eorge Jetson (O'Hanlon) is a low-level executive living in the high-speed, high-automation future. He commutes in his flying car to a job at Spacely Sprockets, where his duties consist of pressing a pair of buttons to turn a big machine on and off. He considers his three-day work workweek exhausting and his boss, Mr. Spacely, an arrogant slavedriver.
George is married to the lovely Jane (Singleton), whose housework consists of pushing even more buttons and finding excuses to spend George's money. Together with their children, daughter Judy (Waldo) and son Elroy (Butler), they explore the limitless possibilities of their high-tech lifestyle, complete with gravity boots that allow Elroy to walk on the ceiling and moving walkways that spare them the necessity of having to use their own legs to walk from room to room. (George, who has little stubby legs, might well be considered evolution's response to this lifestyle, but it seems to be gender-specific, as Jane and Judy both sport more familiar proportions).
Elroy is an inventor, and Judy has a habit of falling so deeply in love with her crush of the week that she tends to see her latest beau's face superimposed over the features of traffic cops and building superintendents.
Within the first few episodes, the family is joined by two more regulars: Rosie the Robot, who seems to have more sense than everybody else combined, and Astro the dog, who talks just like human beings except with an odd speech impediment that turns the opening consonant of every word into the letter R.
Adventures include George's stint as a scoutmaster, his acquisition of a flying suit and his capture of a bank robber armed with a gun that makes bank guards think they're infants. There is also some derring-do involving the corporate rivalry between Spacely Sprockets and its chief competitor, Cogswell Cogs.
The Jetsons was only the second prime-time cartoon in television history, Hanna-Barbera's follow-up to its wildly successful The Flintstones. As such, it clearly deserves a place in TV (and science-fiction) history. Whether it deserves to be immortalized on DVD is, of course, another matter. ...
Flying cars and leaden punch lines
There's a certain kind of science fiction that says less about the future it pretends to foresee than about the aspirations of the era that produces it. The Jetsons is a case in point. Its milieu is pristine, gleaming and oddly disturbing. Every building is a plaza on stilts; every household chore is accomplished by the pressing of buttons. An early episode specifies that even these wonder appliances break down before they're quite paid for. Corporations are still run by petty little tyrants who bellow at their employees while developing products that never work right. The landscape that anchors all of these stilt-structures is rarely seen. (Prior to reviewing the DVD set, I would have said "never seen," but dang, there it is.) George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy, and Jane his wife, all of whom have less-than-vivid personalities that pale next to the charisma possessed by their dog Astro and robotic maid Rosie, exist in a
rabbit-warren apartment with about as much hominess as an automat, pressing buttons that reward them with some comical approximation of what they want, and moving with all the fluidity of spinal-injury patients on their sixth month of physical therapy.
OK, so that last bit has to do with the limits of early-'60s Hanna-Barbera animation, which means that it possesses as little genuine motion as its creators could get away with, but really: That's the least of the problems. It's also the writing. Every lame joke is underlined and italicized and winked at for the benefit of kids too slow to get it. In one scene, George presses the wrong hair-care button, gets Jane's hairstyle, and cries out, "Oh, I pressed the wrong button again!", just in case we failed to get the point. Jane says it's time for the bed to eject George, presses a button to make the bed eject George, so we can see the bed eject George, so we can see George say that he's fed up with these automatic beds. And so on.
In one of the earlier episodes, an airborne George finds himself plastered against the windshield of a hovercar in flight. The driver says something to the effect that he hates hitchhikers. He tells George the hitchhiker to go away. He says, "You hitchhikers are getting more pushy every day." Then he presses a button on his dashboard, which induces a robot arm tipped with a nasty-looking claw to emerge from the fuselage and bite George on the butt. George yelps and zips away. The driver says, "Boy, am I glad I installed the anti-hitchhiker device." That's four explanations for one joke, and each explanation is delivered with a hamhandedness that might appall audiences used to receiving their future-funnies from the inventive likes of Futurama.
Nobody's saying we're smarter these days. The audience for this thing, however young, could not have been so slow that it required four separate footnotes; the same gag would have convulsed kids of Chaplin's era without one. The fault lies in the dull obviousness of Hanna-Barbera's usual house style, which only a handful of their productions overcame. It's as if actual energy and spontaneity were line-budget items the creators found as limiting as the constraints of the animation, and anybody who protests that this review is too harsh on what was essentially a cartoon for kids needs to be reminded that Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Fleischer Popeyes, the Disney features and even Rocky and Bullwinkle all achieved far greater and much more rewarding joke-per-minute totals, which at times exceeded what The Jetsons seems to have managed during entire seasons. They stretched the imaginations of their audiences. The Jetsons bludgeoned them.
DVD extras include character bios of the main characters, with highlight clips; a featurette on the gadgets featured in the series; interviews with Hanna and Barbera, where, among other things, they seem to claim that the idea for the treadmill came from this show; and coming attractions for other DVD compendia including Jonny Quest and The Flintstones. Janet Waldo, who voiced Judy, provides mildly interesting commentary tracks for two episodes.
