Forty Foot Fred as he looked when rediscovered in 2016.
Image Credit: Troy Grover/Old Kelowna
September 20, 2020 - 9:35 AM
KELOWNA - A Kelowna landmark is now truly gone forever after the owner’s hopes of rebuilding him were dashed by his family.
The forty-foot (12.2 metre) high plywood replica of Fred Flintstone stood at the entrance to Bedrock City in Kelowna for decades until the attraction was shut down in 1998.
The sign seemed to have been lost until a Google Earth search found it in a field in 2016 and owner R.J. Bennett salvaged the remnants with the intent to restore it.
“I got voted down,” Bennett told iNFOnews.ca. “All that’s left is 40 feet of steel post.”
Bedrock City stood next to a water slide park. Bennett said it was hard enough to make a go of the water slide with only a two-month window in the summer but when copyright owner Hanna-Barbera cancelled their licencing agreement, that was the end of the park.
Forty Foot Fred now lies in a field. He was found by a Kelowna resident using Google Maps.
Image Credit: Susan Forster/Old Kelowna
McCurdy Corner shopping centre has since been built on the site. It includes Freddy’s Brew Pub.
“Freddy’s was supposed to be called Forty Foot Fred,” Bennett said. “I didn’t go to the meeting that day. We had a guy named Sarg working for us and he said, ‘no, no, that’s kid’s stuff. Well, the kids are all drinking beer now."
“There’s a generation or two that lived in that era. It’s so important looking back on your childhood. It was quite a thing out there on the highway."
He does still have some of the Flintstones characters from the theme park – not Fred or Barney but some fibreglass dinosaurs and other figures he’s looking at getting restored.
As for the Forty Foot Fred pole?
“I was going to bring it over to my farm here and I would put it on the corner and I would put a flying horse on it this time,” Bennett said. “I got voted down by the family.”
Bennett founded Flying Horse Farm in 1965 to breed thoroughbred racing horses in West Kelowna. He was the son of former Premier W.A.C. Bennett and brother to former Premier Bill Bennett.
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