The Jetsons: The Complete Original Series Blu-ray set

[QUOTE="Marshall, post: 22220780, member: 22420"]I would like to see The Flintstones episodes in Blu-ray like The Jetsons , with perhaps a few bumpers also. BTW, AKA, I like your Born to Run cover photo session picture of Bruce and Clarence.[/QUOTE]
me too! I have all the individual seasons on DVD...

 

Yeah, the dirty little secret was that ABC had ordered color gear for NY and LA but it hadn't arrived by premiere day in September 1962, so they were forced to use NBC/Burbank for the West coast color feed, hard-patched to a Bell Telephone connection line to ABC's broadcast center. I think technically it fed a few ABC stations, but not many had color transmitters yet. The Jetsons was ABC's very first regularly-scheduled color TV series.

Sometime in the spring/summer of 1963, ABC NY and LA both had color film chains and "limited" color cameras and switching, so they could sorta/kinda do color. They shot a handful of color specials done with remote trucks and other facilities, even using CBS Television City on occasion (just called "Television City" in the credits). Eventually, all three networks were full color by late summer 1966, in time for the fall season premieres. (I can still remember grumbling for years on shows like "Batman" when the "In Color" banner would pop up, because my family was B&W until 1972. And by that I mean our actual family: we were literally in black and white and had no pigmentation of any kind.)

I wasn't aware until I worked on many HB & Ruby-Spears shows in the early 1980s that the title of "editor" in cartoons was given to the guy cutting the sound and gathering the sound effects. So they were generally not cutting picture and choosing shots per se, totally different from live-action shows. Eventually, all this changed.

My guess is they got a better deal from Pathé than Technicolor or Deluxe (or Fotokem, CFI, and the other independent film labs in LA). By the 1980s, I think HB used any lab they wanted and often didn't even credit them. It was kind of a hodge-podge, since it was Kodak film but processed in Taiwan or Japan or China or all kinds of places. They were actually still shooting animation plates in LA throughout the 1970s, but that work eventually got farmed out overseas.

 

You're welcome Michael.
Marshall

 

Steve,

First of all, thanks for such a great site! I enjoy reading the different forum topics, and learning about your career a bit, too.

Rosey the Robot ( Warner Archive is spelling her name on the Blu-ray disc that way now instead of Rosie) was the first Jetsons episode broadcast , Sunday night at 7:30 PM, September 23, 1962. It's competition was The Wonderful World of Disney and Dennis the Menace.

Do you still have the H-B cells today? If so, they're worth a pretty penny.

Marshall

 

: )

 

Remember when they had a scheduled network show to highlight all the new shows premiering in September? Those were all must see TV in the neighborhood. They did the same for Saturday morning cartoons and sometimes used free comic books.

 

Man we lived for those previews. We also couldn't wait to get our mitts on the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide.

 

Sure do. I don't remember the free comic books, though. But, that would make sense with publicity for the new shows.

 

I remember having my pen and notepad ready to make a list of all my "must see" shows. We were so excited. I guess it was the days before an endless number of entertainment options were available every second of the day.

 

Jetsons: I was too young by a couple of years to remember either The Jetsons or Flintstones in prime time (the only Flintstones prime time I can recall was an Easter episode featuring Pebbles and Bam Bam singing Let The Sun Shine In).

We loved The Jetsons.

We also loved the Sat Morning preview specials. They were must see TV for us though I have to say many of the cartoons did not meet expectations upon viewing the premiers and we usually reverted back to our faves, if they were still airing (the above, plus Johny Quest, Bullwinkle, Underdog, et al) that particular season.

 

That’s the main problem with the 80s Jetsons. I waited SO LONG for them to make new Jetsons episodes, because as a kid, I didn’t understand that the Saturday morning reruns on NBC were just that - reruns. And when they finally did make them, they were - meh. The voices were the same and the animation was more up to date. But, meh. I’ve seen much worse, but those new episodes just weren’t memorable. I can’t name a single one, either.

 

I believe that I'll just watch my Jetsons LASERDISC and be good with it! I might even pull out my Flintstones LASERDISC Box set while I'm at, which has cool extras like the following ...

 

I've been watching the Jetsons recently. I'm a big fan of seeing what people thought the future would be like back then.

The biggest thing I've noticed that has come true though, they live in a 'button push' and 'voice activated' environment and are constantly complaining about how hard work is.
They also predicted how many bugs we'd have in our modern systems and how wrong things go when you leave interpretation up to the computer systems we rely on!

 

Carrman,
That's one of the many things I found intriguing watching the Jetsons Blu-ray set. The 'voice activated' environment you mention would be the smart devices today, such as Alexa, etc.

Marshall

"The Jetsons: The Complete Original Series" Blu-ray Review

 

I think one of the reasons it is so remembered despite its short network run is that it has been in reruns continually since then. I just checked Wikipedia and it only had 24 episodes in its original season, which normally would be too few for reruns.

By comparison, The Macross Saga only had 36 episodes which wasn't enough for syndication. So they took two unrelated series and fused the three into one series named Robotech in the U. S., with a total of 72 episodes.

 

At least the original opening should still exist since Cartoon Network ran the first season with the original opening (including the original opening theme "Rise And Shine").

 

Why was The Jetsons only one season? Did it bomb at the time?

 

Expensive to make. It was only one season in Prime time then multiple years on Saturday mornings. It did OK in prime but not as well as the Flintstones.

 

Also, its competition in the time slot was Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on NBC and Dennis the Menace on CBS. So, they were all going for the same
family audience.

Marshall

"The Jetsons: The Complete Original Series" Blu-ray Review

 

That line-up, Disney, Dennis and Jetsons (wow, only 3 stations, imagine that!) was a difficult choice for me since 1) Dennis was a kid so that appealed to me, 2) Jetsons was a cartoon so again, a no-brainer and 3) Disney. I'm pretty sure I opted for The Jetsons unless Disney was running a cartoon or something like Zorro or The Prince & The Pauper. Heck, even Sammy The Way Out Seal was a must-see!