The Jetsons animation cel - Mr. Spacely

Object Details

associated person

Blanc, Mel

Hanna-Barbera

Description (Brief)

Animation cel with four images of Mr. Spacely, a character from the television series The Jetsons. The cel shows Spacely standing in 3/4 profile, from the back, from the front, and from the side. Mr. Spacely is a stout, partly bald man, with a ring of black hair at the back of his head between his ears and a few strands on the top of his head. He has a toothbrush-type mustache and a quizzical, perhaps mischievous facial expression with a smirk. He is shown wearing black pants and shoes with a green tunic top and pale blue triangular necktie. Mr. Spacely, the chief executive of Spacely Space Sprockets, was voiced by Mel Blanc.

The Jetsons was an animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera that aired on ABC from 1962 to 1963 and in reruns for decades after. The primetime sitcom was set in Orbit City in the distant future and focused on the Jetson family – father George, who works at Spacely Space Sprockets, mother Jane, a homemaker, children Judy and Elroy, robot maid Rosie, and their dog Astro. Despite the high-tech gadgetry, labor-saving devices, flying cars, and space colonization of the Jetsons’ world, the series presented the family as a normative American nuclear family of the era, dealing with many of the same issues with work, family, and neighbors faced by the protagonists of The Honeymooners, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The Jetsons featured many futuristic technologies that have now become commonplace - video calling, tablet computers, robotic vacuums, smart watches, flatscreen televisions, drones, and holograms – as well as many others that seem misguided or still far-off such as flying cars, high quality instant food, robot housekeepers, and communities built on pillars in the sky.

The series drew from a rich American literary and entertainment genre of futuristic science fiction from Edward Bellamy’s 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward to the pulp and comic book adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, not to mention contemporary space travel entertainment like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Americans in the early 1960s were fascinated by the technological innovations of the Space Age and the brighter future promised by the flood of devices, services, and improvements that marketed “better living through chemistry” and material progress. The broad economic growth and prosperity of the post World War II era had allowed many middle-class Americans to purchase luxury goods and participate in leisure activities beyond what seemed possible in the difficult 1930s and 40s. Advertisers marketed new and more inexpensive consumer goods as modern, sleek, and forward-looking, while the NASA space program and race to land a man on the moon captured the world’s attention. The Jetsons premiered amidst this techno-utopianism and seemed to capture the national mood.

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