The Thing

The Thing is a Hanna - Barbera cartoon.

Background
Benjy Grimm is in high school, not unlike "Here They Are! Power Puff Girls Z!", and experiments with changing to solid rock before he was permanently transformed and before he joined The Fantastic Four. He has two rings that he strikes together and says: "Thing Ring, Do Your Thing!".

Production
It is an immensely obscure cartoon for various reasons. The first reason is that he belongs to Marvel Productions which is now The Walt Disney Company. Marvel did not start their own animation studio for many years and instead licensed their characters to other animation studios such as Hanna - Barbera and DePatie - Freleng. DePatie - Freleng Enterprises Films would later transform to become Marvel Productions. It is not possible to view it on Cartoon Network nor Boomerang as the characters and Marvel Productions belong to The Walt Disney Company. Also, Ted Turner no longer owns Cartoon Network.

The other reason why The Thing is obscure has to do with cartoons at the time period are often 60 and at times 90 minutes long. When they rebroadcast them, they used different titles. Cartoon Network did a low budget version of this procedure and omitted the end credits.

The Thing was included with "The New Fred And Barney Show" which aired in February 03, 1979. In September 08, 1979, they changed it to "Fred And Barney Meet The Thing" and grouped the episodes together. In the episodes, Fred and Barney and Benjy do not actually meet each other. They had 13 "full length" episodes of Fred and Barney, with 26 "short" episodes of The Thing. The 16 episodes of "The New Shmoo" was also made by Hanna - Barbera, utilizing yet another licensed character, debuting on September 22, 1979. In December 08, 1979 they expanded it to 90 minutes with the title "Fred And Barney Meet The Shmoo". Once again, none of these different characters actually met each other. However, The Shmoo eventually officially appeared In The Flintstones Universe with the 18 episode "The Flintstone Comedy Show" beginning November 22, 1980. Some of these episodes are 90 minutes, while others are 60 minutes, and can be confused with "The Flintstone Comedy Hour" which is another 18 episode series but it is from September 09, 1972. Hanna - Barbera were in the middle of their All Stars Craze, so they decided to include even more characters such as Captain Caveman from "Captain Caveman And The Teen Angels" from September 10, 1977. As a prequel, it experiences his original adventures before he got frozen in time. Eventually, He got a second prequel when He And Son appear with "The Flintstone Kids".

Music by all of these episodes is from Hoyt S. Curtin.