Free Republic

Prepare to meet The Flintstones all over again. Warner Bros. Animation is working with Elizabeth Banks’ Brownstone Productions on an adult-skewing primetime animated comedy based on the classic cartoon series, TVLine’s sister publication Variety reports. Hanna-Barbera’s original Flintstones — which followed the exploits of married cave-people Fred and Wilma Flintstone, along with their friends, offspring and enormous pets — aired on ABC from 1960 to 1966 for a total of 166 episodes. It was even the first animated show to be nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series at the Primetime Emmys in 1961. More than 10 follow-up series and spinoffs aired...

The Flintstones, a cartoon about life in the Stone Age, has just surpassed The Jetsons, a cartoon about life in the distant future, when it comes to technological innovation. Researchers have successfully trained artificial intelligence to generate new clips of the prehistoric animated series based on nothing but random text descriptions of what’s happening in a scene. A team of researchers from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, trained an AI by feeding it over 25,000 three-second clips of the cartoon, which hasn’t seen any new episodes in over 50 years. Most AI experiments...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has revealed the technological blind spots of the land’s highest court, which —she joked Thursday in Lexington — extends to the intricacies of social media. Speaking at the UK Singletary Center, Kagan told UK College of Law Dean David A. Brennen that the court is “conservative” when it comes to adopting technology, even as questions about those technologies reach the court. “It’s a real challenge to learn enough about all these new-fangled things that one didn’t grow up with oneself to make good and wise decisions to help in the way a court ought...

As a health care provider and pandemic expert, I have never been interested in movies or television shows involving a massive outbreak. I want entertainment to escape from my work, not to watch it unfold again in front of me. Few movies aside, the medical realism could also hinder my ability to generate compassion, empathy or fear. But "Contagion," which opened in theaters last week, is different. "Contagion" tracks the anatomy of a viral pandemic, from its zoonotic origin to social disruption. The fear of a cough, disintegration of basic social services, the ineptitude of governmental officials and the death...

Ed Benedict, a legendary animator who put life, love and laughter in TV cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble and Yogi Bear, has died at the age of 94. Benedict died Aug. 28 in Auburn in Northern California, his longtime friend and fellow animator David K. Sheldon, confirmed Tuesday. "He was quite an interesting fellow, that's for sure," Sheldon said. "He was the main character designer for all the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw." Benedict, who worked at MGM, Universal and other studios on short, theatrical cartoons, joined Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera soon...