In 1962, following the success of The Flintstones, Hanna-Barbera decided to trade the Stone Age for the Space Age. The Jetsons scarcely needs an introduction because most of our readers will have seen it at some stage or another. If you don't know: The Jetsons is about the family and fortunes of George Jetson, an average Joe living in a futuristic space-setting (the year is 2026—not so far away now!). Other family members include George's wife, Jane, who is a homemaker who likes spending money; his teenage daughter, Judy, who for some reason has white hair; his son, Elroy, who at seven is a prodigious scientist; his dog, Astro, who seems as if he was the proto-type for Scooby Doo; and his maid, Rosie, who is a robot. They are voiced by Hanna-Barbera's legendary roster of talented VAs including Mel Blanc, Don Messick and the unmistakable Daws Butler with George O'Hanlon as George. But you already know all this, right?
What you might not know, however, is that the show was canceled in 1963 after its first season (24 episodes). After endless reruns on syndicated television throughout the 60s and the 70s, the show finally got its second season in 1985, twenty-two years after its initial run ended, which has got to be some kind of record—and complete with the original cast and a quite faithful recreation of the animation style too! Season 2 had forty episodes and a third and final season of ten episodes was made in 1987. On this set we have the first twenty-one episodes of the 1980s run, collected for the first time on DVD. The set consists of three discs of seven episodes each, with a brisk eight-minute featurette called "The Jetsons Return to the Future" on disc three. [Side note: One wonders whether this could have been a double-disc set or better still a thirty rather than twenty-one episode affair—especially as there are twenty more episodes of season 2 to come, plus the ten season 3 episodes. Are they really planning on giving season 3 its own release? That would seem like milking it a bit too far to me. WB could have surely squeezed a few more onto these discs.]
Where the 60s show generally followed the old-fashioned nuclear-family American sitcom formula containing a laughter track and a lot of space-based puns, the 80s incarnation is more ingrained in the formulas of Saturday morning kids' television. For 1985 that means an obligatory little annoying comedic-foil/mascot thing (here a small alien called Orbity, who is surprisingly not that annoying) and well-worn plots you've seen a thousand times before. For example, in "Rosie Come Home", we get the old "member of the gang feels unwanted and is somehow displaced, only to come back to take save the day as the rest of the gang realize how much they miss the missing person". The same plot is repeated two episodes later in "Judy's Surprise Birthday", only this time it's a surprise party: Judy thinks everyone has forgotten her birthday, but they haven't! I guess children like to be reminded that they are important to and loved by their parents and friends, because that I've seen that plot dozens of times in many different cartoons.
That said, the episodes on offer here are mostly solid if unspectacular. Episodes usually feature one character more than the others, so it's possible to speak of "Elroy episodes" and "Rosie episodes." This is a good thing, because it not only gives the show a bit of variety but also lets us get to know each of the characters a bit better. In general, though, I enjoyed the episodes that center on the feud between George's boss, Mr. Spacely of Spacely Sprockets, and his rival Cogswell of Cogswell Cogs. "Solar Snoops" is genuinely quite fun as Cogswell schemes to steal Spacely's "microchip cookie" and George has to dress in drag on a counter-espionage mission. And "Winner Takes It All" takes the rivalry to the Olympics. The strained relationship between George and his boss is one of the cornerstones of the show (taken directly, of course, from
The Flintstones).
One of the charms of the show is its world of imaginative robots and gadgets. There are some great little touches, such as Judy's talking diary that promises not to tell anyone her secrets. But watching this show in 2009, there is an added joy in spotting the technologies that have come to fruition. George reads his newspaper and his mail on screen—they couldn't have known about such things in 1985! As I was watching, I kept reminding myself about what was and wasn't invented then, because little things like reading the news from a screen seem perfectly natural to us now. However,
The Jetsons seems to get at a deeper point about our reliance on technology. When Rosie's disc is "past its mileage" in "Rosie Come Home", she thinks she is obsolete and that the Jetsons want to replace her. But the replacement the family gets does things differently and they don't like it; they'd rather the older model. The whole episode reminded me of upgrading my old PC until the point came where I had to get a new one. It's interesting to see that that process dramatized and humanized.
A show as middle-of-the-road as
The Jetsons almost resists analysis. By 1985 standards it's positively retrograde. I mean, if you put it up against
Thundercats,
He-Man,
Dungeons and Dragons,
MASK,
Transformers, or
Defenders of the Earth, it's immediately clear that we're dealing with something from a different time. However, since it was a conscious effort to recreate a 60s show, that can hardly be leveled as a criticism. I'm wondering who the "natural audience" for
The Jetsons was in the 80s. I was a kid then, and I was watching men with big swords fight and then nagging my parents to buy me plastic replicas of them. I remember seeing
The Jetsons on but I always assumed (even back then) that it was from the same stock of endlessly re-run 50s, 60s and 70s shows that people don't tend to criticize, like
Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, Top Cat, Yogi Bear, and
Popeye that they'd put on as filler during a "dead spot" in the schedules. I can't ever remember going out of my way to watch it.
I guess this is my problem with
The Jetsons in general: who
would go out of their way to watch it? It's the sort of show that everyone has seen but is nobody's
favourite show; I can't really imagine someone describing themselves as a die hard "Jetsons fan." It's mildly amusing: but more "mild" than "amusing"; it's gently inventive, but more "gentle" than "inventive". It's not particularly funny, but harmless enough; it's faintly nostalgic but not particularly endearing. Well, you get the picture. In short,
The Jetsons is a study in bland moderation that struggles to justify its own existence.
