Jetsons and the City of Tomorrow

I read a paper, Are We There Yet? The Jetsons and the City of the Future by Laura Broman. This paper appeared in Spectator, 43:1, Spring, 2023.

Spectator is University of Southern California’s premier journal for film and television criticism.

This paper is serious criticism, but it’s not a hard read. It makes some good points, but all the points might be de-legitimized by The Jetsons being unmitigated schlock.

Hanna Barbera, the producers of The Jetsons, clearly were under terrible time pressure when creating all their 1960s Saturday morning cartoons. The writers and artists just did the first thing they thought of. They weren’t afraid to rip off other cartoons, either. The new car episode heavily borrows from a 1951 Tex Avery cartoon, Car of Tomorrow.

The schlock nature makes it hard to take serious criticism of The Jetsons seriously. If you read that much into hurriedly assembled crap, you’re giving a lot of weight to whatever was in the air at the time. Serious criticism gives the writers and animators of The Jetsons too much credit because they were clearly just slopping it out.

Jetsons Resources

Of course there’s a Jetson fandom wiki, a Hanna Barbera fandom wiki, and iMDB entry. But that stuff is garbage. There’s list of episodes, who wrote and directed, and the voice actors. But there’s no analysis whatsoever, just factoids, like “Oswald Dudley, the voice of George, had 10 toes, 6 one one foot 4 on the other”. Absolute foolishness.

Paleofuture blog has a complete rundown of The Jetsons episodes from 1962, and a long post on What inspired The Jetsons.

Orbit City, home of the Jetsons themselves, seems to have copied Norman Bel Geddes.

That’s a model of the aerial restaurant, ca 1930.

See this article for more about Norman Bel Geddes.

The resemblance between the aerial “buildings” in Orbit City and Bel Geddes’ aerial restaurant is unmistakable, but often overlooked.