Meet George Jetson — Again

By James Poniewozik Sunday, May 09, 2004
    • One pleasure of TV on DVD is getting to revisit another era — sometimes two eras at once. The Jetsons Season 1 (Warner Home Video; $64.92) is as much about New Frontier 1962 as about the distant future. Its ditzy slapstick is like the peanut-butter-and-jelly mix Goober Grape — if you didn't love it as a kid, you're not going to acquire the taste as an adult — and the pop-culture gags (like rock star Jet Screamer and his hit Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah) have not aged well. But the animation is still a classic of gee-whiz atomic-age modernism. Most of all, it's touching to look back at the show's optimistic imagined future, in which there's a flying saucer in every garage and even inept button-pusher George Jetson can afford a robot maid and a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle without worrying about his job getting outsourced to Pluto.