This cartoon is pretty bad, I’ll admit it. However, I remember loving it as a kid because it had the Thing from the Fantastic Four.
In this series, the Thing is Benjamin “Benjy” Grimm and he’s a high school student. No mention of the FF is made and he can control his transformation into the Thing by using his Thing Ring. By touching the two halves of the ring together (one on each hand) he can transform into the Thing. He’s constantly using his Thing powers to rescue his friends from everyday dangers. Rarely does he face off against any super-villain, but there is the occasional bad guy.
This was a hard series to track down. I finally found great copies through a friend. They were new recordings from Boomerang. I took the set and created a nice menu using some artwork from a Marvel Comics hardback book that details the history of their television projects. It originally aired in a 1-hour block with a Flintstones show and was called Fred and Barney Meet the Thing, although the two cartoons never crossed over.
The first segment, a very loose adaptation of Marvel Comics’ character The Thing, consisted of stories following the Thing as a teenager named Benjy Grimm who transforms into the rock-skinned superhero by touching together magic rings and reciting the words “Thing ring, do your thing!”
The stories centered mostly around Benjy at Centerville High School with his friends Betty, her rich boyfriend Ronald, Kelly (Betty’s kid-sister) and teacher Miss Twilly. Kelly was the only person who knew about Benjy’s secret.
Twenty six 11-minute episodes of The Thing were produced; 2 shorts aired per show.
from Wikipedia
Where can i get the 26 episodes from? I’ve been searching for these for a while and can’t find a single store or website that sell or stream these cartoons.
Any help will be appreciated
Cool menu. It’s too bad that this will probably never make it to dvd though some would disagree. I’ve lucky enough to get my hands on a couple of episodes and it’s always a fun trip down memory lane, horrible show and all.
where can i get copies of the thing cartoons for i can not find them any where can u please help me
We host classic movie nights and I’m always looking for bizarre shorts to play before hand..and this cartoon series looks plenty bizarre..any idea where I could get a couple of episodes?
Where can I buy a dvd of all 26 minute episodes. I thought it was bad that it never showed how he can control his transformations, ( even though it hinted at it in the opening credits). On the plus side, I did like how he was drawn at the time. Jack Kirby, (I heard), submitted sketches of the Thing for the animators. And it was one of my favorite shows grow up. My son, who is about my age now when I started watching the show, would love it.
Most of the Thing cartoons are up on YouTube right now, as well as a poor quality copy of the “Fred and Barney meet the Thing” opening credits.
Interestingly enough, the credits show the Thing wandering around and causing a panic until Dr. Harkness and his little tomboy daughter Kelly find a way to transform the friendly rock monster into teenage Benjie Grimm.
And in the episode “To Thing or Not To Thing” Harkness tries again to come up with a cure because the Thing is tired of being both a monster and a teenager and wants to regain his true adult form of test pilot Ben Grimm, implying that it was cosmic rays in space that transformed just like in comics only without the rest of the Fantastic Four.
I think what happened is that the Thing was supposed to have his own solo show where the opening credits explained all this but most of that was jettisoned when the character was folded into the Flintstones show leaving a lot of confused kids and annoyed comic fans…
That makes a lot of sense. I knew that “Benjy” was actually not a teenager, but an adult who was stuck between two bad choices (there’s actually two episodes that mention it specifically, the other being “Gone Away Gulch”, and several others that allude to it), but it would have made more sense as a solo show with a full expository opening.
I loved this show when it aired in 1979. It’s my favorite cartoon of THE THING. It’s plain simple fun. When it aired on boomerang you can bet I got collection. It sits right next to my turbo teen.