You've all seen this a thousand times but I don't care. I feel like putting up the opening from The Jetsons because I feel like writing about the first time I saw that show.
It was the first night that show was on: Sunday evening, September 23, 1962…which means I would have been ten years of age. A great age to watch the first episode of The Jetsons.
I wonder if kids today get as excited about a new cartoon show as my friends and I did back then. We all loved what had emerged so far from the Hanna-Barbera studio and this was their new series. What's more, it was announced as the first series to be broadcast in color on ABC. My family and I did not then own a color set but Mrs. Hollingsworth down the street did. She was an elderly widow who was cranky about everything except me because I was so adorable. And if you think I'm adorable now, you should have seen me when I was ten. She invited me to come down and watch the new cartoon show on her set.
(Trivial Aside, of the kind that appears often on this website: We all agree, I'm sure, that H-B TV cartoons never had the visual richness and depth of Disney animation or any good Warner Brothers cartoon…or even the theatrical animation that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had produced for MGM. But something to consider is that they may have worked better on television then. The simple graphics, thick outlines and bold colors came across well on the primitive TV screens of the day. We didn't have 50" High Def Plasmas then, remember. My middle-class family watched its shows on a black-and-white 17" Zenith with reception via a cheap roof antenna. Even when new and tuned properly, it wasn't all that clear. Huckleberry Hound looked pretty good on that set, probably better than Fantasia would have fared.)
The Jetsons went on at 7:00 that first, fateful evening. I was at Mrs. Hollingsworth's, parked in front of the set in her den, by 6:30. Didn't want to miss a second. My mother had cooked a brisket for our dinner and as she sometimes did, she served up a plate of it — with potato pancakes and carrots and the works — and had me take it down to Mrs. Hollingsworth. We did that for her on holidays and special occasions, and this seemed like a special occasion. Mrs. Hollingsworth left me with the TV while she went into her dining room to dine.
She was back in time to watch the show with me, and I'm not sure she enjoyed it but she sure enjoyed how much I enjoyed it. I took an instant liking to The Jetsons. I even liked it more than The Flintstones and I liked The Flintstones a lot. The futuristic show seemed to me to have even more likeable characters doing even neater things. I also liked that I recognized the voice of Daws Butler as "his boy, Elroy." It wasn't a Hanna-Barbera cartoon without Daws.
When the story was over, Mrs. Hollingsworth made a move to turn off the TV before the end credits. I probably said something rude when I stopped her. The credits were almost the best part…in two ways. Something funny always happened under them…and I also wanted to read the names to see how many I recognized from other H-B shows I followed. Dutifully, not wanting to be hurt, Mrs. Hollingsworth waited for the show to be utterly and totally over before she snapped off her RCA. I ran back to my home, half a block away, and asked my father why we didn't have a color TV. I think within two or three years, we did.
By that time, of course, The Jetsons was gone from the ABC prime-time lineup, consigned for all eternity to daytime and syndicated reruns. It only lasted one season because, I suspect, the time slot was too competitive and much of America was set in its Sunday night viewing habits. When I first met Mr. Barbera, one of the things we talked about was how that show (and Top Cat) should have lasted a lot longer than they did.
He agreed. Those were two of his favorite shows and he said that in both cases, there were offers to continue production immediately for syndication but they were deficit offers, meaning the studio would have had to go way in the hole to produce them and hope they could recoup and turn a profit by the shows rerunning for a long time. They had not been in a position to take that gamble at the time, he said, but in hindsight, he wished they had.
Years later, his studio produced another batch of Jetsons episodes for syndication with the original voice cast but (largely) a new creative team. It wasn't the same, of course. The momentum was gone, the spirit was gone…and even Mrs. Hollingsworth wasn't around anymore.
Here's the first three minutes of an episode just as you remember it…