ABSTRACT
The Jetsons premiered on the USA’s ABC network in September 1962. Its first series of twenty-four episodes of TV animation was broadcast on Sunday evenings, until March 1963. After losing its primetime slot, the series was rerun on Saturday mornings and established a significant following. In 1985–7, fifty-one new episodes of The Jetsons were added to the original shows for syndication. 1 Twenty-five years after the original series, the 1980s shows introduced new elements and narrative themes appropriate to the cultural shifts that had occurred over the intervening period. While the first series focused on imagined space-age technologies and was informed by the US space program, the second series reflected the rapidly growing excitement with computer technologies then infiltrating American everyday life.
