the toddler

Ryan Gosling is developing a live-action movie about Bamm-Bamm Rubble. This was announced this week, and it was announced in the normal way that film projects are announced, which is to say through a trade publication, with an agent, as though it were a reasonable thing that was happening.

Bamm-Bamm Rubble, for those who have not followed the Flintstones intellectual property across its six decades of existence, is a toddler. He is the adopted son of Barney and Betty Rubble, who live in Bedrock, which is a prehistoric town where all the appliances are animals that make the same sound as the appliance but louder. Bamm-Bamm's defining characteristic is that he has supernatural strength. He is, in most canonical presentations, approximately one to two years old. His vocabulary, at peak, includes the word "Bamm," which he says twice, and which is also his name. He says his own name every time he uses his arms. This is the character.

Ryan Gosling is forty-five years old. He is an Academy Award winner. He was in Blade Runner 2049, The Notebook, La La Land, and Barbie, in which he played Ken to such effect that there was a period of approximately six months in which a large number of people on the internet were interested in the concept of Ken. He has demonstrated range. He is, by any reasonable metric, a functioning adult.

The project is described as a live-action film "focused on Bamm-Bamm Rubble." The exact nature of his involvement is not fully specified in the initial reports. He may be starring in it. He may be producing it. He may be doing both. He may be playing Bamm-Bamm at his canonical age, which would require significant de-aging technology and a commitment to the bit that is either admirable or alarming depending on how you feel about the Flintstones. Or the film may age Bamm-Bamm up, which is a common Hollywood technique applied to cartoon characters when the cartoon character is a toddler and the actor who wants to play them is forty-five.

It is worth noting that Warner Bros. has made a considerable number of live-action adaptations of Hanna-Barbera properties over the past several decades, with results that have varied. There was a live-action Flintstones movie in 1994, starring John Goodman. It made $341 million. There was a sequel in 2000, without John Goodman. It made $33 million. These two data points suggest something, and Warner Bros. has apparently decided that what they suggest is that they need a Ryan Gosling.

Hollywood has been adapting Hanna-Barbera properties for long enough that we are now in the phase where the properties being adapted were previously adaptations of other adaptations. Bamm-Bamm appeared in his own spin-off series in 1971, in which he was a teenager. He was aged into adulthood for other productions. He has, at various points across sixty-five years of intellectual property management, been a toddler, a teenager, and an adult, which covers most of the available options. He has been the same character throughout. The character is that he hits things and has a name that sounds like hitting.

Ryan Gosling is forty-five. He has one Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and one for Best Original Song. He owns a production company. He is a man of some professional standing. He has looked at the options available to him in the current entertainment landscape and has decided that his next project, the thing he is putting his energy and his name behind, is a movie about Bamm-Bamm Rubble.

I want to be clear that I am not saying this is wrong. It is possible that this will be an extraordinary film. It is possible that the Bamm-Bamm Rubble story has depths that sixty-five years of franchise management have left entirely unexplored. It is possible that Ryan Gosling sees something in this character that no one else has seen, some essential truth about toddlers with supernatural strength in prehistoric societies, some universal human experience that Bamm-Bamm uniquely embodies. These are all possible.

What is also possible, and perhaps equally likely, is that this is a movie about a toddler who hits things, developed by a forty-five-year-old man, based on a character from 1960, adapted from a franchise that has previously been adapted many times, to be released by a studio that is attempting to generate interest in its intellectual property holdings during a period in which studios are generating interest in their intellectual property holdings.

There is nothing wrong with this either. These are the conditions.

Bamm-Bamm's club, in the original series, was drawn with a large round knob at one end. It was larger than he was. He dragged it everywhere he went. He was a toddler carrying a weapon that outweighed him, and everyone in Bedrock appeared to find this charming. This seems like an important detail for anyone developing the live-action adaptation.