User blog:Owenguy101/Owe's Reviews Episode 7

So I’ve had trouble figuring out a good movie to review for Owe’s Reviews for a long time. Because of this, I decided to retire the series for a bit. Then I was looking around on my TV guide and went to the movie channels. That’s when I saw an interesting movie that I thought I would review on one of the movie channels. That movie is Jetsons: the Movie.



To begin with, I’ve always been a fan of the classic Hanna Barbera cartoons. The Flintstones and the Jetsons are two of my favorites because of their environments and characters. It’s always fun to see what they thought of the Stone Age and future back then. Anyway, the Jetsons ran from 1962-1963 and had a total of 24 episodes. A couple decades after that, the series was brought back in 1985 and continued on until 1987 bringing the series another 51 episodes and giving the series a total of 75 episodes. So the Jetsons had quite a run but it wasn’t able to get as much episodes as the Flintstones which had 166 episodes and countless spin offs. Despite this, the Jetsons still managed to get a movie in 1990 just titled Jetsons: the Movie, but the film was both a critical and commercial failure. Because of this, I’ve decided to review this movie and see if it as bad as it seems.

So after watching it, is it as bad as most people say? Well I wouldn’t go that far, but the film is kind of a mixed bag. Here’s the story. Spacely Sprockets has opened a new mining colony on an asteroid and promotes George to vice president (for the 20th something time) to send him to work on the colony. So now the Jetsons are off to a new home and meet a bunch of new characters that look as strange as most of the characters in the 80s version. Soon, problems start to happen with the colony and George and the others soon start to find out what’s wrong. Along the way we soon get musical numbers, drama, romance, mystery, environmental messages and so forth. Kind of a lot for this film but it doesn’t really offer much to other animated films that were coming out at the time such as some of the Disney films and a couple others.

So even though the plot did give me mixed opinions on this film, there are still a few strengths.This was actually one of the earliest films to use CGI, even before Jurassic Park, but a lot of the CGI used in the film is just to show off backgrounds and doesn’t do anything else with the film. They also got most of the original cast back such as George O’Hanlon as George, Penny Singleton as Jane, Jean Vander Pyl as Rosie, Don Messick as Astro, and Mel Blanc as Mr. Spacely. It was nice to hear all of these character’s voices one last time especially from George O’Hanlon and Mel Blanc who died during production. May they be remembered. There are a few replacements. Elroy is now voiced by Patric Zimmerman due to his original actor Daws Butler passing away a couple years before this movie came out. He would later voice him in much more stuff after this. There’s only one voice in this that I find pretty dull and that’s Tiffany as Judy. Honestly, her voice doesn’t fit her and basically I think the only reason they casted her as Judy is to market the songs for the film. At the time this came out, Tiffany was starting to get popular so I think they wanted to use her songs to get people to watch the movie just to hear them. Honestly, I don’t really know much about Tiffany because she’s not as popular as she was when I was growing up but overall, she doesn’t work with this film.

Speaking of the songs those are another weak bit of the film. Like I said, Tiffany does some of the songs for the film but in my opinion, pop / rock songs like these don’t belong in something like the Jetsons. It just doesn’t work and they’re more used as a marketing tool rather than songs like in a Disney film. Even the instrumental score does not fit. There have been moments where I hear pop like music starting to play but no music number never appears. They even start talking during a part where the music starts to sound like its part of a song and I can’t tell that they’re about to start singing or just go with the beat. Honestly, it’s just really confusing.

So after all those problems I’ve mention, is this really a horrible movie? Well no. Like I said, the movie is mostly a mixed bag and it does have its good and bad moments, but it honestly didn’t achieve what it was hoping to get. In my opinion, a film like this would’ve done better if it was a direct to video or a TV movie sort of like how the Jetsons Meet the Flintstones was a TV movie. Still, I think the animation is good even though it didn’t look as great as say the Rescuers Down Under which came out later that year. The animation is a thousand times better than its 80s version which in my opinion looked too bright and sloppy. Also, I think it’s much better than the Tom and Jerry movie that came out afterward. I’ll probably do that in another review or if you want to see a review now, just watch the Nostalgia Critic’s review of it. Overall, this movie is more for people with young kids and kids in general or if you’re a fan of the Jetsons TV series then you’ll probably enjoy it, but in my opinion, you’ll probably enjoy the TV series more than this.

My Rating: 4 out of 10.