Cliff Vandercave

**Cliff Vandercave** is the main antagonist of the 1994 film by Universal Pictures *The Flintstones*, a live-action film version of the animated sitcom of the same name. He is the executive vice president of industrial procurement for Slate & Co. He is assisted by a woman named Sharon Stone.

He was portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan, who also played Isaac Izzard in the 2018 film adaptation of *The House with a Clock in its Walls*.

## Biography

Cliff was presumably hired by Mr. Slate some years after Fred and Barney. It is revealed that he cheated on his resume and became one of the heads of the company dishonestly. Along with Miss Stone, they decided to embezzle a fortune from the company through phony constructing machinery and fly to a beach resort called Rockopoko. All they needed was a "stooge" to put their plan into effect.

Cliff Vandercave is the head of the company Fred and Barney work for. Cliff proposes that he will make one worker his vice-manager, if the worker wins the exam he gives them. The workers take the exam, and Barney wins, but feeling he ought to help his friend Fred who has failed, Barney gives his papers to Fred, and Cliff hires Fred. But Cliff is shocked that Fred could win because he has assumed Fred is stupid and unambitious. Sharon becomes Fred's secretary and Cliff orders her to get information out of him that he cheated. Cliff announces he will be making tiny houses for the town but Fred says come on, who would live in them. Eventually, Cliff tricks Fred into firing all the workers in the quarry. Cliff then accuses Fred of bankrupting the company, forcing him to lose all his money when his wife Wilma leaves him.

The next morning, Fred is met with an angry crowd of employees and heads straight to the file room where he finds the real documents and discovers Cliff's true intentions and confronts him on it. Cliff tells Fred that he's given him all the credit since it was his name on the forms including spending so much money on luxuries and marks Fred as an embezzler.

Fred is now a fugitive on the run who hides out at a hotel. A news broadcast is shown of Fred (or rather, an actor doing a terrible impression of him) embezzling, Wilma who is viewing this remembers the Dictabird in Fred's office and with Betty sets off to Slate & Co to clear her husband's name. Fred, who is now in a disguise, finds refuge in a cave and chats with one of the employees who was fired, but he accidentally gives himself away and a huge mob chases him down the road.

Meanwhile, Wilma and Betty sneak into the office building and steal the Dictabird. However, Cliff sees Wilma and Betty leave with the Dictabird from his office window, and realizes that now that they have the bird, it would spoil everything and decided to go into another devious scheme.

The angry mob soon corners Fred and attempts to hang him and Barney after he admits that it was because of him that Fred was promoted to the job, but before the two can be hanged, Wilma, Betty and the Dictabird arrive and Dictabird forces Fred to say sorry. Then the mob realizes that Cliff was the one who dismissed them and they let Fred and Barney go.

With his embezzlement scheme exposed, an enraged Cliff then breaks into Fred's house and kidnaps Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, demanding the Dictabird in exchange for their safe return. Fred and Barney confront Cliff at the quarry, where Cliff has tied Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm to a huge machine. Though they hand him the Dictabird, Cliff sets the machine off to stall them. Barney rescues the children while Fred destroys the machine. Cliff then attempts to shoot Fred, but is knocked out by Sharon, after finding out that Cliff had betrayed her by getting only one ticket to Rockapoko. Cliff tries to run away from Fred, but he picks up a large round boulder and rolls it at Cliff, knocking him to the ground like a bowling pin. But as Cliff tries to escape the cops, a huge amount of molten concrete comes down over the ledge and buries him alive, turning him into a solid statue. When Mr. Slate sees the cement-covered Cliff, he exclaims that he loves it, deciding to name it "Concrete" after his daughter Concretia, and declares the Stone Age over with its creation. Slate offers Fred the presidency of a new division in the company, but Fred turns it down in exchange for his old job back, Slate rehiring all the workers, and adding a few other improvements to the workplace he had originally desired as an executive. Enter The Flintstones new cartoon The Swimming Pool