Hanna-Barbera
The Roman Holidays is an animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera for NBC in 1972. Like The Flintstones, this show was essentially a contemporary sitcom that transferred 20th-century culture to the distant past: in this case, the ancient Roman Empire, circa A.D. 63.
Very similar in theme to both The Flintstones and The Jetsons, The Roman Holidays brought a look at "modern-day" life in Ancient Rome, around 63 AD (with a 1970s touch), as seen through the eyes of Augustus "Gus" Holiday and his family. The opening showed a chariot traffic jam and a TV showing football on Channel "IV" (NBC was seen on TV Channel 4 in cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Antonio and Boston). An Ancient Roman setting was actually one of the ideas that Hanna-Barbera considered as they were working to create The Flintstones. Gus, his wife Laurie, their daughter Precocia (who, despite being the youngest of the family, is very intellectual) and their teen-aged son Happius (nicknamed "Hap") reside in the Venus de Milo Arms, run by their landlord Mr. Evictus who excites Gus's tagline "Evictus will evict us!". Gus works for a bossy supervisor named Mr. Tycoonius at the Forum Construction Company. After a hard day's marble lifting, he was greeted by the Holidays' pet, a lion named Brutus (who sounded a bit like Snagglepuss). Rounding out the cast is Hap's girlfriend, Groovia. Like many Hanna-Barbera series produced in the 1970s, the show was given a laugh track.
The main adversary in the series consisted of the Holidays’ landlord, Mr. Evictus, the owner of the Venus de Milo Arms apartment building where the Holidays lived. Being temperamental, Evictus would often try to evict the Holiday family for various reasons (the kids making too much noise, trying to sell his building to developers, disliking their pet lion, etc.).
Like most TV families of the era, Gus was the sole breadwinner, with his job consisting of working in a marble quarry for the tyrannical Mr. Tycoonius, who’d threaten to fire Gus or transfer him to Egypt to build pyramids. (In reality, the pyramids had long been built by the time the Roman Empire came into existence around 27 BC.)
Similar to the Flintstones, part of the show’s humor rested in seeing 20th century culture and technology existing in an ancient Roman setting. Thus the Romans of this series had TVs, telephones, traffic signals, etc. Unlike the Flintstones’ technology, only part of it was animal- or human-powered (a giraffe as a window washer’s scaffolding, a bird as a sewing machine, foot-powered “buses,” etc.); the rest consisted of a mix of actual ancient Roman tech (chariots, scrolls, etc.) or modern-styled tech with an “ancient Rome” twist—TVs shaped like ancient Roman architecture, etc.
Modern cultural elements were similarly given an “ancient Rome” twist: Roman centurions as traffic cops; Gus having a pile of old chariot magazines (resembling car ones); football games held at the Coliseum between the “Vikings” and the “Trojans”; etc. Similar to the Flintstones’ “rock” puns and Jetsons’ “space” puns, the Holidays’ Rome had various “Roman” puns—fake Latin names such as consumer advocate “Naderius Ralphium” (Ralph Nader), actor “Stephano McQueenus” (Steve McQueen). Said puns even stretched to expressions such as “every Tom, Dick and Herod.” And, of course, the obligatory Roman numeral references, though being the early 70s, there weren’t any “call IX-I-I” puns as seen in some modern cartoons (Disney’s “Hercules”/an episode of “Histeria!”). - Diverse Tech Geek
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