Why Does Practically Everyone Loathe Gazoo So Much??

First off, an alien visitor to a prehistoric community is actually one of the LEAST far-fetched things about the Flintstones. Why should the existence of a civilization of technologically advanced aliens be any less plausible 10,000 years ago than it is today? How technologically advanced WE are has got nothing to do with how technologically advanced alien civilisations in other parts of the Universe are, whether they exist or not. Even so, the makers of the Flintstones episodes took care to have Gazoo coming to the Stone Age from the distant future. In any case, I fail to see how Gazoo can in any way be far-fetched in a Stone Age in which everyone possesses colour T.V.s and the countries of Sweden, Japan, England and Mexico all exist. You can almost be forgiven for not even realizing that the Flintstones is supposed to be set in prehistoric times when watching a good few episodes of the show.

Secondly, to my mind, the show jumped the shark at the beginning of the Fifth Season, when the episodes seemingly began to be made almost exclusively for children, and there was an endless parodying of popular culture. You had cringe-worthy moments such as when Dino, Hoppy, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm donned Beatles wigs and screeched "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!", and the "Time Machine" episode, in which the trips to the future are as puerile and uninspired as possible, and the Flintstone' and Rubble's experience of 1964 is limited to an inane argument with a vendor at a burger stand. You no longer had the Flintstones doing their own thing; instead, you had crude caricatures of 60s celebrities forever turning up, all of them immeasurably more incongruous than Gazoo. The episodes had also in a large part become tiresomely predictable (with gags and plot 'twists' which I could see coming from a long way off), and so I welcomed the originality which the kooky Gazoo brought to the table.

Finally, it is worth considering that Gazoo appeared in only ELEVEN episodes of the show, 148 episodes into the series and just 18 episodes before the Flintstones was cancelled!! Even then, he had very little screen time in some of the episodes in which he appeared - in the "Gravelberry Pie King" he is to be seen only for 30 seconds or so. How can a character who debuts when a show is all but over and who has such a paucity of screen time be continually cited as the reason for the Flintstones jumping the shark?

Now, I entirely understand that one man's meat is another man's poison. I think that Gazoo is hilarious and endearing and he is easily my favourite supporting character on the show. I wish that there was much more of him. Others may find him obnoxious. I would be interested to learn, however, why viewers detest him so much.