‘Get 4 JETSONS comics’ reads my diary entry for Tuesday 13 August 1974. We were on holiday in Llandudno, North Wales, where I’d discovered a carousel of imported American comic books outside a newsagents. Most of the comics were based on Hanna Barbera characters. Top Cat, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones were all very familiar, but The Jetsons? I’m not sure if I’d even heard of them before. Either way, the colourful covers and retro-futurist asethetic appealed to me, and that day I picked up numbers 13, 17, 18 and 19 of a series published in 1972 and 73.
It was in the pages of these four comics that I discovered The Jetsons – parents George and Jane, offspring Judy and Elroy, space-mutt Astro and Rosie the Robot. It looked like a fun series. So how come it had never been on television? Top Cat, which had been bought by the BBC, was seldom off the air. ITV, on the other hand, owned the rights to The Flintstones, which, despite dating back to 1960, had only really become known to me in the early 70s. Did ITV also own The Jetsons? If so, what had they done with it?
I’d been alert to TV cartoons from a very early age, and knew most of the famous Hanna Barbera creations very well – Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinx. Some I’d seen in books without ever spotting them on television – Hokey Wolf, Fibber Fox, Snagglepuss, Yakky and Chopper, Magilla Gorilla. But not The Jetsons.
There was a simple reason why I’d never seen the series – it had fallen victim to ITV’s regionalistion, where local stations could take their pick of bought-in American filmed series, which would be broadcast on a regional basis without ever being nationally networked. Series like The Flintstones appeared sporadically across the regions, with some areas not committing to the show until the early 70s. Similarly, the live action sitcom My Favourite Martian was shown in only selected regions, with some areas not picking it up at all. And this was the fate that befell The Jetsons.
In its home country, The Jetsons was privileged to become the first programme broadcast in colour on the ABC network when it debuted in 1962. Network repeats saw it through to September 1963 in prime time slots, by which time the show had already been cancelled. Saturday morning reruns on all three networks proved to be much more popular, indicating that the show – which, like The Flintstones, had been conceived as a sitcom with a broader family appeal – was performing better with an audience of children. Over twenty years later, the series was revived, with new episodes going direct to syndication in 1985 and 87. In 1990, the Jetsons finally arrived on the big screen.
Here in Britain, however, it was a very different story. Granada picked up the show in summer 1963, placing it in the 6.05pm slot that was frequently occupied by live-action sitcoms. The TV Times listing, as you can see, even included the complete voice cast, and the show was promoted on the page with a neat graphic of Rosey, the family’s robot maid. A small article in the same issue drew attention to the series, describing it, entirely accurately, as ‘a space-age version of The Flintstones.’ But there seems to have been less enthusiasm elsewhere on the ITV network – by the end of 1963, of the larger regional operators, only Granada had taken The Jetsons. Here, the series ran all the way through to 18 December, and although I don’t have all the TV Times available for inspection, it can reasonably be inferred that all 24 episodes had been shown. Two years later and there was still no sign of the series on any of the other regional operators – while Granada, having an endless supply of new programmes to broadcast, didn’t run to a repeat.
Here in the Midlands, we would have to wait until 1978 for a glimpse of The Jetsons, and a glimpse was all we got. It was four years on from buying those comics – almost to the day – that I finally got to see the programme for real. We were a couple of weeks into the summer holiday when ATV, for whatever reason, suddenly began screening the sixteen-year-old series (the previous week, they’d been showing episodes of the American crime drama Banacek). ‘Watch the Jetsons for 1st time at 11.10am’ read my diary entry for Wednesday 2 August 1978. It was, however, to be very much a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ broadcast.
I must have been impressed by my first look at The Jetsons, because I wrote up the whole synopsis on the opposite page of my diary. Watching it again, I can see I’d been paying close attention, as I even specified the ‘pineapple upside down cake’ that ended up on the head of George’s boss, Mr. Spaceley…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rVeOh1I-uY
Of all the characters in that first episode, the most endearing was Rosie the Robot, voiced by Jean Van Der Pyl, who was already familiar to me as the voice of Wilma Flintstone. Yet in spite of being a regular in the Charlton comics, she only made two appearances in the original TV series. But never mind – there was always space-mutt Astro who, looking and sounding like an early prototype for Scooby-Doo, turned up in the fifth episode. With his coming, the Jetson household was complete… but my brief encounter with the futuristic family was about to reach a premature end. I got to see only one more episode (Jetson’s Night Out) before the new school term began on Tuesday 5 September. Another episode was shown the following day, which, of course, I missed. It was the last in this repeat run, but the series would resurface in the morning schedule in May 1979, for just two weeks. My diary lists the episodes Rosie's Boyfriend and Elroy's TV Show at 9.55 am on Thursday 31 May and Thursday 7 June. It's more than likely that ATV showed other episodes around this time, but if so, I failed to catch any of them – and in the absence of TV Times details, it's impossible to check. Either way, Elroy's TV Show would prove to be my last look at The Jetsons for some considerable time.
The series seems to have seen scant action elsewhere on the ITV network, and from contemporary editions of the TV Times, I can find only one other region showing episodes – around half a dozen having appeared on Tyne Tees around June and July 1978.
It’s small wonder that here in Britain, The Jetsons has left next to no impression as an item of popular culture – I don’t know anyone else who remembers seeing it. Why wasn’t it more popular? It was, as the TV Times put it, a space-age Flintstones; and perhaps that was the problem. The Flintstones had the cute gimmick of seeing modern technology reimagined for the stone-age, whereas The Jetsons’ running gags all revolved around the family’s excessively automated lifestyle. That’s not to say that the gags weren’t good – I particularly like the way George’s flying saucer car folds up into a briefcase (there is now, I believe, a real life car that can perform the same trick) – but the visual gags never quite displayed the level of perverse imagination seen in the town of Bedrock.
Spurred into action by the release of the Jetsons movie in 1990, the BBC nabbed the rights to the series, but put it out at a time when only children and the unemployed would be watching, with the first episode airing on Tuesday 10 July 1990 at 10am. The Radio Times listings were perfunctory at best, but from the scant synopses, it can be inferred that the broadcasts included episodes from the 1960s original and the 80s revival, and lasted a good deal longer than ITV’s attempt. I saw none of them, and was barely even aware that the series had popped up again. Online sources also state that episodes were shown on Channel 5 – I’ll take their word for it.
At time of writing, there are only two full episodes of The Jetsons available to watch online, and there is no UK DVD or blu-ray release (although the blu-ray available through Amazon is stated to be region free). Aside from a VHS release in the 1980s, Jetsons merchandise has always been thin on the ground here in Britain. There were a couple of annuals from World Distributors in the early sixties – the publisher was based in Manchester, one of the only places where the series was being broadcast.
Having revisited The Jetsons for the purpose of writing this piece, I’d happily watch more of them, though I suspect I’d bail out after the 1960s era. If any of this has whetted your appetite for retro space age fun, the good news is that the Charlton comics are available to view online: there was a series of 20, published in the early 70s:
And when you’ve read those, you can take a trip further back in time to Gold Key’s superior Jetsons series from 1963-4:
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