Meet George Jetson
the sights and sounds - mostly sounds - of Hanna-Barbera
A thousand thanks to those of you who are paid subscribers. With your support, half of the revenue from my last post went to Organized Communities Against Deportations and half went the Street Vendors Association of Chicago. This time around, I’ll be splitting revenue between The Sameer Project and Advocates for Trans Equality.
Got a kid nearby? Do me a favor.
Download it onto your phone (so that it doesn’t have a big search result banner at the top that says THE JETSONS, or more likely TE JETSOBS if you play fast and loose with the keyboard).
Show it to the kid and ask them who these people are.
I posed this prompt in one of my group chats a few weeks ago, and my friends’ kids — ranging in age from five-ish to ten-ish — were stumped. Another friend, who recently turned 50, said: “It’s kind of amazing Y’ALL know who the Jetsons are. Jetsons came out when my mother was 12.”
I think about The Jetsons a lot, actually. Every few months, with no obvious inciting incident, while washing the dishes or sorting socks or walking the dog, I find myself singing a particular song from my childhood. Is it a good song? Debatable! Is it… a song I remember vividly? That it is! The song: “I Always Thought I’d See You Again,” by 80s pop star Tiffany, and from the movie The Jetsons (1990).1
Some of why I dig the song is the tune itself, and much of it has to do with the scene in which Judy Jetson sings it. She’s feeling bummed out, and decides to try to cheer herself up by visiting the “nature zone” of the mall. This entails floating up a giant tube on a hover-scooter while the opening synth strings and kick drums enter the scene. She hovers morosely around a spacey botanical garden where literally everyone else present is snuggly couples. No power-walking seniors, no one watering the plants. Poor Judy!
I loved this mall. I wanted to float up the tube and through the purple space flowers and look out the window at the stars rearranging themselves just for my benefit.
Almost immediately thereafter, Judy becomes smitten with this alien (?) named Apollo Blue, and out of nowhere the normal action ceases and cuts into a whole music video which is a pastiche of 80s music videos and is kind of great? It’s short. Real quick real quick!
It’s not a coincidence that I, a person born in 1986, was watching a movie in 1990 about a set of characters who debuted on television in 1962 — and that most of my reminiscences about this movie come via my memories of the music. Music and sound are central to why The Jetsons have been an enduring cultural presence, even if those elements haven’t been enough to keep them popular in the present.
an abstract (100 words or less!) for the uninitiated.
The Jetsons was an animated series that debuted on ABC in 1962. It was created by animation studio Hanna-Barbera, also famous for such characters as the Flintstones, Johnny Quest, Yogi Bear, the Smurfs, Scooby Doo and his homies, and many others. The Jetsons was a sitcom following the lives of a family living in a futuristic Space Ace world of gadgets, robots, flying cars, and interplanetary travel. The family was comprised of patriarch George, his wife Judy, their kids Judy and Elroy, their sassy robot maid Rosey, and their dog, Astro.
Critical perspectives have been pretty disdainful toward William Hanna and Joe Barbera, and for understandable reasons. For starters, some of their most famous characters were more or less facsimiles of other people’s efforts. (The Flintstones were The Honeymooners; Huckleberry Hound was Droopy.) And in case you ever wondered why a caveman wears a collar all the time, it was to cut costs: draw the characters once, and swivel their heads around without having to animate the movement of their necks.2
“Hanna-Barbera produced the shallowest characters,” wrote critic Stefan Kanfer, “and the most obvious gags.” He accused the studio of representing “the decline of craftsmanship, the speedup of planned obsolescence, of deliberate shoddiness, of products meant to end in a landfill.”3
These criticisms are valid, but they also ignore the fun sight gags that many of us remember from childhood. When Judy and her friends get together, they turn on the anti-gravity floor so that they can do the Solar Swivel (performed by their idol, Jet Screamer) in mid-air. When it’s time for Elroy to leave the playground, his dad grabs him up with an automated claw like one you’d see in an arcade machine and deposits him into a pneumatic tube that immediately whooshes him into the living room. As a kid, you understand these to be fanciful imaginings, but they’re just entrancing enough to occupy the same space at the back of your brain that thinks maybe your teacher sleeps at school or Santa might be real. It’s an enticing vision, one that makes the future (or the Flinstones’ past, where the needle of a phonograph is replaced by a bird’s beak) wholesome and inviting rather than terrifying.
And there’s another angle: the relative benefits of the company’s cheapness. Hanna and Barbera tried to figure out ways to keep animation cheap not just for their own bottom line, but to create less of an excuse to kill their animation programs altogether.
Hanna and Barbera had started their careers working on Tom and Jerry, a show that for the most part had no dialogue. In the absence of speech, the score behind the action took on heightened importance.4
All was fine and dandy until MGM’s animation operations shut down in 1957, with a single phone call to the business manager. “Close the studio. Lay everybody off.” Barbera would later describe the experience as being “like the fall of the Roman Empire in fast motion.”
Hanna and Barbera took many of their staff with them to start their own company. Their second project under the new imprimatur, The Huckleberry Hound Show, was the first animated half-hour television series ever. No puppets, no live-action shorts, no random collections of shorts inserted at the whim of the network in between other shows.5
The Flintstones would extend that impact by being the first half-hour animated series to air on primetime TV — meaning that it was aimed at adults as well as kids. And the scale of the enterprise was ridiculous compared to their work at MGM. During the Tom and Jerry days, the team made five or six cartoons a year, and each was only around five minutes long. Now, they would be responsible for thirty minutes of content a week. If you don’t feel like doing math, that’s a jump from 25 or 30 finished minutes to over 1,500, a task which Barbera called “simply insane.”6
The structure created an incentive for cheap, crappy animation… which was, perhaps, still better than no animation at all. Leonard Martin, who was the film critic on Entertainment Tonight for thirty years, wrote in 2024:
[Hanna and Barbera] were pioneers when it came to producing cartoons for television on a tight budget. Propelled by youthful moxie I mounted a high horse and decried their use of so-called limited animation. With the passage of time, I came to appreciate what they actually accomplished, entertaining kids while keeping animation alive in Hollywood and providing a lifeline to countless veterans of the business."7
“One of the great glories of Tom and Jerry was, of course, the lushness of the art and animation,” Joe Barbera wrote in his memoir.8 “Without this quality — which was impossible on a television budget — the sustaining power of the new cartoons had to come from something else.”9 A single Tom and Jerry episode cost between $40,000 and $65,000 to make. With inflation, that’s about three-quarters of a million dollars today on the high end. A completed Tom and Jerry entry had 20,000 or 30,000 finished drawings. While at MGM, Hanna and Barbera leaned on the technique of making a rough draft version as a test run — a “limited animation” that would be comprised of about 1,800 drawings. As Hanna-Barbera, they bumped that up to about 3,000 drawings, saving immense time and money and resulting in a product that used literally a tenth of the effort.10
Top-notch music, sound effects, and voice acting were supposed to compensate for the fact that you’d been watching a character run past the same plant on a loop for two minutes. Like in this clip, where Fred Flintstone passes an identical house, garage, and tree seven times. He then goes into the store and passes the same shelf with the same bin of eggs next to it 2.5 times.
Interestingly, when I watched this clip without counting, I estimated 3-4 reuses of the same cel featuring the house and garage. Only when I slowed it down to half speed and took the time to count did I realize it was a whopping seven. When my brain was also focused on the dialogue and music, and the action of Fred’s car in the foreground, I subconsciously gave a free pass to the repetition of the house — even though I was going into it literally to focus on the reuse of the same cels! I figured it out by rewinding and rewatching — something which today is really easy to do for kids, and wasn’t that easy to do when I was growing up. (Since most of us were watching Hanna-Barbera shows on syndication, not on tape.)
By way of quick comparison, look at how detailed the food is in this Tom and Jerry short, back at MGM:
And not to put too fine a point on it, but when the grocer wallops Fred with the side of ribs at 1:54, it’s a static image of Fred with the meat on his head just being shifted up and down. Not a lot of movement. Compare that to Tom being whacked with a frying pan here, where we get the moment of impact, the wiggly pan, the gag of Tom’s head being shaped like a pan, and him blinking in shock. A veritable feast!
But back to the cheap stuff.
The Jetsons took the elevated music and soundscapes of Tom and Jerry, the affordability of Huckleberry Hound, the nuclear family sitcom structure and bid for a broad audience of The Flintstones, and tucked it in with a hefty dose of Kennedy-era astro-optimism. It offers an inversion of the typical Flintstones gag, which plays on the same humor logic while quietly allowing you to feel hopeful about the future. Fred Flintstone has a “car,” but it’s powered by his own two feet. Mans don’t even got shoes. Meanwhile, George Jetson flies around everywhere and has a machine that hands him a martini and a cigarette when he gets home, and it’s all so mundane to him that he doesn’t even know how good he’s got it. “George, Jane, Judy, Elroy, and Mr. Spacely may be the main characters,” writes Greg Ehrbar, historian and host of the Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera podcast.
But the star of the show is really where they live and the possibilities of what people might achieve, without the usual dystopian consequences of such fiction. Generations of viewers never stop watching because they want to visit them and their world. The Jetsons do not suffer the science-fiction trope of paying a terrible price for technology.11
The cultural impact of The Jetsons is absolutely bananas when you consider that in its original run, only one paltry season (24 episodes!) was produced. It originally was slotted into primetime as The Flintstones had been, did terribly there, and then those same episodes were rerun as Saturday morning cartoons the following season, and fared better. It was revived with a new batch of episodes in the 1980s.
Even though The Flintstones debuted first, The Jetsons actually beat them to the punch on the formula of the highly descriptive catchy theme song that tells you who all the principal characters are. The Flintstones started its first couple of seasons with an instrumental theme song; the iconic “Meet the Flintstones” was added in the third season after The Jetsons was already on air.12 The clutch thing about these openers and closers was that they also took up a pretty lengthy chunk of airtime, cutting down on the required weekly animation even more. The opening and closing themes together take up like two minutes out of a 22-minute show!
Both of those theme songs were composed by Hoyt Curtin, who brought a love of big-band music to the work. Where the theme for The Flintstones outlined key details of the setting and premise (they’re a modern Stone Age family, they live in Bedrock), the actual lyrics to The Jetsons theme are just the characters’ names, with no exposition. The composition carries the storytelling work.
It’s not surprising that Curtin’s work was an overt inspiration to one of my favorite composers ever, Danny Elfman, when he composed the theme for one of the most influential pieces of pop culture ever, The Simpsons… which also includes the characters’ names as its only lyrical entry.
Groening’s direction to Elfman: “I want something that’s frantic and frenetic, like the scores of the great shows of the 1960s. I always thought that the shows of the seventies and eighties were so wimpy and very tentative, saying, ‘Oh, here’s our little show, we’re trying not to be too offensive, please give us a chance.’ Whereas in the sixties, show themes were big fanfares and swoops and swooshes‚— they said, this is a show!” Recalled Elfman: “I was inspired by a lot of different stuff including The Flintstones and The Jetsons, and just the style of those times.
Curtin also developed hundreds and hundreds of musical cues. Sounds like the tinkling piano that accompanied Fred Flintstone tip-toeing up to the line with his bowling ball brought the animation to life, and Curtin’s original compositions helped Hanna-Barbera avoid licensing fees — another cost-saving measure.
So. Why don’t kids know who the Jetsons are these days? Is Curtin’s legacy a victim of its own success, as we live in a world where high-end soundscapes of animated worlds are so ubiquitous — and so much easier to synthesize, no big band needed — that the show doesn’t feel special? Is it because Cartoon Network stopped platforming Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the late 90s, in favor of creating original programming like Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls instead of airing old shows twenty times a day? Is it because it’s too easy to eye-roll at the limited animation?
Or is it because we live in a real-life Jetsons world and it ain’t sweet? I would estimate that 90 percent of the time someone around me brings up The Jetsons now, it’s to lament that we don’t actually have flying cars as the show promised we would. There’s a kernel of real disappointment, real melancholy contained within that common joke. The future is here, astro-optimism has crumbled into space dust, and we are paying a terrible price for technology.13 In The Jetsons, time savings and quality-of-life improvements from technology are passed along to everyday people. Computers have automated George’s job, so he pushes a single button at his terminal and spends the rest of his three-hour workday napping. In our present-future, he would get sub-minimum wage to push the button, and then have to cobble together a hodgepodge of button-pushing gigs to make ends meet. A flying car stops being a cute dream if you realize that the guy best positioned to manufacture them has all the empathy and human kindness of an old sock.
Seems like a good time to bring back Top Cat! I’ll still be listening to that Tiffany song on repeat, though.
What I’m up to:
Counting my blessings as the year wraps up. Writing more X-Men: X-MEN UNITED drops this March. It’s about a school for mutants, which, as a person with two masters degrees and a doctorate on the topic of real-life schools, I find both hilarious and vindicating! I promise there are no vouchers in the Marvel Universe, though. Not on my watch, anyway.
I’m very honored that I’ll be giving the MLK keynote at Dr. King’s alma mater, Boston University, in January.
I’m also going to be interviewing the phenomenal, talented, Oscar-nominated Julian Brave NoiseCat about his new book, We Survived the Night, on January 14. RSVP here!
And I’m writing a couple of other things (a TV thing, a radio thing) but too superstitious to tell you about them until they’re signed, sealed, delivered. But I’m also back to baking bread, which has been lovely. Here’s a shokupan I made a couple of weeks ago.
By the way:
I recently switched to The New Yorker crossword and away from NYT for all the reasons. It’s a pretty good substitute and they have another puzzle I’ve come to like, an anagram puzzle called Shuffalo. I’m half mentioning it as a recommendation, and half mentioning it as an invitation for other daily crossword and puzzle recs. Must meet the following needs:
not too easy
but also not too gimmicky
free or worth my money/supporting an indie creator
mobile-friendly
bonus: I can go straight to it without having to move through depressing content. I am doing the crossword to take a break from the depressing world! Please!
That’s it for now. Cheers to 2026.
Got a friend who wants to read too much information about unimportant and silly things?
Did you know Tiffany was Lebanese and Syrian? I did not realize that!
Joe Barbera was not too keen on Tiffany and felt creatively sidelined from the movie in general. According to his memoir, he walked out mid-production and never went to go see it. Yikes!
Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to “Toy Story,” 189.
Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to “Toy Story,” 189-190.
This argument is explored in more detail in Greg Ehrbar’s Hanna-Barbera: The Recorded History from Modern Stone Age to Meddling Kids, which focuses on the sound and compositions behind Hanna-Barbera’s body of work.
A notable exception to the lack of dialogue: the occasional appearance of the Black woman who worked as a maid in the home where Tom and Jerry lived. She doesn’t have a name, but has been referred to by historians and commentators as “the mammy” or “Mammy Two-Shoes” because we generally only see her shoes in the frame. Animator Jack Zander, who worked on the show, said of her: “Now the mammy in Tom and Jerry was an outright racist cartoon character. [She] had the typical negro voice and served as a foil for the two animal characters. Showing just her feet and lower body kept us from worrying about her face and making her another ‘character’ to give personality to.” For more, see chapter 3 of The Colored Cartoon: Black Presentation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954, by Christopher P. Lehman. The maid was voiced for 12 years by Lillian Randolph, who was also in It’s A Wonderful Life.
This fact is in bold because it’s crazy to me!
Joseph Barbera (1994), My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century, 3; 111. There’s a whole other story here about the glory days of the studio system in Hollywood and the end of those days, but MGM was losing money and stars for a number of reasons. One of them was the Supreme Court decision U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, in which it was declared monopolistic for studios to own theaters in which their films were distributed (and establish rules barring competitors’ movies from showing in their theaters), and to engage in “block booking,” forcing theaters to buy a license for a block of movies — some of which were destined to be flops — without seeing them. Lots of interesting antitrust history here! The good old days!
Ehrbar, Hanna-Barbera, 25.
In writing this, I learned that the Flintstones were originally the “Flagstones,” until the creators got a letter of complaint from the writer of the comic strip Hi and Lois. This is also how I learned that A) Hi and Lois have a last name and it’s Flagston, B) Lois is Beetle Bailey’s sister?! C) Hi and Lois is still running?!?! I feel like if you’re reading this and you have even the faintest inkling what I’m talking about, you probably also knew those three facts. I feel like if you’re a Hi and Lois fan in 2025, you’re a superfan. Not a lot of casual Hi and Lois fans rattling around anymore.
Joseph Barbera (1994), My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century, 4.
Joseph Barbera (1994), My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century, 118.
I always find it truly remarkable when people who have had notable lives but are not famous by face nevertheless insist on publishing memoirs with their faces on the cover. Nobody knows what you look like, Joe! Imagine being the man who invented Fred Flintstone and you’re like, no, the people want to see me.
Joseph Barbera (1994), My Life in ‘Toons: From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century, 115.
Ehrbar, Hanna-Barbera, 59.
Jared Bahir Browsh (2022), Hanna-Barbera: A History, 61.
John Burlingame (2023), Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, 320.
For a bit more on this: “The Jetsons and the Future of the Middle Class,” by Matt Novak.
I'm hustling to my library's website to put on hold! At first I was like "look! It's got a wait-list! People still watch!" But I realized it's 3 of us waiting for 1 copy... Anyway I also remember really enjoying the Jetsons and I loved the gems of fun facts in this essay. Thanks for publishing!
So I loved all the gadgets of the Jetsons! Was never a huge Flintstones but I suppose I was unconsciously picking up on the optimism of the Jetsons. (And Tiffany is Lebanese?!?!) Thanks for this!