began to float in all directions, bumping into walls and bouncing off the smooth floor. In a few minutes, the euphoria wore off, replaced by craving. “I need more!”

She plucked another nezaruan from the cage. Its segmented, chitinous body writhed in her hand. After Shagelbextyzinkus injected the neuropeptides, she began to laugh uncontrollably again. She lifted the convulsing nezaruan to eye level. “What happened here?” she cooed. “What did I do to you?” She tossed it aside. It skittered under a reconbobulator cabinet, where it hissed and drooled foamy aqua regia on the floor.

Shagelbextyzinkus was seized with a panic attack. All she could think about was the many different ways her plan could go awry. What if someone finds the cereal box and throws the doomsday device away? “I must make decoys!” She shouted at the cage of uncomprehending nezaruans. “Thousands and thousands of boxes.”

Drops of chartreuse perspiration formed on Shagelbextyzinkus’s globe-shaped bald head. She couldn’t remember what flavor she’d made the cereal. Fruity? Or cocoa? Oh well, it didn’t matter. Her eyeballs rolled in their sockets. Mustering all her powers of concentration, she manifested a warehouse full of cereal boxes, each with a fake doomsday device inside. However, instead of a picture of Gazoo, she made them with pictures of the two prehistoric hominids and the small dinosaur. “That will keep them guessing!” she snickered. With another snap of her fingers, she distributed the boxes into kitchen cupboards throughout the colony of Denver.

She reached into the nezaruan cage and grabbed another. The drug hit her like lightning. “You’re too much!” said Shagelbextyzinkus to the thrashing bug. “You’re the life of the party!”