Betty Rubble gets no respect.

Yesterday morning, I was in Schenectady and needed breakfast. A quick pit stop at Mike’s Hot Dogs – you can’t miss the neon sign on Erie Boulevard – and I was chomping on scrambled eggs and homefries.

It was then that I looked up at the window panes along the diner, and I noticed that someone had hand-painted the Flintstones characters onto the glass. Well, there’s Fred and Wilma, there’s Barney, there’s Pebbles and Bamm Bamm…

And that’s it.

There’s a couple of blank, unpainted windows.

But no image of Barney’s wife. Or of Bamm Bamm’s mother. Or of Wilma’s best friend and confidante.

Yep. Somebody forgot to paint a Betty Rubble on that glass.

Seriously. Where the hell is Betty Rubble?

I mean, come on. It’s Betty Rubble, for crying out loud.

It’s just like the Flintstones vitamins. They had room in the bottle for a vitamin that was shaped like Fred Flintstone’s car, but it took them 30 years to put a Betty Rubble pill in the bottle?

Seriously?

Weak.

And for those two or three blog readers that want to give me guff about, “Well, you don’t see Dino there, and you don’t see Mr. Slate there, and you don’t see the Great Gazoo there, so kwitcherbellyaking, Chucko.”

To you I say, you’re missing the point.

Dino belongs on Sinclair gasoline signs. The Great Gazoo was one of the stupidest additions to the Flintstones universe, he’s like the Cousin Oliver of the TV series. And come on, you want to add Mr. Slate? Hell, why not go all in and bring in Joe Rockhead? Or Arnold the paperboy? Or some of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo members?

Yeah, that’s stretching it. But come on. Betty Rubble is as important to the Flintstones lineup as Ethel Mertz was to I Love Lucy, as important as Trixie Norton on the Honeymooners, as Helen Willis on The Jeffersons, or as Marcy Rhoades Darcy in Married With Children. You need that fourth person – the neighbor’s wife who acts as the main distaff character’s best friend and partner in crime, as the long-struggling foil for her husband, all of that.

And I can’t believe I just vented about a missing cartoon character that was not painted on the side of a small Schenectady greasy spoon.

Twelve years writing this blog without a day off.

It can get to a person. 😀