Newbie's Perspective The Jetsons 90s Issues 3-4 Reviews
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00:00 The Jetsons Archie issue 3.
00:03 George is wondering where the new interactive comic book program is,
00:08 because he needs it for work, and he thanks Elroy for finding it for him.
00:13 He'd hear him for sure, he just believed him too easily.
00:18 So Spacely tells an audience about his company's latest invention,
00:21 and George gets hit by a beam and Spacely shows what his family would be like in other time periods.
00:27 Not that it's interesting, because it's not creative at all.
00:31 George thinks he's trapped in the living hell.
00:34 He'd have to be in a holodeck here.
00:37 Spacely can even change the comic to make all the characters feel a certain emotion,
00:42 and apparently, stupid is an emotion now.
00:45 It'd make more sense if he was just choosing to make them all the same way,
00:49 and it's not like it's impossible to restrict it to one character.
00:52 There's just nothing to say about this. It shows exactly what you'd expect.
00:57 Spacely brags that the comic isn't predictable because there's hundreds of ways George can lose.
01:03 Now it's more interesting.
01:05 It isn't unacceptable to see this, because I know it's just happening in fiction within fiction,
01:10 and he'll get out of it at the end of the story.
01:13 Still, I don't feel like describing these panels because they aren't connected to each other in continuity.
01:18 They don't matter to each other, and they don't matter in general.
01:22 But it is funny to see George melodramatic about doing an honest day's work,
01:26 because he's never done that before, supposedly.
01:30 If Spacely thinks that about him, why hasn't he fired him?
01:33 He could bully any employee. He'd think he was better than any employee.
01:37 Might as well get a competent one.
01:40 Then we see him get fired by someone other than Spacely in the "Who Else Would Hire Him?" program.
01:46 I'd rather see what George was actually doing working for him.
01:50 He shows off charts, making it look like his company's revenues would somehow be higher without George.
01:57 If he believes this, why hasn't he fired him?
02:01 It'd make more sense if he doesn't actually think this lowly of him,
02:05 and is just trying to make him think worse of himself and employees to get him to do better.
02:10 And then he runs into the ironic reversal of fortunes program.
02:15 Somehow he's too stupid, so he activates it anyways,
02:19 and Spacely gets trapped in there to get told off by George.
02:22 And that was awesome.
02:24 We see a giant George tell Spacely he messed up again, and that he's an idiot,
02:29 and Spacely just lies down agreeing.
02:32 Sadly, it cuts ahead in just two panels to several hours later,
02:36 where someone looks at the machine and calls it sick.
02:39 The story would've been great if Spacely was in the program the whole time.
02:44 The audience is bored, and so am I,
02:46 because I was hoping I'd see a lot more than one panel of George getting back at him.
02:51 George gets an idea to print out hard copies of comics,
02:55 and he thanks them for the idea working out.
02:58 But how did that fix the machine?
03:01 Why did it even malfunction?
03:03 In the next story, Elroy's upset about something,
03:06 and none of his family is interested in listening because they're distracted.
03:10 George is chasing Astro for chasing a cat that must've been a stray
03:14 hanging around the outside of their house to be here.
03:17 But I can't help but be distracted by how unlikely it is for him to be here.
03:21 And Jane's agreeing to play bingo with a neighbor.
03:24 It'd be a little interesting to learn why it's different from regular bingo,
03:28 to the point of getting a different name.
03:30 Somehow, when Elroy says he's leaving in front of Jane,
03:33 she doesn't react, even though she can hear,
03:36 and he's able to leave the house and try to join the circus.
03:40 What's the point of having this story?
03:42 We already had a story about him running away in the show and the 60s comic.
03:47 This was the cliché story by the 80s.
03:49 He says he'd like to apply for the job of a short clown,
03:53 and somehow he's considered, despite child labor laws
03:56 and a lack of a resume and education.
03:59 It's not believable that just two panels later,
04:02 the entire family's noticed his absence,
04:04 and George is saying he called the police.
04:07 And then literally a panel later,
04:09 the owner of the circus tells George his son showed up.
04:13 There's an explanation for why this happened so fast in the story.
04:17 He tells him not to calm down and get him,
04:19 because the circus gets a lot of kids trying to run away to it,
04:22 so he knows that if he tries to make him come home,
04:25 he'll run away again.
04:27 So he tells him he'll come home on his own if he waits.
04:30 But George refuses to listen to reason because he's the idiot protagonist.
04:35 Though I do wonder if it's even realistic for him to be told this.
04:39 Thankfully, he at least agrees to wear a disguise and spy on him instead.
04:44 He gets to wear a fake beard because the Flying Fandango family has an opening
04:49 and they all have beards.
04:50 And somehow it's such a dangerous job that they get a new opening every week.
04:55 Then they'd be outlawed.
04:56 You'd think they'd be more skilled.
04:58 You'd think even if George disguised his voice in front of Elroy,
05:02 the fact that he almost called him Elroy just to not try to call him by name
05:07 would completely give away that he's his father.
05:10 It's insulting writing to have him not figure it out.
05:14 Elroy misses his family,
05:16 and even though he's told they'd listen to him from now on,
05:20 when obviously that's not a promise they'd keep,
05:23 he just says "doesn't matter" instead of simply saying they won't always be like that
05:27 to make sense.
05:29 As if it wasn't bad enough before,
05:32 George calls him "son" and then even more suspiciously corrects himself.
05:37 He could've assumed if the circus owner told the employees his name,
05:41 but him correcting himself made him more suspicious.
05:45 George is gonna be a trapeze artist,
05:47 and somehow part of the circus act is that he has to dodge lasers.
05:52 So after that illegal nonsense,
05:54 his beard falls off for no reason,
05:57 and he bounces off the trampoline and gets recognized.
06:00 He doesn't want to be sent back up by the trampoline,
06:03 so he tells them not to catch him.
06:06 He thanks them and gets hurt,
06:08 which is overly depressing for an ending.
06:11 In the next story, we see the Jetsons' family wearing headsets
06:14 that make them feel like they're actually the characters in a show,
06:18 which would only happen if they only worked for an incredibly light-hearted show,
06:22 because nobody would want to feel the character getting hurt.
06:26 Rosie does the vacuuming and knocks the control unit over
06:29 because she was distracted by the TV,
06:31 which is unusually sloppy for someone whose job is to clean,
06:35 let alone a robot.
06:36 And just because that happens, the characters get freaked out.
06:40 She thinks she rearranged the switches when she knocked the unit over.
06:45 And her lasers also explain that she doesn't really know what to do
06:48 to bring them back to normal.
06:50 So that's supposed to be why there was a body-switching plot.
06:54 But they'd obviously know right away that they aren't in the same bodies as before.
06:59 They aren't blind.
07:00 It has to be that a part of the body-switching includes
07:03 them not being able to notice anything changed
07:05 and them forgetting they didn't always look the way they do now.
07:09 How inconvenient.
07:11 It's so hard to take seriously.
07:14 But when I saw Astro eating dog food in Judy's body,
07:17 it all became worth it.
07:19 It's funny enough to see Astro in an apron.
07:22 Rosie says they all think they're each other,
07:25 which would be even more confusing,
07:27 and decides to call the repair service.
07:29 They'd hear her, unless she's saying this after going far enough away.
07:34 I like that she dials the number for a pizza restaurant by accident at a time like this,
07:39 especially because she adds to the joke
07:41 because instead of just apologizing and hanging up,
07:44 she orders some large pies for the family.
07:47 We needed that levity before the depressing scene
07:49 where Judy's friends freak out what happens to the family and run away.
07:53 So I feel sorry for Judy because they're gonna throw it in her face.
07:57 Finally, the repairman shows up.
07:59 A robot for some reason.
08:01 Spacely assumes George is trying to make him think he's cracking up
08:04 so he won't work him so hard,
08:07 which is why he doesn't make this too depressing by calling the men in white coats.
08:11 I guess the reason why he doesn't question the rest of his family being weird
08:14 is that he assumes George told them to make him think he was nuts
08:18 because he'd assume he told them to act like that.
08:21 I don't get it. Why isn't he questioning this?
08:24 The family gets headsets put on them, and the flip switch returns them to normal.
08:28 And luckily, they don't remember what they did for no reason.
08:33 Jane thinks George is in a crazy outfit because he's a guy,
08:36 and George thinks she means that the shoes and skirt don't match,
08:40 as if they always have to.
08:42 It's a complete reverse of the show.
08:44 In the show, any time George gets mistakenly given a girl's outfit,
08:50 she compliments him, and he complains about it.
08:54 Surprisingly, the repairman asks Rosie out,
08:58 and the family gets told what happened off-screen to spare us recap.
09:02 The repairman says they won't be able to watch the show tonight
09:05 because the unit's gonna need fixing.
09:07 And conveniently, the family stays optimistic
09:10 because they've had enough entertainment for one night,
09:13 even though they don't remember that night at all.
09:16 The Jetsons, Archie, issue 4.
09:19 George sees someone dance on the ceiling with shoes that magically fit anybody,
09:24 and he plans to buy Elroy some to humor him.
09:28 Then he gets interested in an impossible magic television
09:32 that lets someone take part in any TV program he'd choose on it.
09:36 At home, Elroy thanks him for the shoes,
09:39 and after the foreshadowing's too obvious because he's asked if he knows how to use the TV,
09:45 George goes into the wrong program,
09:48 and then accidentally goes into an old detective movie,
09:51 getting tempted to help a woman because she's pretty.
09:54 I'm pretty sure it'd be more believable if he went here on purpose.
09:59 He runs into a door because he forgot that old-fashioned doors don't open automatically,
10:04 even though it's clearly one with the doorknob.
10:07 Because old habits die really hard.
10:10 Other than this happening, there's no point in the plot going in this direction,
10:14 because it's just George being in a non-futuristic world.
10:18 He has no reason to think politely asking the thief for the statue back would work out.
10:23 He gets hurt, but is conveniently still able to go after him for it.
10:28 And somehow, after he's somehow given a ridiculously obvious bomb,
10:34 he doesn't notice it's a bomb instead of the statue until a few panels later.
10:39 He throws it, and it conveniently sends him flying out of the TV screen without being hurt,
10:44 rather than just killing him.
10:46 Elroy tells him that maybe using his shoes will cheer him up, and he thanks him.
10:51 He puts them on and returns to the TV universe,
10:54 going through a screen like it's a portal to another universe
10:57 that'd be way too dangerous for most people to be given access to.
11:01 He gets the thief to chase him to a wall as he runs up the wall with his shoes.
11:06 But Jane's so jealous of the woman being grateful for his help
11:10 that she plans to endanger her husband with remote control.
11:14 So she changes the program to another one where he's being chased by a giant alien that could kill him.
11:20 Yeah, that's not out of character at all.
11:23 It's not his fault the woman was grateful for his help,
11:27 and that's not the same as him cheating on her.
11:29 In the next story, nobody questions Astro's standing next to Judy,
11:34 as if it's normal for there to be rare dogs in the future that are like that.
11:38 And I know he did stand up a lot in the show, but it's pretty rare in the comics.
11:44 Astro's here because George wanted him to keep an eye on Judy
11:48 while she's waiting to see her favorite soap opera star,
11:51 whose female teen co-star can't make it tonight because of a petty reason.
11:56 She smeared her lipstick, that's all.
11:59 So he had a dog keep an eye on Judy,
12:04 and that has to be because he knows he has human intelligence.
12:07 So predictably, he picks Judy for the part.
12:11 The pacing's too slow.
12:13 Astro pushes someone away riding the scooter when Judy's sitting on it
12:18 because she wanted someone to save her.
12:21 How is Astro so stupid?
12:23 He would've seen the director tell her to call for Nikki to save her.
12:27 Unrealistically, he says to forget that scene
12:31 and cut to where Nikki grabs the girl from the back of the cycle and ride off.
12:36 Somehow, Nikki saves Astro instead.
12:39 Someone finally gets told to get him out of here for ruining the story.
12:43 How did that not happen after the first time?
12:46 Somehow, the director decides to skip the action and cut to the love scene.
12:52 If he hates his job, why doesn't he just quit?
12:55 Somehow, Astro decides to get between Judy and him for no reason and he quits.
13:01 He would've been... tied up.
13:04 And for no reason at all, the director says he just has to find someone
13:08 who's the same height as Nikki and put a wig on him.
13:11 I wish he explained that he means he's gonna have CGI make it look like he's Nikki.
13:16 And Astro gets to be his replacement.
13:19 Because this is a terrible story.
13:22 I may not like Judy, but that doesn't mean I want to see stories about her suffering in a way that's forced.
13:29 I'd rather it be a way that's not forced.
13:32 I'd rather just not have Judy's story at all.
13:35 In the next story, Spacelight gets given a delivery and tells people sitting in a chair
13:40 that because the Jupiter colony is threatening war from a planet that has to be terraformed with witchcraft,
13:46 they're gonna become Earth's secret weapons because of smart pills,
13:51 rather than pills to make them invincible.
13:54 Why would it matter how smart their soldiers are?
13:57 All they have to do is do what the general says and rush into battle.
14:02 He says he'll risk permanent brain damage this way,
14:06 because apparently the writer watched the Jetsons movie
14:10 and took inspiration from how his character was exaggeratedly evil in it.
14:15 I say that, but that's a lot more true of the next comic.
14:19 George complains that his lunch bag has nothing but candy,
14:23 being solid of character that this is all he cares about right now.
14:27 Spacelight doesn't have smart pills, and instead he finds George's happy meal,
14:32 meaning that George ate 100 smart pills,
14:36 which would never happen unless the few he was shown eating were really 100 pills in total.
14:42 George talks in a more sophisticated way that's a lazy way to show that he's smarter,
14:47 which is forced because just being smarter doesn't mean you'll change your way of talking to show off,
14:53 as Rick Sanchez was written to prove.
14:56 He just makes himself annoying this way.
14:58 They should call them "talent pills" instead, because he's still got just as little common sense as ever.
15:04 That's why he not only calls his boss by his first name when he should know he's not allowed to,
15:09 but he uses a word he would know nobody understands.
15:13 He tells him he corrected his machine so that it'd do the work of all of his employees,
15:18 which would cause them to fire him anyways because it means he's redundant to them.
15:23 It's more like he's an evil genius here, because that would mean all of them would be fired.
15:30 He makes him vice president, and George isn't happy with that because he's usually only in that job for 77 minutes.
15:38 Why would he be worried?
15:40 He's a moron here too, because he should know if he's really smart, he won't get fired this time,
15:45 as long as it doesn't wear off, because it was always his fault he got demoted before.
15:51 Instead, he says he'll start his own company and put him out of business, so he doesn't think it'll wear off.
15:58 So maybe sometimes he got fired from vice president not because of something he did that was actually incompetent,
16:05 but because Spacely was too irritable.
16:08 Spacely insists that he'll mess things up anyways, and then says he's in big trouble,
16:13 fortunately being smart enough to have not actually had no faith in George.
16:18 He was just trying to scare him.
16:21 Just because you take smart pills shouldn't mean you would be a genius at business without actually reading about it first.
16:29 Otherwise, how does it determine what knowledge to give people?
16:33 It would take forever to cram in all of the knowledge in there.
16:37 As I assume the smart pills are just temporary, George sees Jupiter's armed troops heading for Earth in spaceships.
16:44 Then George uses a toaster, and somehow with that, he calls all of the warring factions,
16:50 and somehow expects them to stop being aggressive.
16:54 He tells them to send their leaders to his apartment in 10 minutes so that he could resolve their problems.
17:01 Then he threatens to turn up his broadcasting equipment and permanently burn an image onto every TV screen otherwise,
17:09 one of Spacely without a shirt, which convinces them to humor him.
17:14 I guess it's just a bluff, or he'd be out of character.
17:17 George says he'll give Astro a well-deserved walk, and the leash breaks when he's walking him on a conveyor belt.
17:24 And he says he knocked all the genius out of him when he landed.
17:28 There's no reason that'd be what would do that to him.
17:32 I'd rather assume the smart pills were temporary, and it was just a coincidence that they stopped working now.
17:38 I understand him deciding to walk him himself because it was force of habit, and he didn't anticipate this.
17:46 But he could've very easily just made a robot walk the dog for him, or hell, told one of his kids to do it for him.
17:54 Also, how does anyone walking a dog on a conveyor belt above a high height actually expect to pick up after the dog,
18:01 which is the whole point of walking it?
18:03 Well, I guess it's because of the fact that in the show, there's gravity on the bottom of it, too.
18:09 How does George think he knows for sure that the dog doesn't want to go to the bathroom and instead just wants exercise?
18:16 The warring factions agree on hating George and conveniently decide to say bad things about him instead of having a war,
18:24 even though all they would be able to say about him is that he's mean because they don't know anything else about him.
18:31 I guess that's believable enough. They found common ground.
18:35 Even if it's still clear the writer wrote himself into a corner, these people don't really hate each other that much then.
18:42 I guess they're only mad at each other for one reason instead of having a whole bunch of reasons that go back thousands of years.
18:49 It makes sense that George got his genius lost because the writer isn't a genius,
18:54 so he can't relate to one enough to know what to make George say to change their minds about having a war.
19:00 But I was actually interested in what he was going to say. So much for that.
19:06 I was interested because that could have actually done world building on the Jupiter Colony by explaining what it was like to explain why they were warring.
19:15 I imagine it's like the Jupiter Colony is like America, the other one is like Britain.
19:21 At least the story ends with Space Liaving with George invented.
19:25 But you'd think he'd know how to turn it on because there'd just be an obvious-looking power button like there's on everything else,
19:33 and no other button would do something when it's off, so he'd have no harm in pressing all of them.
19:39 The first story was about Space Liaving putting George in a comic book in front of an audience using a machine and changing the comic a lot to torment him.
19:48 At least we saw him yell at Space Liaving as a giant, but it felt too cartoony that something so magical happens without explanation.
19:56 It was just distracting how confusing it was.
20:00 This story was by Bill Bailey.
20:04 The second story by Mike Kirshenbaum has Elroy get ignored into running away to the circus.
20:11 But rather than us learning what he actually does there, George joins to keep an eye on him,
20:17 and somehow the circus act is so dangerous it'd be illegal, just in a failed attempt to justify him losing his fake beard and getting Elroy to realize he cares.
20:27 Because simply taking off the disguise and saying he cares was too simple.
20:32 I just hate that he got hurt in the end.
20:35 The third story, by Viola, actually turns out to be a body-switching episode from Rosie's Unusual Sloppiness damaging the thing that makes them think they're in a movie.
20:45 I'm glad it's not a story about them being in the movie, because that'd make no sense.
20:49 Instead, it was a funny-looking story,
20:52 with enough levity to make up for how depressing it was that they embarrassed themselves.
20:57 But it still should've been explained that a part of them being magically body-switched is them not realizing their own body is being used by someone else and they don't look like they should.
21:06 I'd like the control unit to be properly explained, too, because that's really confusing.
21:12 The first story is about George somehow getting a TV that can let him be a character in whatever show it's got on, as if it can warp him to another universe.
21:21 If anyone could get one of these TVs, most people would be getting annoyed by anyone with one of these TVs dropping into their show and messing it up at any moment.
21:32 Even if it does warp him to another universe that just happens to be similar to that show, that puts him in danger so often that it'd never be sold to people.
21:41 And the story doesn't even explain how this is possible, like with the warp gem from a witch.
21:47 But even ignoring how it doesn't make sense, it's so boring to have him be a typical detective in a world-fashioned world.
21:56 It's only interesting when he walks up the ceiling with Chekov's gun shoes.
22:01 The second story is a ridiculous one, where Aster Judy gets brought in as a replacement for her favorite actor's co-star.
22:10 Aster butts in on every shot, which has absolutely no excuse for happening, ruining everything in a repetitive running gag.
22:19 And the third story is about George eating smart pills, because somehow they were in his lunch bag, and space leaf's delivery was George's happy meal.
22:29 Because George has his lunch delivered to work now, when it'd be far more likely that he'd either bring what his wife made, or buy from a fast food place directly.
22:40 The worst part is that it's annoying that he's written to talk in a sophisticated way just because he's smart, because that always demonizes his intelligence.
22:49 He uses his intelligence to make a device to invite some invading soldiers to his house, wanting to figure out a way to convince them not to invade Earth.
22:59 So I like that he was trying to be useful.
23:02 And because his dog leash sucked enough to break when he was walking the dog on a conveyor belt, he falls and the smart pills wear off because it's been long enough.
23:12 Though the story tries to have you believe that he turned back to normal because he fell, which means that it feels forced, but they decide not to go to war because they bond over deciding to insult George.
23:24 So this was the only good story, being exciting at least, even if obviously it was full of problems too.
23:32 Not to mention it's forced that smart pills were considered for a way to deal with invading soldiers in the first place when they'd barely make a soldier any more likely to survive, compared to an invincibility pill or super strength pill.
23:44 But I like that the story wasn't all about demonizing intelligence. All he did with his intelligence was be useful.