Thing ring, do your thing

OK, the video is a bit rough. Just imagine that you're 12 years old again, and you're watching scrambled Cinemax in the middle of the night in the hopes of seeing a boob or something.

Here is the opening for Fred and Barney Meet The Thing, the cartoon show that fails on damn near every level, including the name. Yes, cats and kittens, only in the opening sequence are the titular characters together.

I've mentioned the show here before, but in case you missed it, someone somewhere got the idea to take The Thing, the orange, rocky looking powerhouse from the Fantastic Four, and make him into a wimpy teenager. To change back into the Thing, he pressed the two halves of a ring together and said, "Thing ring, do your thing!"

I would have loved to hear the logic that went into this craptacular concept.

I can only wonder if at some point, they thought they were going to get the license to do a Captain Marvel cartoon, wrote a bunch of stories, only to have the license yanked at the last minute, forcing them to pull a character from a property they'd already done and completely change him.

So, if we work backward from the result, the math looks something like this:

The nth permutation of the Flintstones + The Fantastic Four - 3.75 + Captain Marvel/Shazam + Shazzan! * mistaken notion about the Wonder Twins + ripoff of the theme song to the Super Friends + Scooby-Doo-like group of teens - cognitive thinking process = Fred and Barney Meet the Thing.

It's like the Hanna-Barbera snake eating itself.



I have a few episodes of this on tape somewhere, and let me tell you--don't bother. It's like an inescapable vortex of suck.